"Our Lady of Victorian Feminism" is about three 19th-century women, Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women.

It also draws attention to an often neglected strain of feminist thought, essentialist feminism, which proclaimed sexual equality as well as difference, enabling the three writers to make one of their most radical arguments - that women and men are made in the image of the Virgin Mother and the Son, the two faces of the divine.