Shaw studies the three women in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop with respect to both the manifest content of the narrative and Cather's psychosexual conflicts. The males portrayed by Cather are occupied with "facts" and have a considerable capacity to compromise personal integrity. The women, who for Cather bear prime responsibility for psychological disorders, are more rooted in introspection and imagination. The author proposes that Cather never came to terms with her conflicts over homosexuality, and that one piece of evidence for this was her inability to represent, in her fiction, a "traditional, heterosexual, child-bearing female." Cather's women are passive in the face of male authority and, although they engage in traditional female roles, are substantially resistant to them.