part 1 got buried way back there, but it probably was time to start part 2 anyhow...

Just finished reading "Riding Freedom" to dd. It's a fictional biography of Charlotte Pankhurst (aka "one=eyed Charley"), a woman who disguised herself as a man and drove stagecoaches in the 1800s. She was also the first woman ever to vote--55 years before women won the right to vote in the U.S. Her gender wasn't discovered till after she died.

I think that the book was written for children a bit older than dd (age 6.5 and in 2nd grade). She didn't get a lot of things, like why 10-year-old Charlotte was forbidden to ride horses because it wasn't "ladylike" and why she ran away from the orphanage and was still, ten years later, afraid of being found by the orphanage director. Or why men laughed at the women who were advocating for their right to vote. This might be because such notions are really foreign to her, but I suspect that the book is also aimed for slightly older kids.

Still, she seemed to like it and we stayed up many a night past bedtime because she wanted just "one more chapter." And it's a nice little gender-bending kids' tale as well.