Consider Chopin's novels At Fault and The Awakening.
Consider other feminist writing of the era, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Herland.
Consider works that interested Chopin herself at the time, such as the writing of Guy de Maupassant and Charles Darwin.
Consider other women writers who captured a particular region of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Willa Cather, who wrote of Nebraska and farming populations, and Edith Wharton, who wrote of New York City society.