Reading the Little Engine that Could to my toddler for the first time, I stopped short about halfway through. I stared at the book and thought, “The Little Engine that Could is female? Huh.”
Personally, the only thing I remembered before reading it with my kid was that the Little Engine said, “I think I can” a lot. (It was actually a lot less than I remembered.)
As it turns out, the core of the story is a groundbreaking feminist fable. While The Paper Bag Princess rightly gets great feminist cred for flipping the princess story on its head in 1980, the Little Engine that Could was a story about women helping each other and overcoming barriers together 50 years earlier than that. It’s a great little feminist fable for your train lovers of either gender.