Main Street

Carol Milford, the daughter of a judge, grew up in Mankato, Minnesota, and became an orphan in her teenage years. In college, she reads a book on village improvement in a sociology class and begins to dream of redesigning villages and towns. After college, she attends a library school in Chicago and is exposed to many radical ideas and lifestyles. She becomes a librarian in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the state capital, but finds the work unrewarding. She marries Will Kennicott, a doctor from the small town of Gopher Prairie. When they marry, Will convinces her to live in his hometown. Carol is filled with disdain for the town's physical ugliness and smug conservatism and immediately formulates plans to remake Gopher Prairie.
She speaks with its members about progressive changes, joins women's clubs, distributes literature, and holds a party to liven up Gopher Prairie's inhabitants. Despite her efforts, these ventures are ineffective and she is constantly derided by the leading cliques. She finds some comfort and companionship with a variety of social outsiders in the town, but these companions all fail to live up to her expectations.
After a political meeting of the Nonpartisan League is broken up by local authorities, Carol leaves her husband and moves to Washington, D.C. to become a clerk in a wartime government agency but she eventually returns. Nevertheless, she does not feel defeated:

I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dishwashing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith. (Chapter 39)