In What The Women Do, three trailblazing women—Eleanor Roosevelt, Kay Summersby and Bobbie Gentry—face private decisions that redirect their live and also shape history. In these powerful novellas, Adam Braver imagines life-changing encounters away from the spotlight, hidden inflection points that capture how these remarkable groundbreakers engaged the world around them.When Eleanor Roosevelt rushes to her son's hospital bedside, she's stopped short by Miss Ethel duPont, his fiancée and the embodiment of everything she's always resisted. In the crush of World War II, Kay Summersby lives and works alongside General Eisenhower, building a loving domestic sanctuary that's dismantled in victory and that shadows the life she later builds for and by herself. And in a small shop in Reykjavik, Bobbie Gentry, the reclusive 70's pop star, fights to preserve her anonymity. Or maybe it's her doppelgänger: her refusal to engage with an ambitious reporter recasts the entire prospect of knowing these women's lives at all.