Fairy tales have often been a way to convey deeper messages about life to a young audience, subtly interwoven in the fabric of stories about kings and queens, witches and princesses.
Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, two entrepreneurial Italian women, have put different protagonists at the centre of their collections of good night tales.
The characters in their bestselling children's book, 'Good Night stories for Rebel Girls,' are all women who have really existed, who lived in different eras and excelled in different parts of the world and in various fields, and their stories have captivated girls (and boys) all over the world.
The first volume of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls Source: www.facebook.com/rebelgirls
“Elena and I met in Milan," Francesca Cavallo tells SBS Italian. "Elena was working as a journalist and I was a theatre director.
"In 2011 Elena asked me to collaborate to create a children's magazine for iPad."
Elena and Francesca, who then moved to the United States, created a newsletter for parents called Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, which, each week, shared a different story about women's emancipation.
"This newsletter became very successful, and we told ourselves: maybe this could become a book," Francesca recalls.
Rather than following the traditional path of looking for a publisher, Francesca and Elena decided to start a crowdfunding campaign.
Little did they know that they would reach and overtake their goal so quickly that they would become a world-renowned success story.
The first volume of their book far surpassed their original fundraising goal of $40,000 to become was Kickstarter's "most funded children's book," raising over US $675,000.
The second volume also went on to become the crowdfunding website's "fastest-funded publishing project" of all time.
"Ours has become the most-financed book in the history of crowdfunding," says Francesca.
"[We didn't want to create] a collection of biographies that looked like homework, but good night stories that could make people dream."
Elena and Francesca used three criteria to choose the stories they wanted to include in their book: they had to be about women from various fields; women from all around the world; and with stories that included personal details potentially interesting for children - "details that light up the imagination," as Francesca puts it.
One example is French fashion designer Coco Chanel, who said: "Women think of all colors except the absence of color."
"I have said that black has it all. White too.
"Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony."
Coco learned to sew as a child while being raised in an orphanage, using left over materials from the nuns' habits, which were of course, black and white.
Another example Francesca Cavallo recalls is the US-based chef Julia Child, who, long before becoming a renowned author, collaborated during WWII on the development of shark repellent to protect Navy men and equipment stranded in shark-infested waters.
"Growing up with strong female role models is important for boys too."
Francesca and Elena's project was to create "not a collection of biographies that looked like homework, but good night stories that could make people dream," says Francesca.
They had to be stories that could offer strong female role models both to girls and boys, "because growing up with strong female role models is important for boys too," Francesca adds.
As for the 'Rebel' component, "there are one hundred ways of being rebels," Francesca says.
"Being a rebel is learning how to listen to your heart and do all you can to follow it, without giving up because of those who want to scale back our aspirations, scale back the idea we have of our own potential."
"As a child I didn't have many heroines, my heroes were all male because I didn't have any female role models, and this is part of the reason why I wanted to write this book."
As a young girl, Francesca says she struggled to find strong female role models. Nowadays she has plenty of personal heroines.
During the interview with SBS Italian she mentions Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who wrote the book 'We should all be feminists.'
Reading it, says Francesca, was a "turning point" for her.
She also mentions the recent presidential campaign by Hilary Clinton as a source of inspiration.
Ultimately, she says, "we try to celebrate all examples of female leadership."
"As a child I didn't have many heroines, my heroes were all male because I didn't have any female role models, and this is part of the reason why I wanted to write this book," says Francesca.
Francesca and her literary partner Elena Favilli have recently published Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2, a second volume with another 100 new stories of "rebel women."
At the end of January they donated $100,000 from the proceeds of their book to the Malala Fund, explaining that Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist for female education and youngest ever Nobel Prize laureate, who also features in the first volume of Good Night Stories, is "a global symbol of the fight for girl’s empowerment, [and she] is an inspiration for millions of girls and young women around the world."
Listen to Francesca Cavallo's full interview (in Italian) with SBS Italian in the audio player above.
Related:
The empowerment of girls
