Presents a comparative biography of five women designed to point out the improvisatory nature of life, looking at ways in which people combine familiar and unfamiliar components in response to new situations, following an underlying grammar and an evolving aesthetic.

"How one "fallen woman" battled religious ideology, pseudoscience, and political resistance to women's right to vote. Exposed in Ohio newspapers for an affair with a married man, Alice Chenowyth refused to cower in shame. Instead she changed her name to Helen Hamilton Gardener, moved to New York, pretended to be married to her lover, and became a wildly popular lecturer and author, brazenly opposed to sexist piety and propriety. The "Harriet Beecher...

In this subtly crafted biography, the historian Lori D. Ginzberg narrates the life of a woman of great charm, enormous appetite, and extraordinary intellectual gifts who turned the limitations placed on women like herself into a universal philosophy of equal rights. That nearly all of her ideas, including the demand for voting rights, are now commonplace is in large part because she worked tirelessly to extend the nation's promise of radical individualism...