Just One Girl: A Fight for Equal Rights

It's the early 1970s in America and change is in the air. Women are marching in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. It's a time of self-expression and social change. Jillian Parker loves math; it's her favorite subject and she is good at it. So when it's time for the fourth graders to select their after-school clubs, she knows exactly what she'll choose. But when Jillian goes to sign her name on the Math Club sign-up sheet, she is met with snickering and jeers. A girl in the boys' club? Shouldn't she be in Cooking Club, instead?

Jillian knows she's smart, but maybe she's not smart enough. Maybe they are right, and she doesn't belong. She's just one girl. But after hearing about the discrimination experienced by her mother and other women, Jillian realizes that maybe what is needed is for just one girl to step forward. A new entry in the Tales of Young Americans series.

Trinka Hakes Noble is the award-winning author of numerous picture books including The Orange Shoes (2007 National Parenting Publications Awards Honors Winner), The Scarlet Stockings Spy (2005 IRA Teachers' Choice), The Last Brother, and The Legend of the Cape May Diamond. Ms. Noble also wrote the ever-popular Jimmy's Boa series and Meanwhile Back at the Ranch, both featured on PBS's Reading Rainbow. Her many awards include ALA Notable Children's Book, Booklist Children's Editors' Choice, IRA-CBC Children's Choice, Learning: The Year's Ten Best, and several Junior Literary Guild Selections.

Ms. Noble has studied children's book writing and illustrating in New York City at Parsons School of Design, the New School University, Caldecott medalist Uri Shulevitz's Greenwich Village Workshop, and at New York University. A member of the Rutgers University Council on Children's Literature, she was awarded Outstanding Woman 2002 in Arts and Letters in the state of New Jersey for her lifetime work in children's books. Ms. Noble currently lives in the historic Jockey Hollow area of Bernardsville, New Jersey.

Amanda Calatzis found math very frustrating and even cried about it sometimes in school, until a teacher named Mrs. Sabatini helped her feel good at a type of math called Geometry. She has always loved drawing pictures, and geometry combines math and pictures! She is the illustrator of Mister Rogers’ Gift of Music and received an MFA in Illustration as Visual Essay from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.