This edited volume contains stories of ordinary women, rich and poor, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, who demanded and obtained the rights promised to them in patriarchal societies and they accomplished this with the support of both men and women. Such heroines demanded the rights due them for properly occupying their societal place in the home, in church or on the street corner. This is shown here to be consistent across time and space. The volume begins in the seventeenth century with European women on three continents: Europe, North Africa and North America. It presents Isabel de Jesus, Alida Schuyler Van Rensselaer Livingston, and soldiers' wives, widows and femes sole of the Tangier and Gibraltar garrisons. These are women of different religions, language groups and social classes, who all used patriarchal laws to protect their rights. The book then moves across time to the turn of the twentieth century in Ireland, Puerto Rico and the United States, to study women as wives of rich men in Toledo's Woman Suffrage Association, as middle class professionals in the civilizing missions of the Christian Church in Puerto Rico, as employees and clients in the magdalen homes of Ireland, as leaders and targets of the eugenics movement in the US, and as sex workers serving tradesmen in Ireland. These women manipulated the legal systems and obtained the personal agency due them from legislators, mission boards, and judges.