With all due respect to Wonder Woman, Black Widow and Captain Marvel — some superheroes aren’t required to rock T&A tights to explode off the pages of a comic book.
A new graphic anthology, “Noisemakers: 25 Women Who Raised Their Voices & Changed the World” (Knopf), marvels at the groundbreaking work of inventors, athletes, entrepreneurs, activists, scientists, artists and more, all depicted in vibrant comics by some of the industry’s most acclaimed contemporary cartoonists.
No, these gals aren’t beating fantasy villain butt. They’re too busy making real-world history.
The 200-page book is the first from the creators of Kazoo, the quarterly indie magazine geared for girls aged 5 to 12 — but with a decidedly grown-up reach. Vogue hailed Kazoo as “the magazine for little girls who want to grow up to be president,” while best-selling “Bad Feminist” author Roxane Gay declared it: “Kickass.”
“A lot of books for girls have their hearts in the right place, but stories over and over again are about how hard it is to be a girl, facing a lot of oppression and sexism and misogyny — that you can overcome,” says Kazoo founder and editor-in-chief Erin Bried from her home in Park Slope. “I wanted to move past that: See all this adventure out there? You can go anywhere, build anything and be anything. This is not a book about oppression. It is a big world out there — and this is how they can be big in it.”
“Noisemakers” is the culmination of an idea sparked in 2016, after a bummer visit to Bried’s local newsstand with her then 5-year-old daughter. Turns out inspiring reading material can be hard to come by in a culture that encourages little girls — and grown women — to aspire to little more than being a Disney princess.
“We stopped to get her a magazine, and that day they all either had a princess or a doll or a young pop star wearing makeup on the cover,” says Bried, 45. “She was bored and we didn’t get anything. I was a little bit mad and it’s one of those things I kept rolling over in my mind: ‘I really can’t believe that’s all there is.’ I couldn’t let it go.”“It’s important to see yourself in stories. If you’re erased from the stories we tell each other it gives the message you aren’t valuable.”
- Erin Bried, founder of Kazoo
But instead of staging a frustrated “Frozen” singalong, Bried did her research.
Boys are three times as likely to be the lead character in a childrens book, according to a widely cited Florida State University study. Even worse, Harvard University research finds that girls are less likely than boys to act — and feel — like leaders in real life by the time they reach adolescence.
“Girls are so often the sidekick — even in their own stories. We’ve made great advances in terms of equality but there’s such a long way to go,” Bried says. “I wanted girls to know these stories, that women and girls have always done amazing things throughout history, so they can have an easier time imagining themselves going out and being fierce and strong and true to themselves. And changing the world.”
As a longtime editor for Conde Nast magazines, Bried finally “realized I had to be the change.” She launched a Kickstarter. As she sat at her kitchen table watching donations come in, she dared to think, “This might actually work. We might have an ad-free, independently published kids magazine in this climate, when major publishers are shutting down print magazines every day. This might actually happen.”
Kazoo eventually crowdsourced more than $171,000 in 30 days, the highest-funded journalism campaign at the time, according to Kickstarter. (That figure has since been surpassed.)
The premiere issue was published in the summer of 2016. Four years later, Bried and company have worked with “mind-blowing experts” in myriad professional fields: from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Greta Thunberg and Misty Copeland to Margaret Atwood, Ellen DeGeneres, Shonda Rhimes and Dolores Huerta.
Kazoo also became the first children publisher to win the prestigious National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2019 — and the latest issue is dropping next month, just in time for International Women’s Day 2020 on March 8.
“This roster of talent who’ve all said ‘Yes’ when I email them out of the blue asking, ‘Wanna help?’ Yes, it’s heartwarming and inspiring. Women who fought to open doors have thought to hold the door open for those who come behind them.”
Still, narrowing down the “Noisemakers” was an admittedly overwhelming task (“How do you choose?”), so Bried followed the chapter model set up for each issue of Kazoo. “We cover engineering, science, sports, art and critical thinking in every issue,” she says. “Those pillars of the magazine formed the chapters of the book.”
She said they couldn’t have a chapter on women who made a difference through activism without including Alabama civil rights trailblazer Rosa Parks, or a chapter on art without Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. “But I wanted to tell their stories in a new, fresh way so our readers would learn something new,” Bried says. “For example, Frida is told through the eyes of her imaginary friend she had when she was little and kept her whole life.”
Bried’s personal favorites include journalist Nellie Bly, who at 18 read a newspaper article about how women shouldn’t compete with men, but serve as their helpers. Bly blew up that myth by writing “powerful stories that changed the way people were treated and lived.” And self-made millionaire Madam C.J. Walker, who launched a black hair-care “empire with $1.25 in her pocket.”
As a self-described “tall woman,” Bried said another big inspiration was famed TV chef and cookbook author Julia Child, who “showed us we can mess up, laugh off our mistakes — and still be great. Our mistakes make us powerful.”
And of course the NYC transplant — she moved here from her native Pennsylvania in 1997 — can’t walk the Brooklyn Bridge without thinking of Emily Warren Roebling.
Check out an exclusive excerpt from “Noisemakers” below:
“Her husband was the lead engineer but got the bends and was incapacitated for life. He never got out of bed again. A master engineer in her own right, Emily made adjustments to the plan and led the crew, making drawings and overseeing construction. She also dealt with the politics of getting it built, going to Albany and meeting with the mayor to get it done.”
Bried says the combined ultimate goal of “Noisemakers” and Kazoo is to preserve the innate confidence inside of little girls — before it’s too late.
“If you tell an 8-year-old girl today, ‘You can be anything you want,’ they give you side-eye — like, ‘Of course, I know that.’ But when they get older they start to doubt it. It’s important to see yourself in stories. If you’re erased from the stories we tell each other it gives the message you aren’t valuable. These stories are meant to reach them before they fall off the confidence cliff, so their belief in self is so shored up — before they start getting other messages.”