This is a work of 11 self-contained chapters, one for each day of September before the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, each containing one woman's story. Taking stories from a broad spectrum of women, the chapters reflect the worlds they inhabited and how the attack on September 11 affected their lives. Despite national and international policies aimed at securing equality for women, the sad fact is that it is still an uneven and insecure equality. Dare we hope that the situation will improve? Christopher Hilton has interviewed eleven very different women--some from the West, some from Afghanistan--to find out what their lives were like and how the attack of September 11, 2001 changed their lives. In the stories that emerge we hear the voices of women whose ordinary loves were suddenly changed and who became actors in some of the most far-reaching events of the modern world.