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Introduction: “Maidenhood, Wifehood, and Motherhood” xv because they were types of women who really existed and who exerted a powerful influence on the imaginations of observers, even at that time. But, like the “average” woman in the first paragraph, they fail to capture the staggering variety of women’s actual lived experiences. I make no claim to have captured that variety within these pages, but I have made an effort to step beyond the standard narrative whenever time and source material permitted. Some communities of women were poorly documented Jewish women on the Lower East Side of New York commanded the intense inter- est of social scientists and government officials, for example, while Latina women in the desert Southwest rarely did. Native American women’s stories tended to be collected after the fact as oral histories, and the conventions of many indigenous storytellers—­grounding tales in space rather than time, for example—­can make it hard to pin down whether certain events occurred within our time frame. Collectors of oral histories and household “dietaries” shaped their subjects’ narratives in ways both subtle and profound. And many communities were studied with an agenda in mind by recorders who often did not understand what they were seeing. At the other end of the spectrum, it can be possible to drown in the data, especially since the Progressives were prolific statistic-­ gatherers and record-­keepers. Especially now that so many source materials are available online, it is possible to spend days charting, for example, fluctuations in the price of milk in various cities or trends in millinery by region. I have had to be selective at times to avoid diving down bottomless rabbit holes, and this has no doubt constrained the nature of the narrative I can offer. To the reader who wishes I had spoken more about juvenile delinquency, Christ- mas traditions, airplanes, interracial marriage, disability history, or prayer, I can only answer: I agree with you. For these readers, I hope the bibliography will provide guidance for further exploration. Since this volume focuses on the history of women in the Pro- gressive Era, I have tried whenever possible to be brief in sketching overall trends and then to focus in more detail on how these vari- ous developments affected women. Accordingly, some extremely important phenomena of the period overall receive relatively little space because they applied fairly equally to men and women, and they are more thoroughly addressed elsewhere, for example, in Daily Life in the Progressive Era in this series. In every point of deci- sion about what to include, I applied four tests. The event or trend needed to be indispensable for understanding women’s overall context, affect women or girls in distinctive ways, illustrate some- thing about the lives of large populations of women, or illustrate