In 1917—that is, in the midst of the First World War—Madeleine Z. Doty, a feminist, lawyer, prison reformer, peace activist, and journalist, was commissioned by the magazine Good Housekeeping to travel "around the world" to get a view “behind the battle line” of how people on the home front, especially women, were responding to the war. Traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway from China, Doty crossed the border into Russia just days after the Bolshevik Revolution had begun. She meant it literally when she declared in her account of these travels, Behind the Battle Line: Around the World in 1918: “The Bolshevik Revolution had descended on me.”