Real Women Heroes Who Are Changing the World
Several years ago, I was on a book tour with a stop in Ohio. After my talk at a high school, I stepped down to greet the usual crowd of kids who wanted to talk about epic fantasy, heroes, and writing. But one young woman waited until everyone else had gone. Then she came up and told me what was really on her mind.
“Your books are fine,” she said, “but I know the truth about how life really works.”
I tried to lighten the mood. “Well, I’m in my forties, and I have no clue how life really works.” She didn’t crack a smile. She looked at me with a deeply cynical expression and said:
“People like you write these stories about young people who do something amazing. They save the people they love, or maybe even their whole world. But the truth is… that only happens in fairytales. Not in real life.”
Then she looked me straight in the eye and said, “In real life, kids don’t matter. Kids just don’t mean squat.”
She turned and walked off.
I was stunned, and stayed stunned for the rest of that tour. There was something underneath her words I couldn’t stop hearing: not just the defeat, but longing. She wanted to matter. She wanted to believe it was possible.
That experience made me think hard about what my fictional heroes could and couldn’t do. All of Merlin’s courage and Kate’s tenacity couldn’t reach a girl who didn’t believe her own life held any power. What she needed wasn’t another story. She needed to hear about real young people, from all kinds of backgrounds, who had faced real obstacles and still found a way to make a difference.
That’s when I decided to delay my next novel and instead create a prize, named after my mother, who was always a quiet hero in my own life. The Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes has now honored hundreds of young people — real heroes, boys and girls alike — who are making the world better, and I remain in awe of them every year.
What the Barron Prize Has Taught Me
March is Women’s History Month, and I keep thinking about a particular thread I’ve noticed running through the Prize over the years: a striking number of our honorees have been girls and young women. They’ve created clean water systems, saved endangered species, championed mental health awareness, and founded nonprofit organizations — all before they were old enough to drive a car.
One of the young women I think of often is Gitanjali Rao of Colorado. She won the Barron Prize as a young teenager, around the same time she invented a device to detect lead contamination in drinking water. She was motivated by the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and wanted a faster, cheaper way to identify the problem. She went on to develop apps to combat cyberbullying and was named TIME’s first-ever Kid of the Year in 2020. What I noticed most in learning her story was how undramatic her own account of it was. She saw a problem, had some ideas, and kept working.
Then there’s Stella Bowles of Nova Scotia, who at thirteen turned a middle school science project into something that changed her province. She wanted to know if it was safe to swim in the LaHave River near her home. What she found was that hundreds of illegal straight pipes were draining raw sewage directly into the water. She documented it, published it, and refused to let the adults in the room change the subject. The Canadian government eventually committed more than fifteen million dollars to the cleanup. Stella was in eighth grade when she started. She didn’t have a platform or a strategy. She had a water sample and a question she wouldn’t stop asking.
And I think of Brooke and Breanna Bennett, twin sisters who co-founded Women in Training, Inc. when they were fourteen, after learning that many of their peers were missing school because they couldn’t afford menstrual products. They started distributing hygiene kits, recruited volunteers, raised money, and then did something that takes most adults years to attempt: they went after the policy. They advocated for legislation to provide free menstrual products in public schools. The personal became practical became political, in the best possible way.
That’s the pattern I’ve seen again and again with these young women. They don’t describe their work as heroic. They describe noticing something that needs doing, feeling bothered enough to try, making mistakes, and trying again. Most of them started before they had any particular reason to believe they would succeed.
Real Women Heroes Who Refused to Stop
Long before I started the Prize, I was a reader, and the women I encountered in history and science shaped the way I think about courage.
I first heard Jane Goodall speak in the mid-1970s, when I had just arrived at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and snuck into the back of a lecture hall at St. Catherine’s College. She was early enough in her career that she was still, as she put it, clearly finding her way and choosing her language. But even then, the power of what she was doing was unmistakable. I got to know her over the following decades, and she became one of the people I loved most in this world. We lost her on October 1, 2025.
Jane had traveled to Gombe Stream in Tanzania at 26 years old, with almost no formal training in primatology and a great deal of quiet determination. Her observation of a chimpanzee named David Greybeard using a grass stem as a tool rewrote what it meant to be human. Scientists had long defined our species as Man, the Tool Maker. After Jane, that definition had to change. Over the decades that followed, she built the Jane Goodall Institute, launched the Roots and Shoots program in 67 countries, and carried the same message everywhere she went: every single day you live, you make a difference, and you get to choose what sort of difference you make. When someone once asked her what her next great adventure would be, she said, without missing a beat, dying. Not because she was ready to stop, but because she believed, as she always had, that what came next would be worth discovering.
Wangari Maathai returned to Kenya after earning her doctorate in the United States and found the forests stripped and the rivers silted. She didn’t write a manifesto. She planted trees. The Green Belt Movement, which she founded, eventually planted more than 51 million trees across Africa and inspired a generation of environmental leaders. She became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. What strikes me most is how long the world took to catch up to what she was already doing.
Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, challenging powerful chemical industries at a time when a woman scientist doing so was considered, by many, slightly preposterous. The backlash was fierce, but she held her ground. The modern environmental movement (the EPA, the Clean Water Act, the banning of DDT) traces a direct line back to that one woman’s refusal to be quiet.
None of them waited to be asked. They looked at what was in front of them and made a choice.
Writing Heroic Women in Fantasy Novels
When I was working on Heartlight (the first of the Heartlight Saga, the adventures of Kate), I kept coming back to what I wanted my infant daughter to understand: that everyone, even a lone youngster, has the power to make choices that can change the world. And so I decided the hero of that story would be a girl.
Making Kate real — not just brave but genuinely uncertain and vulnerable — required more soul searching than almost anything I’d written. I had to find her voice somewhere inside my own. It took time, and rewrites, and the willingness to sit with what I didn’t know. But I believe it was some of the most important work I’ve done as a storyteller.
When The Ancient One was first published, strong female characters in fantasy were still largely sidekicks or love interests. Kate was something different. And if her adventures helped lay even a small piece of groundwork for the heroic women who followed in other stories, I’m grateful for every rewrite it took to get her right.
Throughout the Merlin Saga, I kept returning to that same conviction. Merlin’s journeys depended on the wisdom and courage of Rhia and Hallia, and on the lasting influence of his mother Elen. The fate of the Great Tree of Avalon rested on the heroism of the young priestess Ellie and the elf warrior Brionna. In the Atlantis Saga, it is Atlanta, as much as her companion Promi, who sparks the creation of the magical island. These weren’t supporting roles. They were the story.
Recognizing the Real Women Heroes History Forgot to Name
Women’s History Month is a good time to look more carefully at what we think we know. The official record of history has often credited movements while leaving out the people who built them. Many of those people were women — often young women, often women whose names we still don’t know. Real women heroes whose contributions shaped the world, but whose names were never written down.
But then there are the present-tense stories. The girls right now who are inventing devices to detect lead in water, replanting stripped forests, and writing letters to legislators who haven’t yet written back. They are, in their own way, doing exactly what Goodall and Maathai and Carson did. They see what is, decide what should be, and begin.
I’ve thought about that young woman in Ohio more times than I can count. I never caught her name. I hope she found, somewhere along the way, some evidence that she was wrong. There’s a lot of it out there.
