West End Girls
West End Girls

Author: Barbara Tate

Publisher: Seven Dials

Published: 2010-07-22

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1409116077

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A vivid and compelling memoir recounting the real lives, loves and friendship of 1940s Soho and its working girls. Barbara Tate was 17 when she heard the whispered word that would change her life: Soho. It would take four years for Barbara to escape her loveless home but when she finally made it to the forbidden streets of Soho - just as London was recovering from the trauma of the second world war - things would never be the same again. There the naive Barbara meets the beautiful and capricious Mae. When she takes a job as Mae's maid, Barbara imagines she'll be housekeeping. But down a shabby backstreet, Barbara discovers the secret lives of Soho's working girls. An astonishing world full of fierce friendships and bitter rivalries, dangerous men and desperate measures, Barbara soon learns that taking the money from a staggering supply of punters and making copious amounts of tea are only the bare essentials. She will need to be nursemaid, protector and confidante to impossible, adorable, self-destructive Mae.

Working Girls in the West
Working Girls in the West

Author: Lindsey McMaster

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2008-07-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0774858257

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As the twentieth century got under way in Canada, young wage-earning women � "working girls" � embodied all that was unnerving and unnatural about modern times: the disintegration of the family, the independence of women, and the unwholesomeness of city life. Long after eastern Canada was considered settled and urbanized, the West continued to be represented as a frontier where the idea of the region as a society in the making added resonance to the idea of the working girl as social pioneer. Using an innovative interpretive approach that centres on literary representation, Lindsey McMaster heightens our understanding of a figure that fired the imagination of writers and observers.

Upstairs Girls
Upstairs Girls

Author: Michael Rutter

Publisher: Farcountry Press

Published: 2012-11-26

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1560375426

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Prostitutes make up one of the most engaging chapters in the story of the American West. Upstairs Girls opens a window on the lives of these women for hire. Historian Michael Rutter offers a thorough and fascinating history of prostitution in the West, with details on why women turned to this profession and what their lives were like. Chapters on the notorious madams, the tragic Chinese sex trade, occupational hazards, rowdy dancehall girls, and the efforts of the ''Moral Purity Movement'' supplement the heart-breaking and sometimes humorous profiles on some of the most famous madams and prostitutes in history.

Code Girls
Code Girls

Author: Liza Mundy

Publisher: Hachette Books

Published: 2017-10-10

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 0316352551

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The award-winning New York Times bestseller about the American women who secretly served as codebreakers during World War II--a "prodigiously researched and engrossing" (New York Times) book that "shines a light on a hidden chapter of American history" (Denver Post). Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history; now, through dazzling research and interviews with surviving code girls, bestselling author Liza Mundy brings to life this riveting and vital story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.

Nothing Daunted
Nothing Daunted

Author: Dorothy Wickenden

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2011-06-21

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1439176604

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From the author of The Agitators, the acclaimed and captivating true story of two restless society girls who left their affluent lives to “rough it” as teachers in the wilds of Colorado in 1916. In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, bored by society luncheons, charity work, and the effete men who courted them, left their families in Auburn, New York, to teach school in the wilds of northwestern Colorado. They lived with a family of homesteaders in the Elkhead Mountains and rode to school on horseback, often in blinding blizzards. Their students walked or skied, in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string. The young cattle rancher who had lured them west, Ferry Carpenter, had promised them the adventure of a lifetime. He hadn’t let on that they would be considered dazzling prospective brides for the locals. Nearly a hundred years later, Dorothy Wickenden, the granddaughter of Dorothy Woodruff, found the teachers’ buoyant letters home, which captured the voices of the pioneer women, the children, and other unforgettable people the women got to know. In reconstructing their journey, Wickenden has created an exhilarating saga about two intrepid women and the “settling up” of the West.

Dealing in Desire
Dealing in Desire

Author: Kimberly Kay Hoang

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2015-02-11

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0520960688

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This captivating ethnography explores Vietnam’s sex industry as the country ascends the global and regional stage. Over the course of five years, author Kimberly Kay Hoang worked at four exclusive Saigon hostess bars catering to diverse clientele: wealthy local Vietnamese and Asian businessmen, Viet Kieus (ethnic Vietnamese living abroad), Western businessmen, and Western budget-tourists. Dealing in Desire takes an in-depth and often personal look at both the sex workers and their clients to show how Vietnamese high finance and benevolent giving are connected to the intimate spheres of the informal economy. For the domestic super-elite who use the levers of political power to channel foreign capital into real estate and manufacturing projects, conspicuous consumption is a means of projecting an image of Asian ascendancy to potential investors. For Viet Kieus and Westerners who bring remittances into the local economy, personal relationships with local sex workers reinforce their ideas of Asia’s rise and Western decline, while simultaneously bolstering their diminished masculinity. Dealing in Desire illuminates Ho Chi Minh City’s sex industry as not just a microcosm of the global economy, but a critical space where dreams and deals are traded.

Far from Home
Far from Home

Author: Lesley Poling-Kempes

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 32

ISBN-13: 9780896723306

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In the early 1880s when conventional wisdom decreed that working women were socially inferior and morally suspect, an English gentleman brought the first of thousands of young women to the American West to work in restaurants along the Santa Fe Railroad line. Preferring the term Harvey Girl to waitress, Fred Harvey recruited single women between the ages of eighteen and thirty to work ten-hour days serving four-course meals in under thirty minutes at Harvey Houses from Kansas to California.Harvey Girls usually lived above the Harvey Houses and were chaperoned by a house mother. Their uniforms were modest, makeup and jewelry were forbidden, and each Harvey Girl signed a year-long contract. In exchange for these stringent rules, a Harvey Girl enjoyed room and board, railroad passes, and job security. In the seventy-year history of the Harvey Houses, more than one hundred thousand women proudly wore the black-and-white uniform of the Harvey Girls.Far from Home is the first of two volumes of paper dolls that feature the authentic uniforms and fashions of the day worn by the Harvey Girls. The text is presented as journal entries, and the historic fashions are based on the holdings of the Arizona State Capitol Museum.Step back in time with Mayetta and Christine as they leave their childhood homes and begin new adventures as Harvey Girls in the 1890s: July 1893: What a flurry of activity and excitement today! Fred Harvey himself came to Las Vegas. He climbed off the train and onto the platform and right into the lunchroom. Everyone knew who he was immediately and scurried to make our service extra good. He spoke with all the girls (even me!) and told us we were doing a fine job. The only complaint I heard was about the orange juice in the cooler. He poured it down the drain and told the cook it had to be freshly squeezed for every meal.For more in the paper doll history of the Harvey Girls, see The Golden Era: West by Rail with the Harvey Girls.

The Business of Women
The Business of Women

Author: Melanie Buddle

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0774818158

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Throughout history, Western women have inhabited a conceptual space divorced from the world of business. But women have always engaged in business. Who were these women, and how were they able to justify their work outside the home? The Business of Women explores the world of those women who embraced British Columbia’s frontier ethos in the early twentieth-century. In this detailed examination of case studies and quantitative sources, Buddle reveals that, contrary to expectation, the typical businesswoman was not unmarried or particularly rebellious, but a woman reconciling her entrepreneurship with her identity as a wife, mother, or widow. This groundbreaking study not only incorporates women into the history of business, it challenges commonly held beliefs about women, business, and the marriage between the two.

The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art
The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art

Author: Guerrilla Girls

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1998-02-01

Total Pages: 97

ISBN-13: 014025997X

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"[A] tart, funny, lurid little bomb of a book. It's all p.c., of course, but not at all predictable, and a lot of righteous information gets dispersed in record time." -- BUST Magazine We were Guerillas before we were Gorillas. From the beginning, the press wanted publicity photos. We needed a disguise. No one remembers, for sure, how we got our fur, but one story is that at an early meeting, an original Girl, a bad speller, wrote 'Gorilla' instead of 'Guerilla.' It was an enlightening mistake. It gave us our mask-ulinity. Ever wonder about the abundance of naked male statues in the Classical section of your favorite museum? Did you know medieval convents were hotbeds of female artistic expression? And how did those "bad boy" artists of the twentieth century make it even harder for a girl to get a break? Thanks to the Guerrilla Girls, those masked feminists whose mission it is to break the white male stronghold over the art world, art history--as we know it--is history. Taking you back through the ages, the Guerrilla Girls demonstrate how males (particularly white males) have dominated the art scene, and discouraged, belittled, or obscured women's involvement. Their skeptical and hilarious interpretations of "popular" theory are augmented by the newest research and the expertise of prominent feminist art historians. "Believe-it-or-not" quotations from some of the "experts" are sprinkled throughout, as are the Guerrilla Girls' signature masterpieces: reproductions of famous art works, slightly "altered" for historic accuracy and vindication. This colorful reinterpretation of classic and modern art, as outrageous as it is visually arresting, is a much-needed corrective to traditional art history, and an unabashed celebration of female artists.

Women in the American West
Women in the American West

Author: Laura E. Woodworth-Ney

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2008-04-03

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 1598840517

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This engaging narrative synthesizes more than 20 years of historical writing on the history of women in the American West. Twenty years after many Western historians first turned their attention toward women, Women in the American West synthesizes the development of women's history in the region, introduces readers to current thinking on the real experiences of Western women, and explores their influence on the course of expansion and development since the 19th century. Women in the American West offers vivid portrayals of women as pioneers, prostitutes, teachers, disguised soldiers, nurses, entrepreneurs, immigrants, and ordinary citizens caught up in extraordinary times. Organized chronologically, each chapter emphasizes important themes central to gender and women's history, including women's mobility, women at home, wage labor, immigration, marriage, political participation, and involvement in wars at home and abroad. With this revealing volume, readers will see that women had a far more profound effect on the course of history in the Western United States than is commonly thought.