The Crux portrays a multigenerational group of women who flee the repressive traditions of their New England village on the advice of a woman physician. Migrating to the free and progressive West, they find personal growth and self-fulfillment in a Colorado town. An argument against the nineteenth-century ideal of female "innocence" that left women vulnerable to sexually transmitted disease, the novel invokes classic frontier ideology along with a feminist critique of the male-dominated medical establishment in order to argue for women's sexual self-determination.