A Girl’s Guide to Activism

A seven-year-old in California scored a big win for the little guy (or, in this case, the little girl) by convincing Abdo Publishing to stop marketing their Biggest, Baddest Book of Bugs exclusively to boys. Young reader Parker Dains took umbrage with the title, and the other titles in the same series, writing:

You should change from “Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys’ into ‘Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys and Girls’ because some girls would like to be entomologists too.

As the Guardian notes, this victory joins a trend of de-gendering book titles following campaigns from children and parents around the world, championed also by popular authors including Neil Gaiman, Joanne Harris, and Malorie Blackman.

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Dinah Fay is a poet, copywriter, and social media maven living in Brooklyn. She is the co-host of the Brick City Speaks reading series in Newark, where she is pursuing an MFA in writing from Rutgers University.

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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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