In the essay "Men and Women," first published in a nine-part series from January to March 1859 in the abolitionist newspaper National Era and then reprinted in the collection Country Living and Country Thinking (1862), Mary Abigail Dodge presents a primer for women who desire independence, autonomy, and self-reliance, qualities that Dodge vigorously pursued for herself. With a pragmatic eye, Dodge, who wrote under the name Gail Hamilton, objects to the gendered proscriptions of her day that would inhibit women's freedoms, both geographical and intellectual. She writes: "There are no wild wanderings at [women's] own sweet will, no experimental deviations from the prescribed route, no hazardous but delightful flying off in a tangent on the spur of the moment." With these words Dodge cogently identifies the stultifying social conventions that fostered the so-called Cult of True Womanhood for white, middle-class women in nineteenth-century American society. Rather than accept the "prescribed...