Get ready for a new generation of feminists, because there’s a badass new set of books that teaches young girls they can be anything they want to be. Yep, the future of children’s literature is finally here, and we are so here for it: Scholastic is releasing a series about amazing historical princesses and blacking out the parts where they get married at age 12.
Now this is what empowerment looks like!
According to Scholastic, each book in this awesome series will follow a badass princess throughout her journey and feature chapters from her childhood, her reign, and a totally blacked-out section that explains the part of her life where she was a child bride. The series, called Royal Role Models, has more than 600 pages of empowering stories that girls can read, as well as 100 pages of redacted material that describe how women were married off at the same young age as the book’s readers!
“We want girls to be able to be inspired when they read about these amazing royal women whose weddings they will never know about,” said Lydia Goff, a spokeswoman for Scholastic Corporation. “This series lets our daughters learn about accomplished women like Princess Emilie of Saxony without seeing that her father forced her to marry a 48-year-old German noble. We blacked out the section about her wedding with jet ink so that curious young readers can get right to the part where Emilie rides her champion horses and learns ancient Greek poetry.”
“The later chapters do include an adult male figure who lives in her house and helps her raise her kids, of which she has 9, but our readers don’t need to know that it’s her husband,” added Goff. “If precocious young girls want to work out the math for themselves while reading these inspirational stories, then that’s on them.”
The first book, due out in the coming weeks, will profile Eleanor of Aquitaine and will feature several chapters about her early childhood learning to speak Latin and play the harp, followed by one with just a single sentences that reads, “Eleanor turned 14.” After that, the book will reportedly start back up in the next chapter when she’s 15 years old and becoming a talented painter in Louis VII’s castle!
Wow. These books are doing some seriously inspirational work, redacted sections and all!
Kudos to Scholastic for providing role models as amazing as these women and blacking out the parts where they married men 30 years their senior as part of a political truce and then immediately became pregnant. This series is going to empower girls all across the country, and we can’t wait to see what all of those young feminists grow up to do!
