December 31, 1889. As the sky over New York City explodes with fireworks on the eve of the new decade, an explosion in the streets causes social tremors that will rock the lives of three women who share a house on Twenty-Third Street: suffragette Columbine Nash, her assistant Bell Huxton, and Marguerite Corbeau, a young woman they've adopted from the streets.

Lovely noble Columbine, a woman ahead of her time, strives to correct the social ills that are created by her class; lush, beautiful Bell, battered and abused as a child, searches for a true love and a pure philosophy; and Marguerite, a passionate woman of mystery and self-indulgence, attempts to rise above her station and join the glittering stars of New York theatre.

Their paths will diverge, but their destinies are entwined in this volatile decade of high contrast,
a time when wasp-waisted beauties attend fabulous balls, while underpaid seamstresses talk of anarchy and strike, and in the midst of it all are three women, each living in a gilded cage of her own design, trapped by a difficult past, a promise made in haste, a blind faith in an unbending philosophy, Their liberation is the true story of The Gilded Cage.