Women of Glass and Steel

Women of Glass and Steel is a young adult novel of first love and courage on the World War I home front. For Della (a.k.a. Delfina Pereira), Seneca Falls, New York, in 1916 offers days of drudgery in the knitting mill and nights confined to a shabby flat with Mama, the town's most outspoken suffragist. Della wants only to find love and escape Mama's unpopular opinions and the foreign ways that mark their immigrant family as different. But just as Della finds the romance she craves, the United States enters World War I. A dark new reality strains her bonds to family and friends and pits her awakening understanding against her cherished dreams.

An ugly duckling compared to her best friend, Netty (Agnese Tambussi), Della fantasizes about a silver-screen courtship with Douglas Fairbanks. That is, until Netty falls for handsome Tommy O'Fallon and fixes her brother Carlo up with Della. When Carlo proposes to Della, she believes her fairytale ending has come-but Tommy does not propose to Netty before the boys leave for war. Mama vocally opposes the war and is arrested for picketing. She's fired from the mill, and Della must support them both. After Tommy dies of the Spanish influenza in the trenches, Della nurses Netty through suicidal depression. Carlo comes home from war an amputee, and Della realizes that she has grown, but her deeply traditional fianc?sees-and wants-only the passive girl he remembers. She has come to agree with Mama that women deserve rights equal to men's. Della must choose between the admirable role of war hero's wife or the uncharted path of breaking her engagement, losing Netty's friendship, and facing disgrace in their small town. If she follows her convictions, Della foresees a life as lonely as Mama's.