Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls Is Almost 10 & We Need It Now More Than Ever

I had one daughter in 2016. She was 2, and wore her “Future President” shirt with me to the polls. I took a photo of her looking up at the sky right before I cast my vote for Hillary Clinton as president, and then I captioned the photo “hope personified.” I put her to bed, fully confident in our country, believing she’d wake up in an America that valued women.

Instead, I cried all night.

That was a real roller coaster of a year, full of dizzying hope and monumental letdowns. But in the grief of that year, there is a small glimmer of joy for me, and I often think back on it and miss that weird bruise of a time. Because 2016 also felt like a renaissance of girl power.

It reminded me of my own childhood, when Take Our Daughters to Work Day became an empowering holiday and the Spice Girls were on stage encouraging us to be ourselves. In 2016, we were dressing babies in Notorious RBG shirts, buying Barbie dolls that represented women in history, playing Moana on repeat — and, in our house, we were reading Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.

The book was a balm for my soul. Released in November 2016, just when we needed it most, the book featured one-page stories with gorgeous illustrations of women and girls who have done extraordinary things in history. Some everyone knows about — Amelia Earhart, Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth — and some I had never heard of before, like Alek Wek, Sylvia Earle, and Ashley Fiolek. My daughter loved it. She called it “the girl book” and preferred to read straight through, sometimes getting five or six history lessons a night before I could convince her we had to save some for tomorrow.

In a post-election haze where it felt like I was scrambling to get my feet back under me, reading Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls to my girl felt like something helpful to do. Maybe I couldn’t control what the rest of the country was doing. Maybe I couldn’t keep her safe from misogyny forever. But by reading her these stories, I could give her the protective barrier that would make her feel strong and confident and brave, no matter what anyone said to her.

Now, nearly a decade after that first book, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is getting an update. The brand has become huge since that first publication in 2016, with more volumes of Good Night Stories, advice books, chapter books, and so much more empowering media for girls (and women, honestly). But this new edition, releasing on March 4, 2025, includes 22 new stories to the original tales, with a foreword by Melinda French Gates.

And I feel like we need it even more now than we did in 2016.

The 2024 election was even more painful than the 2016 election for our family. For one, we know what a Trump presidency looks like (goodbye, Roe v. Wade), and for another, we’ve now gone from one daughter to three daughters. Protecting one little girl from all the terrible things in the world felt hard enough, but protecting three when their own country is trying to dismantle their rights and well-being piece by piece? It’s too much to bear. In 2016, pushing for more feminist books and teaching my daughter how empowering it is to be a woman felt important, but also fun.

Now I feel like I’m in the fight of my life to make sure all three of my girls have the confidence, courage, and compassion to be the best version of themselves, always.

This time, there are more dark forces at play. There’s DOGE, there’s Elon Musk, there’s RFK Jr. From one corner of the country to the other, things are unraveling. As the Department of Education is threatened to be dismantled and “jokes” about women losing the right to vote are made by people in power and science is ignored to the point of endangering people’s lives (especially women and children), it feels imperative to bring Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls back into my daughters’ lives.

I hope they never know what it means to not get the education they deserve or to not have the same opportunities as men. I hope they never relate to some of the more intense stories of women and girls who had to fight like hell to just be treated like a citizen, let alone an equal one.

But the state of America worries me. And I need them to know what it means to persevere. I need them to know these women’s stories not just for history’s sake, but for their future’s sake.

I need them to know what it means to be a Rebel Girl.

The new edition of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is set to release on March 4, 2025.