Hillary Rodham Clinton and her girl, Chelsea, talk about the stories of the gutsy women who have inspired them—ladies using the courage to stand up to the position quo, ask hard questions, and complete the job.

She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old. “Go ahead, request your issue,” her father urged, nudging her forwards. She smiled shyly and stated, “You’re my hero. Who’s yours?”

Many people—especially girls—have asked all of us that same question over the years. It’s among well known about The Publication of Gutsy Women: Favorite Tales of Courage and Resilience topics.

HILLARY: Growing up, I knew almost no women who worked beyond your home. THEREFORE I appeared to my mother, my teachers, as well as the webpages of Life journal for inspiration. After learning that Amelia Earhart kept a scrapbook with newspaper articles about effective ladies in male-dominated jobs, I started a scrapbook of my own. Long after I stopped clipping articles, I continued to seek out tales of ladies who appeared to be redefining what was feasible.

CHELSEA: This publication is the continuation of the conversation us have already been having since I was little. For me personally, too, my mother was a hero; so had been my grandmothers. My early educators were also women. But I grew up in a global very different from theirs. My pediatrician was a woman, therefore was the initial mayor of Little Rock who I remember from my child years. Most of my close friends’ moms worked outside the house as nurses, doctors, educators, professors, and in business. And women were entering space and breaking records here on Earth.

Ensuring the rights and opportunities of women and girls remains a big piece of the unfinished business of the twenty-first century. While there’s a lot of work to accomplish, we know that throughout history and around the world women have conquer the toughest level of resistance imaginable to earn victories that have made progress possible for most of us. That is the achievement of every of the ladies in this book.

So how did they do it? The answers are as exclusive as the women themselves. Civil rights activist Dorothy Height, LGBTQ trailblazer Edie Windsor, and swimmer Diana Nyad kept pushing forward, no matter what. Authors like Rachel Carson and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called something no one had dared talk about before. Historian Mary Beard utilized wit to open up doors which were once shut, and Wangari Maathai, who sparked a motion to plant trees, understood the energy of role modeling. Harriet Tubman and Malala Yousafzai looked fear in the facial skin and persevered. Just about any single one of these ladies was fiercely optimistic—they had trust that their activities could make a positive change. And they had been right.

To us, all of them are gutsy women—leaders using the courage to stand up to the status quo, ask hard questions, and get the job done. Therefore in the moments when the long term seems awfully long, we hope you can draw power from these stories. We perform. Because if history shows a very important factor, it’s the world demands gutsy women.