Much was made of lake swimmer Annaleise Carr’s age when she touched the wall at Marilyn Bell Park.

She’s only 14. That makes her a record breaker. Headline news. Someone amazing.

Yet Annaleise is not alone as the kind of great girl who does great things — even at 14.

A 14-year-old American recently pressured Seventeenmagazine to use untouched photographs of girls in its glossy pages. An Australian wrote a self-help book on bullying after being harassed in grade 8.

Annaleise and her ambitious peers are part of a confident youthful female population that is “riding the wave of feminism of the 1960s and ’70s,” says sociologist Diane Pacom, a professor in the University of Ottawa’s department of sociology and anthropology.

“They’re harvesting the fruit” of the battles for equality waged by their mothers and grandmothers, says Pacom.

“They are so different from generations of women before them in many ways. But what’s universal, at least here in North America, is they are really empowered at (the full extent) of their capabilities.

“There is no limit.”

Annaleise didn’t limit her swim to a vanity quest, her sole aim to ink her name in the history books. She was motivated to use her Lake Ontario showcase to raise money for Camp Trillium, a summer retreat for children with cancer. Donations have now topped $100,000nearly doubling her goal of $50,000.

Julia Bluhm had a different cause. The 14-year-old ballet dancer from Maine took on Seventeen magazine this year over its use of body images.

Julia started a petition on Change.org that called for the magazine to use real, unaltered images of girls. By May, she’d collected 84,000 signatures and delivered them to the magazine’s office in New York. Editor-in-chief Ann Shoket announced in the magazine’s August issue that it would not change girls’ bodies or face shapes when retouching photographs.

Though neither Julia nor her petition were mentioned in Shoket’s letter to readers, the soon-to-be ninth grader was widely acknowledged in the United States as the girl who triggered Seventeen’s reaction to public pressure.

Julia told the Huffington Post: “I’ve always known how Photoshop can have a big effect on girls and their body image and how they feel about themselves.”

Last year, Australian schoolgirl Julia Weber wrote a book about coping with bullying — after she’d been pushed around in person and in cyberspace while writing her work.

The name of Weber’s book: ILY (I Love You): One Teen Girl’s Guide to a Bully-proof Adolescence.

Adolescence is a turbulent time for 14-year-olds who struggle with the transition from childhood to adulthood. In Canada, there were of 403,905 14-year-olds in 2011, according to the latest census figures; 207,860 boys and 196,045 girls. In the GTA, the total is 70,294 (about evenly split between boys and girls).

But even at 14, the grown-up world beckons with salaried jobs. Fourteen is the minimum age one can legally work in Ontario. Generally, employment is restricted to work in stores, offices and arenas. In the city of Toronto, a 14-year-old with training can work at a wading pool as an attendant.

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Pacom says though youthful overachievers like Annaleise typically “are driven because of the (gender equity) changes in history and we can see the fruit of all this female power, this girl power,” there is also a “backlash.”

“They are still conscious of their weight, there’s anxiety. . . they want to be perfect,” Pacom says.

“So they live in this extremely interesting and paradoxical world, stuck between these contradictions — they are still very much stifled by some of the issues of their mothers and grandmothers — and (yet) the sky’s the limit.”