Introduction: women and temporality
The regime of feminine virtue
Chaste women : sacred, praiseworthy, or misguided
Public women : licentious or evolved
History, nation, and female talent
Women of talent : valorized and repudiated
Wise mothers and mothers of citizens
New global hierarchies of female heroism
The Chinese woman warrior and the Western heroine
The new-style heroine and the paradoxes of feminine time
Conclusion : from the turn of the twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first.
