By Katherine Handcock, A Mighty Girl Senior Research Intern

Welcome to the first of two articles about resources to help parents teach their Mighty Girls money management skills! Every parent wants their children to learn how to manage money effectively, but many families aren't sure how to go about discussing finances -- especially since few of us grew up in homes where money, spending, saving, and debt were discussed in any detail. However, with a few good resources and a little time, even very young children can start learning about how money works. In our follow-up post, we provide resources for teaching money management skills to older children and teens.

How Money Works

One early step in learning about money is learning how to recognize different denominations of paper money and coins. A toy like Melissa and Doug's Play Money set, which comes with dozens of pretend bills from $1 to $100 as well as play coins in all US denominations, allows kids to role play the whole process of a purchase: selecting an item, learning a price, recognizing and totaling bills and coins, and making change.

At the same time, parents can read books to their kids that involve money being invested, saved, and spent. One good book is Lemonade in Winter by Emily Jenkins, in which Pauline and her younger brother John-John start their first business -- a lemonade stand. The book covers addition, subtraction, sorting, and money recognition, but also more complicated concepts such as investment and return, selling techniques, and entrepreneurship. Continue reading → Continue reading

A Mighty Girl is proud to announce the expansion of our clothing section! In addition to featuring several great girl-empowering clothing companies, we are now offering a selection of empowering shirts and accessories through Amazon and CafePress. This selection of high-quality, fun clothing includes items for infants, toddlers, children, juniors, and adults, so the whole family can find a favorite!

We have divided our collection into eight categories. Our Superheroes, Character Themed, and Literary Themed categories focus on clothing featuring individuals (both fictional and real) that represent strong female characters in a variety of media.

Our Science / Technology section includes clothing that promotes girls and women in STEM areas, while our Career / Jobs lets girls express their future career dreams and aspirations. Our Sports / Hobbies section makes it easy for girls to find clothing relating to their interests, especially active lifestyles. Finally, our Girl Power / Feminist and Princess Alternative sections show off how girls and women can be so much more than damsels in distress! Continue reading → Continue reading

By Carolyn Danckaert, A Mighty Girl Co-Founder

Today in Mighty Girl history, Alice Stokes Paul, an American suffragist and women’s rights activist, was born in 1885. Paul, along with her friend Lucy Burns, was a driving force behind the passage of the 19th Amendment, which won the right for women to vote.

Paul, who was famously depicted by Hilary Swank in the film Iron Jawed Angels, was raised as a Quaker, a religious sect in which gender equality is a central tenant. As Paul said, “one of their principles was and is equality of the sexes. So I never had any other idea...the principle was always there." This uncompromising core supported her through the long fight to resurrect the suffrage movement, which had been stalled for many years.

Paul organized protests and rallies, including in January of 1917, the first political protest to ever picket the White House. In July 1917, Paul and many other protesters were arrested for "obstructing traffic" and incarcerated at the Occoquan Workhouse. To protest the poor conditions of the women held there, Paul led a hunger strike which resulted in her being force-fed. Press coverage of these abuses, along with on-going protests, strongly influenced the Wilson Administration who declared, in January 1918, that women's suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure" and asked Congress to act. Continue reading → Continue reading

We're excited to announce a wonderful new site upgrade that will be of special interest to our Canadian and British supporters -- A Mighty Girl now integrates with your local CA and UK Amazon sites.

If you are visiting the site from Canada or the U.K., the site will now automatically display two options on each A Mighty Girl product page -- one to purchase a particular item from either Amazon.ca or Amazon.co.uk and one from Amazon.com. We've keep both options visible to you because you'll discover that, while the majority of items on the site will be available via your local Amazon, there are some that will only be found on Amazon.com. In those cases, your local Amazon button will be grayed out and unclickable but you can still select the Amazon.com option.

If you'd like to browse via another country, for instance, if you are in the U.S. and would like to order a gift for a friend in Canada, you can also change your country location using the new location feature located on the top menu bar. Continue reading → Continue reading

Today in Mighty Girl History, we remember the contributions of Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist Rita Levi-Montalcini who died today at the age of 103. Born into a Jewish-Italian family in Turin in 1909, Levi-Montalcini's years in medical school coincided with the rise of fascism in Italy and the imposition of anti-Semitic laws which limited her career prospects.

Once WWII broke out, she and her family decided to stay in Italy rather than flee overseas and she built a laboratory in her bedroom to continue her research work. It was in this makeshift laboratory that she began studying the development of chicken embryos; research that laid the underpinning of her later Nobel Prize-winning work on the mechanism of cell growth regulation.

After the Nazi invasion of Italy in 1943, Levi-Montalcini and her family were forced underground and moved to Florence where she worked as a doctor in Allied war camps after the city was liberated. Following the war, in 1946, she moved to the U.S. for more than twenty years to conduct research at Washington University in St. Louis. It was there that she discovered nerve growth factor, a protein which regulates the growth of cells; this discovery was critical to better understanding tumor growth among other conditions. Continue reading → Continue reading

By Jennifer de Beer, A Mighty Girl Research Intern

The season of reflection is upon us, and here at A Mighty Girl we’ve been taking a look back at the year’s new releases. As it is also the season of gifting, many of you are likely interested in finding some fresh, new material to inspire and delight the Mighty Girls in your life. Whether you like to stay on top of new releases or are seeking the perfect present for a young book lover, you are in luck!

Our latest special collection, 2012 Mighty Girl Books: A Year in Review features more than more than 100 empowering books for girls, the majority of which are brand new additions to our site.

Over the course of this past year, a wide variety of books have hit the market that feature stellar Mighty Girl characters. The new titles run the gamut, from picture books to young adult novels, historical fiction to fantasy, and the return of old favorites alongside newcomers. Continue reading → Continue reading

By Lili Sandler, A Mighty Girl Research Intern

We are pleased to introduce A Mighty Girl's “Small but Mighty” Toy Collection! We know that there are times when you want to get the Mighty Girl in your life just a wee special present, and we’ve selected 250 different toys that fit that bill. Whether you’re looking to stuff a stocking, reward her hard work, or just put a smile on her face, there’s sure to be something in this collection that will do the trick.

We've included toys to appeal to Mighty Girls of every age from infants to teens. You can choose from an array of girl-empowering sticker books, action figures, cards games, science toys, finger puppets, sports equipment, Lego minifigures, musical instruments and much more -- and the vast majority of the toys in this collection are small enough to fit into a Christmas stocking. We've also sought out toys that were very affordable. Everything in the collection is under $20 and nearly two-thirds of the toys are under $10. Continue reading → Continue reading

On this day in Mighty Girl history, computer-programming pioneer Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was born in 1906. Hopper was a highly-regarded professional in both academia and industry and her doctorate in mathematics, received in 1934, was a rare achievement for women at that time. However, it was only the start to a long career of challenging traditional expectations.

We are excited to present A Mighty Girl’s 2012 Holiday Gift Guide with fifty toy recommendations for children of all ages. It's our hope that this guide will make your holiday gift buying a little easier this year and help you learn more about our recently released toy collection.

In this gift guide, you’ll find a list of the top ten favorite girl-empowering toys of each member of A Mighty Girl’s toy team, the group responsible for researching and carefully selecting the 2,000 toys featured in our toy section.

Our toy collection was the culmination of a three month long research project by one of A Mighty Girl’s co-founders and a team of our fantastic interns. Given the time and energy the toy team devoted to this project, we have become intimately familiar with the wide range of girl empowering toys and each of us has our personal favorites. Continue reading → Continue reading

Keeping girls and boys in their pink and blue boxes in toy catalogs is standard practice in the U.S. but, with all of the exciting changes coming out of Europe this year with London’s biggest toy store, Hamleys, and the holiday catalog of Sweden's biggest toy chain, Top Toy, going gender neutral, now is the time for U.S. toy companies to stop dictating the interests of kids here too.