books (and movies) with strong female characters for 4-7 year olds.

I would like to add to the kids book collection, and want books that have strong female characters.

any suggestions?

National velvet! Beautiful story, horses, a strong girl character and nice language from the olden days :)
Edit- for the upper end of the age scale obviously :)

Frozen has two strong females :-) both my DDs loved it. Brave was another one

I'm not sure whether all of these are age appropriate but they're ones I have read

The Secret Garden
Little Women
Anne of Green Gables
Little House on the Prairie
Matilda
Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great
The Ramona series
Pippi Longstocking
Truly Tan

Check out A Mighty Girl. They have great lists of this stuff :)

Also Narnia, What Katy Did, Five Children and It, Wee Free Men, Jane Eyre... But all those are a little older, or for higher end readers.

Have you tried Terry Jones' Fairy Tales?

Pippi Longstocking is also and awesome movie if you can get hold of it. The 1988 movie, not the cartoon.

The Trixie Belden series (has horses in it too! The heroine is a horse rider who solves mysteries!)

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Pippi Longstocking is also and awesome movie if you can get hold of it. The 1988 movie, not the cartoon.

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ohhh I loved Pippi Longstocking!!!

I loved the baby sitters club when I was young! :)

Second Frozen for a girl power movie. Loved the ending :)

Princess Smartypants by Babette Cole.
Zog by Julia Donaldson.
The old woman who loved to read
Alison Lester has a series of picture books that are all about individual kids & their differences - eg, Rosie sips spiders.
The brave little seamstress (adapted from the brave little tailor).
Pirate girl by Cornelia funke

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The Trixie Belden series (has horses in it too! The heroine is a horse rider who solves mysteries!)

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I'm not sure i would include these - sure, Trixie is pretty feisty, but the books themselves are saturated in gender stereotypes of the all-pervasive kind, eg - she's always babysitting the youngest kid (despite there being 2 other older brothers present & available).

I loved the Trixe Beldon books growing up I had all of them!

Well, I killed it there by dissin' on Trixie! :lol:

This thread has been bugging me - mostly because I *know* that I read heaps of books when I was younger that had awesome females in them - and especially because some of the most enduring female authors were women who stood outside of the normative values of the day themselves. But can I remember them? No! Mind you, I don't remember too many of the male lead characters in the hundreds of books I've read, either, so it might be more about my memory and less about the books.

But - this one: Charlotte's Web.

The Paperbag Princess still just makes this age range.
I loved the Ramona books from about 7.
I also loved "The Practical Princess and other Liberating Fairy Tales" but it's out of print now. You can get second hand copies though and they're worth it if you have someone into princess stories/fairy tales.

Some favourite movies I remember were
Mary Poppins- the submission of the wife is the one grey area in this movie but I did learn what the suffragette was movement from her!
Annie
The Parent Trap- the old original one, not sure what the remake is like but the girls were very savvy in the first one

I loved Ramona too!