Modern women and what is said of them : a reprint of a series of articles in the Saturday Review (1868)

A series of polemical essays surveys contemporary debates about women, social roles, and manners, interrogating fashionable affectations, dress, and marital ambitions while also treating education, employment, motherhood, religious life, and public influence. The writer catalogues social types—from frivolous society women to ambitious wives and plain girls—to analyze how economic pressures, limited opportunities, and cultural expectations shape female behavior. Critical but at times sympathetic, the essays argue for broader mental training, fairer work and pay, and a reevaluation of domestic and public responsibilities as means to remedy perceived excesses and narrow prospects.