During the depression of the 1890s, a young Iowa newspaperman, indignant over the excesses of the Gilded Age, led a group of midwesterners to the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, where they established a model community based on the utopian ideals of Henry George. In Women of Fair Hope, Paul M. Gaston follows the dreams and achievements of three extraordinary women -- an early feminist reformer, an educator, and a freed slave -- whose individual desires to create a fairer, more equitable society led them to play important roles in the life of that community.