Abstract
Constancy has never been considered one of the attributes of woman, which makes it entirely proper that heroines should have altered their characters in fiction almost as often as they have changed their styles in dress; each age has modeled anew the face of woman altering her vices and her virtues to the tastes of the time. |While thumbing through the pages of some old magazines one day, the author encountered this rather unusual statement. It challenged an investigation which resulted in the following study. Four widely separated periods in the history of literature were selected, and an attempt was made to show that the flesh-and-blood woman of each period found her counterpart in the realm of drama. In each case the type of woman portrayed was determined by all the moral, political, and social forces of the age.