This essay examines Silas Estabrook's 'The laves and Tragical Deaths of Beautiful Females' (Boston, 1847), a cheap, racy, gaudily illustrated paperbound collection of sexualized murder accounts, and juxtaposes it to several more respectable antebellum compilations of sketches of 'celebrated women.' Many nineteenth-century American texts, especially ones produced by men, acclaimed the lives of women bold enough to violate prescribed gender roles and to appropriate such stereotypically masculine attributes as physical courage, martial prowess, and political leadership. Whether found in plebeian murder pamphlets or in genteel biographical collections, accounts of courageous, if often victimized, female heroines embodied a strikingly 'masculinist' tradition of popular feminist discourse--designated here, in two variants, as 'transgressive feminism' and 'heroic feminism' that engaged many thousands of female readers of the generation that initiated America's modern women's rights movement.