Girls Are Not Chicks

A Feminist Coloring Book

By: jacinta bunnell
Other authors: Julie Novak, Irit Reinheimer
Submitted: 08/11/2009

Girls Are Not Chicks is a coloring book that celebrates girls as thinkers, creators, fighters, healers, and superheroes. It examines a variety of traditional characters and images and allows children to imagine and color in new and unexpected roles for women. For example, this Rapunzel comes complete with power tools, a roll of duct tape, a Tina Turner album, and a bus pass! Now, you can also paint outside the lines with Miss Muffet as she stands up to that spider and considers a career as an arachnologist!

Girls Are Not Chicks exposes the limited gender portrayals in children's media and offers young girls and boys a range of alternative possibilities. By displaying diverse images that reinforce positive roles for girls, creators Jacinta Bunnell and Julie Novak have hit upon a playful way to examine and confront the pervasive gender stereotypes that exist in different aspects of our lives.

The title of the book comes from Bunnell and Novak's belief that when a girl's voice is fostered to its brimming potential, the sound she makes is not a peep, a chirp, or anything akin to the tiny, soft sound of a fuzzy baby chick. Instead, the encouraged voice of a girl is resounding, glowing with perfect protest and intellect, and helps give shape and color to a new "gender-defiant" world.