Heroines of Service

In the nineteenth century, a generation of women refused to accept that caring for a household was the only service they could offer the world. This collection profiles eleven extraordinary women who carved paths where none existed: Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross after nursing soldiers through the Civil War's bloodiest battles; Anna Howard Shaw, who demanded the right to vote while also becoming one of the first women to practice medicine in America; Mary Slessor, who abandoned the comforts of Scotland for the jungles of Nigeria, where she would ultimately become a respected chief among the peoples she served. These are not soft-focus portraits of Victorian benevolence. They are portraits of women who fought institutional resistance, weathered physical danger, and refused to accept that their ambitions should fit inside a domestic box. Parkman's prose is direct and occasionally admiring, but it never condescends to its subjects. The result is a book that doesn't just recount historical achievements it asks what any of us might be capable of if we simply refused to be told our place.