Gertrude Stein, as a college student at Radcliffe and a medical student at Johns
Hopkins Medical School, was a privileged woman, but she was surrounded by women
who were trapped by poverty, class, and race into lives that offered little cho
ice. Her portraits of Anna and Lena are examples of realistic depictions of immi
grant women who had no occupational choice but to become domestic workers. This
collection of documents from the history of women's suffrage, medical history, m
odernist art, and literature enables readers to see how radical Stein's subject
was.
