Three Lives

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 choice. Her portraits of Anna and Lena are examples of realistic depictions of immigrant women who had no occupational choice but to become domestic workers. This collection of documents from the history of women's suffrage medical history modernist art and literature enables readers to see how radical Stein's subject was.