This collection analyzes the theme of the "afterlife" as it animated nineteenth-century American women’s theology-making and appeals for social justice. Authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Martha Finley, Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, Zilpha Elaw, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Belinda Marden Pratt, and others wrote to have a voice in the moral debates that were consuming churches and national politics. These texts are expressions of the lives and dynamic minds of women who developed sophisticated, systematic spiritual and textual approaches to the divine, to their denominations or religious traditions, and to the mainstream culture around them. Women do not simply live out theologies authored by men. Rather, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife: A Step Closer to Heaven is grounded in the radical notion that the theological principles crafted by women and derived from women’s experiences, intellectual habits, and organizational capabilities are foundational to American literature itself.

This collection analyzes the theme of the "afterlife" as it animated nineteenth-century American women's theology-making and appeals for social justice. Authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Martha Finley, Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, Zilpha Elaw, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Belinda Marden Pratt, and others wrote to have a voice in the moral debates that were consuming churches and national politics. These texts are expressions of the lives and dynamic minds of women who developed sophisticated, systematic spiritual and textual approaches to the divine, to their denominations or religious traditions, and to the mainstream culture around them. Women do not simply live out theologies authored by men. Rather, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife: A Step Closer to Heaven is grounded in the radical notion that the theological principles crafted by women and derived from women's experiences, intellectual habits, and organizational capabilities are foundational to American literature itself.

During World War I, as young men journeyed overseas to battle, American women maintained the home front by knitting, fundraising, and conserving supplies. These became daily chores for young girls, but many longed to be part of a larger, more glorious war effort. A new genre of children's books entered the market, written specifically with the young girls of the war period in mind. Through fiction, girls could catch spies, cross battlefields, man machine guns, and blow up bridges. These adventurous heroines built the framework for the feminist revolution, creating avenues of leadership for women and inspiring individualism and self-discovery. The work presented here analyzes the powerful response to such literature, how it sparked the engagement of real girls in the United States and Allied war effort, as well as how it reflects their contemporaries' awareness of girls' importance.

Alternating chapters of historical background and literary analysis, this study argues that postbellum series books inspired young women by illustrating the ways in which girls could participate in social change, whether through church societies, benevolent organizations, educational institutions or political groups. By 1900, however, the socialization of series heroines had shifted to the consumer marketplace, where girls could develop personality and taste through their purchases. Both models had benefits: religious faith and political activism gave young women moral power within their communities; consuming gave them opportunities to indulge individual desires and often to socialise in public without adult oversight. The book adds to the existing scholarship on girls' culture not only by examining the beginnings of series fiction for girls and the models of womanhood it presented but also by tracing the shifting social ideologies of girlhood throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.