Description: An intricate network of contacts developed and intensified among women in Europe and North America over the course of the nineteenth century. Forged across boundaries of nationality, language, ethnic origin, and even class, this matrix of connections provided the foundation for the 1888 International Council of Women.

In a tour de force of investigative research, Margaret McFadden describes the burgeoning avenues of communication in the nineteenth century that led to a virtual explosion in the number of international contacts among women. These included the transformation of travel, advances in literacy and education, and the emergence of female evangelicals, revolutionaries, expatriates, and reformers.

Particular attention is paid to five women whose decades of work helped give birth to the women's movement by century's end. These "mothers of the matrix" include Lucretia Mort and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of the United States, Anna Doyle Wheeler of Ireland, Fredrika Bremer of Sweden, and Frances Power Cobbe of England.

McFadden demonstrates that the traditions of transatlantic female communication are far older than most historians realize and that the women's movement was inherently international. No other scholar has painted so complete a picture of the golden cables that linked these women who saw the Atlantic and the borders within Europe more as bridges than as barriers to improving the status of women.

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