"Long awaited, A Sisterhood of Sculptors is a rich and satisfying account of that brave band of nineteenth-century Americans who defied Victorian conventions of womanhood to live in Italy as professional marble sculptors. Melissa Dabakis embeds these audacious women in the struggles for suffrage and the politics of race, as well as the pre-1876 taste and demand for large-scale neoclassical sculptures, rendering them inseparable from the larger forces of history that shaped and confined them."