“The idea that [a woman’s] sphere was at home, and only at home,” said the feminist Lucy Stone in a speech of 1893, “was like a band of steel on society.” Stone’s mention of steel is interesting, for it was the Industrial Revolution that actually hastened freedoms for women. These mid-19th-century daguerreotypes and ambrotypes of women—activists and writers like Stone, Margaret Fuller, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—catch the “developing” role of women in the public sphere. —C.J.F.