Louisa May Alcott's energetic, ambitious, and androgynous Jo March has inspired generations of tomboys. But at the close of Little Women even Jo's valiant tomboy spirit has been subordinated to her role as wife and mother. For Jo's Girls, editor Christian McEwen has assembled a collection of fiction and memoir that looks at what it has really meant to be a tomboy from the nineteenth century to the present-and at what the refusal to turn into a "young lady" has implied.

Contributors include: Toni Cade Bambara, Willa Cather, Sandra Cisneros, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Alexis De Veaux, Annie Dillard, Nadezhda Durova, Leslie Feinberg, Emily Hiestand, Maria Hinojosa, Teresa Jordan, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne LaBastille, Ursula K. Le Guin, Bia Lowe, Carson McCullers, Susan Moon, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Grace Paley, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rose Tremain, Frances Willard, Opal Whiteley, Virginia Woolf