Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 by Martha Vicinus

Detailed study into the lives of so-called “superfluous” single middle-class women showing how major their role was for the women who followed them, in opening up new professions for women, improving education, and asserting women’s political and economic rights. ???The seven chapters of this book explore the paradox of power and marginality, of enormous strength within narrow limits, of unity and support linked with division and doubt. Over a period of sixty-odd years independent women and their institutions changed and developed under the constraints of their own weaknesses and the power of established traditions, social opinion and economic weakness.”