These autobiographies illustrate the emergence of American women from their traditional position of dependence and legal and social inequality. Here are five women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Anna Cora Mowatt, a well-known playwright and popular actress; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a prominent leader of the first women's rights movement; Harriet Jacobs, an escaped slave; Mary Antin, a Russian Jew who emigrated with her family to the United States in the late nineteenth century; and Margaret Sanger, founder of the birth control movement in the United States. An introduction and notes accompany each autobiography.