In thinking through American women's history, Susan Ware found herself drawn to seven women who influenced not only their own professions - politics, journalism, anthropology, acting, sports, dance and music - but also the way women say themselves and their options in life. Ware recovers the people behind the legends of Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Thompson, Margaret Mead, Katharine Hepburn, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Martha Graham and Marian Anderson in their life stories. She looks at how they created their personae and how they kept themselves in the public eye. She also speaks of how these women balanced their personal lives - choosing lovers and partners, and deciding whether to have children. In the choices they made and the success of those choices are lessons relevant to contemporary working women. In living exceptional and unconventional lives, they gave the other women the ability to desire beyond the limits imposed on women and allowed them to dream and strive for independent and fulfilled lives.