Award-winning ABC News journalist and New York Times best-selling author Linsey Davis wants to celebrate all the girls who are accomplishing something and are set to flourish in life — and she did it by writing her sixth book, Girls of the World: Doing More Than Ever Before. Davis is calling all girls to be leaders for equality and fairness and to continue to build a safe world in which to live.
What inspired you to start writing children’s books?
I have a son who’s 10 years old, and when we would be reading books to him as an infant, I started thinking that I could do this, I should do this, I can do this and I was kind of wheeling myself into what seemed like this gargantuan dream or idea of actually being a published children’s book author. It took a few years for me to know what I wanted to write about and the process and just start putting pen to paper, but it was born out of that goal of wanting to inspire my own son and plant certain seeds that would flourish within him and like-minded parents who have certain ideas that they want to build a certain foundation. Throughout all of my books, there’s kind of a common theme: love, self-love and loving each other. Some are also faith-based about loving God as well. I just think that it’s so important for our kids to learn at an early age.
What does the title of your latest book mean to you?
We’re still marking so many firsts. When I look about at Greta Thunberg or Monet Davis, or girls who are making their mark despite the odds, whether it comes through as in those examples I made like in softball or climate change — whatever the case may be — we have young ladies who are just going for it against all odds, so I wanted to highlight some of them. We see the athletes in the books; we see engineers, mechanics, and astronauts … [and] we still have a very limited number of women who are actually breaking through those highest glass ceilings, and so I do think that that progress is being made. When I say doing more than ever before … yes, it’s happening, but I don’t think it’s happening at the rate where it should be, where it’s 50/50, where you have just as many female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies as you have males, or we have just as many candidates who are women who are running for president of the United States as males. There’s just still such a discrepancy there.
What are words of affirmation that you would tell young women to think of when they’re looking in the mirror?
Be strong, be bold, be ambitious, be courageous, and be great. People often talk about daring to be great, because it is almost like a dare. Quite often, when you don’t have people who are cheering you on, supporting you, and celebrating you, it’s like going against the grain. Quite often, we settle for mediocracy, and we settle for being the same as everybody else. When we’re teenagers in particular, we’re just trying to blend in; we’re just trying to fit in; we don’t want to be the different person. We don’t want to be the outlier. Sometimes, I think that we kind of don’t tap into what it might look like to be great because we might not know how to go about it — but also, we don’t want to be different. I just think that it’s something that we need to enforce early on in our girls.
