Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls

Amelia Earhart - Aviator

Once upon a time, a girl called Amelia saved enough money to buy a yellow airplane. She called it The Canary.

A few years later, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. It was a dangerous flight. Her tiny plane was tossed around by strong winds and icy storms. She kept herself going with a can of tomato juice, sucked through a straw. After almost fifteen hours she touched down in a field in Northern Ireland, much to the surprise of the cows.

“Have you come far?” the farmer asked her. “All the way from America!” she laughed. Amelia loved to fly and she loved to do things no one had ever done before.

Her biggest challenge was to be the first woman to fly around the world. She could only take a small bag, as all the space in the plane had to be used for fuel. Her long flight was going well. She was supposed to land on the tiny Howland Island, but never got there. In her last transmission, Amelia said she was flying through clouds and was running low on fuel.

Margaret Hamilton - Computer Scientist

Once there was a girl who put a man on the Moon. Her name was Margaret and she was really good with computers.

When she was just twenty-four years old she joined NASA, the US agency that explores outer space. She took the job to support her husband and her daughter, little realizing that she would soon lead a scientific revolution that would change the world.

Margaret was an engineer and led the team who programmed the code that allowed the Apollo 11 spacecraft to land safely on the Moon’s surface. Margaret would bring her daughter Lauren to work on weekends and evenings. While four-year-old Lauren slept, her mother programmed away, creating sequences of code to be added to the Apollo’s command module computer.

On July 20, 1969, just minutes before Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface, the computer started spitting out error messages. The entire mis-sion was in danger. Luckily, Margaret had set up the computer to focus on the main task and ignore everything else.

Amna Al Haddad - Weightlifter

Once upon a time, there was a journalist named Amna. Amna was not happy. She was overweight and unfit. One day, she said to herself: “You can do much more than this. Just do something. Go for a walk.

“And that’s what she did. She enjoyed her walks so much she wanted to do more. She ran long distances. She sprinted. She started to work out at the gym; when she dis-covered weightlifting she knew this was the sport for her. Amna’s life changed when the International Weightlifting Federation al-lowed Muslim women to compete in a unitard (an outfit that covers all skin). She started competing in Europe and America and became an icon for Muslim girls across the world.

“I like being strong,” says Amna. “Being a girl does not mean you can’t be as strong as a boy, or even stronger!”

She liked weightlifting so much that she started training for the Olympic Games in Rio. She thinks everyone should find a sport they like, and practice it.

“Whatever your age, religion, or ethnicity.