Women Who Dared: 52 Stories of Fearless Daredevils, Adventurers & Rebels by Linda Skeers

Women Who Dared features stories of remarkable women who were fearless in their quest to follow their dreams. Linda Skeers has put together a fascinating collection of stories that will captivate young and not-so-young readers.

The book is divided into three sections: Daredevils, Adventurers and Rebels. In Daredevils, readers will meet Annie Edson Taylor who decided to take the plunge over Niagara Falls, Florence Chadwick who swam the English Channel-both ways, Lillian Boyer who was an aerial acrobat and Valentina Tereshkova, a cosmonaut who orbited Earth forty-eight times.

The Adventurers section introduces readers to Barbara Hillary, explorer of both the North and South Poles, Beatrice Ayettey who grew up in Ghana and became that country's first maritime captain, Dr. Eugenie Clark whose passion for the sea led her study sharks, and Canadian Mina Hubbard who explored the uncharted wilds of Labrador.

The final section, Rebels describes the heroic efforts of Alia Muhammad Baker, chief librarian in the Al Basrah Central Library in Basra, Iraq to save the rare books from destruction during the Iraq War. Readers will also meet Irene Sendler who save 2,500 Jewish children from death during World War II, Keiko Fukudo who was one of the first women to master judo, Margaret "Molly" Tobin Brown, who survived the sinking of the Titanic and Minnie Spotted Wolf a member of the Blackfeet Nation who became the first Native American woman to join the U.S. Marine Corps.

Some of the women profiled are well known, such as (unsinkable) Molly Brown, Irene Sendler and Mary Anning. Others such as Amelia Earhart and Nellie Bly are missing.  Each one page biography is accompanied by a colourful rendering of the person profiled by illustrator Livi Gosling. While most of the women featured are American, Skeers does include women from other countries including Canada, Ghana, France, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Jamaica, England, France and Nicaragua.  There is an extensive Bibliography at the back of the book for further research. This is a great companion volume to Women in Science by Rachel Ignotofsky.

Book Details:

Women Who Dared by Linda Skeers
Naperville, Illinois:  Sourcebooks, Inc.       2017
112pp.