Nancy Drew

Each month in our newsletter (sign up right here on the homepage if you haven't already!), we poll Bitch staffers and readers on their top five in different categories and posting the polls and results here on the Bitch blog. So c'mon, give us five!

The newspaperman, and newspaperwoman, have long captured the American imagination – and reporters, anchors, and even photojournalists have served as the protagonists in comics, animation, television and film.

As a woman writer and pop culture herstorian I can’t help but be drawn to places in pop culture where women and journalism intersect – and that means I absolutely adore Lois Lane.

She is not the first woman reporter in popular culture, but Lois is likely the most recognizable – and certainly the longest lasting in the American cultural consciousness, having debuted alongside Superman and Clark Kent in 1938.

Like many real-life women reporters of her day, Lois Lane began her career writing romance columns and covering other "women’s news." Rather than spend her career as a "sob sister", she was anxious to tackle more challenging material, but her editor assigned the hard-hitting stories to Lois’ journalistic rival, Clark Kent, and insisted the work was too important for "a girl."

 

Peggy Orenstein grapples with it and so do many other feminist mamas, aunts, sisters, cousins, dads and uncles: what to buy your girl-feminist. A Bitch reader named Maura recently wrote to us asking readers to weigh in about the "best books for budding feminists," especially six- and eight-year-old girls.

So, please take two seconds to channel your feminist girl-self and talk about the fiction that made you feel like you could do anything and become anyone.

I asked Kimmie David, one of the owners of Bluestockings—the radical bookstore, fair trade cafe, and activist center in the Lower East Side of Manhattan—to share her picks for the best feminist fiction or nonfiction books for girls. Read on for her recommendations!

 

Nancy Drew-loving Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is joined this month by two other recent notable First...Ladies.