Walbert's The Gardens of Kyoto: A Novel (2001) focuses on the experiences of two cousins prior to World War II.

Walbert's Our Kind (2004) chronicles the lives of a group of women in the 1950s who struggle against the social restrictions of the age.

The Awakening, first published in 1899, is Kate Chopin's long-suppressed novel of a young woman who struggles and fails to resolve the conflicting roles of wife and artist. This novel depicts the upper-class social roles of Creole wives living in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century.

“To Room Nineteen” (1963), by Doris Lessing, follows a British housewife's slow descent into madness as she confronts what she sees as the meaninglessness of life in the suburbs as a wife and mother. This story appears in Doris Lessing's A Man and Two Women (1963).