Heireses: Surely they are among the luckiest women on earth. Yet all too often those gilded lives have been beset with trauma and despair. Before the twentieth century, a wife's inheritance was the property of her husband, making her vulnerable to kidnap, forced marriages, even confinement in an asylum. Heiresses tells the stories of these million dollar babies: Mary Davies, who inherited London's most valuable real estate and was bartered from the age of twelve, Consuelo Vanderbilt, the original American "Dollar Princess," forced into a loveless marriage; Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress who married seven times and died almost penniless; and Patty Hearst, heiress to a newspaper fortune who was arrested for terrorism. However, there are also stories of independence and achievement: Angela Burdett-Coutts, who became one of the greatest philanthropists of Victorian England; Nancy Cunard, who lived off her mother's fortune and became a pioneer of the civil rights movement; and Daisy Fellowes, elegant linchpin of interwar high society and noted fashion editor. Heiresses is about the lives of the rich, but it is also a bigger story about how all women fought their way to equality.