Something hard

From the back cover of an old Scholastic book we picked up:

"'I don't know what I'm going to be,' said Elizabeth Blackwell when she was six. 'But I think it will be something hard.'

"Twenty years later, mobs threaten her life. Women pull their skirts away when she goes by. No one will rent her a room. No medical school wants to admit her....But Elizabeth did become a doctor--a good one--in spite of everything. Read her thrilling story."

The book is The First Woman Doctor, by Rachel Baker, copyright 1944 and picked up in 1961 by Scholastic.

Do six-year-olds today still get an urge to do "something hard?" Do we encourage or discourage them from those ideas? Do we teach them to embrace or avoid "hard?"

Would children still "get" Elizabeth Blackwell, or this back-cover blurb? Why would you choose to do something that would get your life threatened by mobs, or at the least make you uncomfortable or embarrassed?

"For you know what was paid to set you free from the worthless manner of life handed down by your ancestors. It was not something that can be destroyed, such as silver or gold; it was the costly sacrifice of Christ...." [1 Peter 1:18-19, Good News Bible]

P.S. One Amazon reviewer says that her fourth-grader daughter (who had already read Harry Potter) couldn't get past chapter 4 of this book, because it was just too...hard.