Age range 9 to 14

Today has been the most important day of my life. I still don't know whether to laugh or cry. This is how it all began …

Fourteen-year-old Lucy's life changes when she starts a job working in Louisa Lawson's printery, where only girls and women are employed. But it's the late 1880s and the male printers elsewhere think that this work should be for men only. So they decide to make the girls' lives difficult!

Lucy has many battles ahead but, in the process, she realises who her real friends are — and finds her first love.

In this story, today's young women can also find out about the early feminist struggles that were fought over rights that they now take for granted, and about the amazing women who fought so hard to achieve them.

Teachers' notes available here