The Emerging 'New Woman'

The 'Coming Woman,' the 'New Woman,' the 'Modern Woman' - call her what you will, post-Civil War America was abuzz with the new possibilities for female independence and autonomy emerging as the the decades led up to women gaining the vote in 1920. This collection of 24 short stories, published between 1865 and 1917, features a new kind of heroine being developed by well-known writers like Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather and her lesser known writers, popular in their day and worthy of re-consideration by modern readers, such as Lydia Maria Child, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Ellen Glasgow, Sui Sin Far, Mary Antin, and Maria Christina Mena. An introduction, head-notes, and a bibliography provide contextual and other information about the four sub-categories organizing these stories: Slavery and Freedom, Race and Gender, Self Reliant Women, Work vs. Family, The Marriage Question - and Divorce, and Communities of Women: Female Friendships - issues often relevant to women's lives even today.