Not such little women: many of America's greatest heroines were young girls who were wise beyond their years.

• Author: Collins, Gail
• Position: National

A common complaint today is that children--and girls in particular--grow up too fast. Some blame Hollywood, the Internet, or societal pressures for robbing young women of their youthful innocence. But as Gail Collins, the editorial page editor of The New York Time, recounts in her recent book, "America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines," girl have taken on the burdens of adulthood throughout American history, and in some case, changed the course of the country in the process.

We've all heard stories about the women who traveled to America in tiny ships, struggled to set up colonies, protected their families through wars, and fought for abolition, the right to vote, and their own liberation. But we don't often talk about how young some of them were. Perhaps that's because at the time it hardly seemed unusual.

Nancy Kelsey was 17 when she became the first woman to travel to California on a wagon train. In 1841, Nancy, her husband, and their baby daughter left Missouri with a party that included 30 other men. They made a wrong turn at Wyoming and were stuck in the Sierra Nevada mourn rains as winter bore down. Several pack animals died when they fell over cliffs, the party ran out of food, and Nancy's husband nearly died. Nancy, meanwhile, impressed all the other travelers with her "heroism, patience, and kindness."

Janette Riker was still a young girl in 1849 (her exact age is unknown) when she, her father, and her brothers set up camp in the Montana wilderness. One day, all the men went out to hunt and never came back. Left by herself with winter approaching, Janette built a small shelter. She killed an ox, salted down the meat to preserve it, and survived the winter, surrounded by howling wolves and mountain lions. Indians discovered her in the spring and took her to safety at an Army fort in Washington State.

SLAVE GIRLS

African-American girls were frequently forced to begin their adult lives early. Phillis Wheatley was born in Senegal and arrived in America on a slave ship in 1761, when she was about 8. She was purchased in Boston by John Wheatley, who wanted a servant for his wife. Fortunately, the Wheatley family recognized Phillis was a prodigy. She learned to speak and read English with astonishing speed and began studying Latin. She was writing poetry at 13 and later became the first internationally known American writer.

Most slave girls, of course, wound up doing very different kinds of work. While white children on a plantation were learning to read, black youngsters worked in the fields and did housework. A former slave in Nashville who worked for a family in the years before the Civil War recalled that she had to "nurse, cook, chop in the fields, chop wood, bring water, wash, iron, and in general just do everything"--at age 6.

Until long after the Civil War, the goal of virtually every American girl was to become a...