Young compares and contrasts the histories of African-American and Chinese-American women, then analyzes each group’s response to the stereotyped images that have become a part of American cultural history. Her vehicle for this study is fiction from writers as diverse as James Fenimore Cooper, William Wells Brown, Ambrose Bierce, and Frank Chin, and from Euro-American, African-American, and Chinese-American writers who created the dominant stereotypes. Young examines the response to these stereotypes in the writings of key African and Chinese-American women writers such as Linda Brent, Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Sui Sin Far, Chang Hua, and Amy Tan.