Buell's study of village sketches (a type of fiction popular in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s) provides a valuable summary of sketches that portray the community as homogeneous and fixed, but it ignores those by women writers, which typically depicted the diversity that increasingly characterized actual village communities at that time. These women's geographical mobility was restricted (although women writers of the time were not uniformly circumscribed in this way), and their subject matter reflected this fact. Yet their texts were enriched by what Gilligan, writing in a different context, has called the ability to attend to voices other than one's own. To varying degrees, the women's sketches portray differences among community members: all stress differences among men and among women (particularly the latter) as well as differences between the sexes, and some also depict cultural diversity. These writers represent community as dynamic, as something that must be negotiated and renegotiated because of its members' divergent histories, positions, expectations, and beliefs.