Gertrude Stein, as a college student at Radcliffe and a medical student at Johns Hopkins Medical School, but was surrounded by women who were trapped by poverty, class, and race into lives that offered little choice. This book is a collection of documents from the history of women's suffrage, medical history, modernist art, and literature.

In these three stories, Gertrude Stein put into practice certain theories about prose composition that paralleled the ideas expressed in the art of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters.