Spanish Peaks Library District

These twenty-six suspense-filled stories unfold from across Germany, Poland, Great Britain, the United States, and more, providing an inspiring reminder of women and girls' refusal to sit on the sidelines around the world and throughout history.

When Valentina Tereshkova blasted off aboard Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963, she became the first woman to rocket into space. It would be 19 years before another woman got a chance—cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982—followed by American astronaut Sally Ride a year later. By breaking the stratospheric ceiling, these women forged a path for many female astronauts, cosmonauts, and mission specialists to follow.

Women in Space profiles 23

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One of just a handful of women reporting on the Vietnam War, Kate Webb was captured by North Vietnamese troops and presumed dead -until she emerged from the jungle waving a piece of white parachute material after 23 days in captivity. Le Ly Hayslip enjoyed a peaceful early childhood in a Vietnamese farming village before war changed her life forever. Brutalized by all sides, she escaped to the United States, where she eventually founded two humanitarian...

Pearl Witherington Cornioley, one of the most celebrated female World War II resistance fighters, recounts her life and experience as a special agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

The first and only young adult book about Ada Blackjack and her remarkable, true-life survival story In 1921, four men ventured into the Arctic for a top-secret expedition--an attempt to claim the remote, uninhabited Wrangel Island in northern Siberia for Canada. With the men was a 23-year-old Inuit woman named Ada Blackjack, who had signed on as a cook and seamstress to earn money to care for her sick son, left at home. Conditions soon turned dire...

"Using a host of primary sources, author Brandon Marie Miller recounts the roles, hardships, and daily lives of Native American, European, and African women in 17th- and 18th-century colonial America. Hard work proved a constant for most women--they ensured their family's survival through their skills while others sold their labor or lived in bondage as indentured servants and slaves. Even in this world defined entirely by men, a world where no one...

Profiles the lives and careers of twenty-six women who were pioneers in the field of aviation.