The dawn of the twentieth century saw the birth of the New Woman, a cultural and literary ideal that replaced Victorian expectations of domesticity with visions of social, political, and economic autonomy. This book is the first to focus solely on multiethnic women writers responses to the ideal of the New Woman in America. Rich reveals how these authors uniquely articulated the contradictions of the American New Woman, and how social class, race, or ethnicity impacted women s experiences of both public and private life in the Progressive era.