Praise for the “True Woman” by Catharine Beecher, her sister Harriet, and many others in the nineteenth century sought to elevate the status of women by celebrating their roles at home as wives and mothers, but this ideal was often used to confine women to subservience at home and deny them freedom outside it. For Women’s History Month, we’ll consider three women authors of the nineteenth century to see how the stories they tell reflect on the ideal of the True Woman and also speak to our time.