Would you like to celebrate Women's History Month with a good read? Here's a recap of the best women's history-themed books, fiction and non-fiction, that I read and reviewed over the past year.
Broadway Butterfly: Vivian Gordon the Lady Gangster of Jazz Age New York. Anthony M. DeStefano. Citadel, 2024. 256 pages.
In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a group of women who followed their dreams of theatrical stardom to New York City. There were so many that they were given a name, "Broadway Butterflies." Few of them attained stardom, or even work, on the Broadway stage. Most had their dreams dashed, and some were forced to turn to even less savory occupations in dance halls and nightclubs, or, even worse as kept women, mistresses, or sex workers. Some found themselves in lives of addiction or criminality, and several were murdered during the Jazz Age. The most notorious example of the tragic Broadway Butterfly was probably Vivian Gordon. On February 26, 1931, Gordon's battered lifeless body was discovered in a Bronx park. The murder led to revelations of her life as not only a prostitute and madam, but also as a blackmailer and extortionist who kept detailed records of important men and their business with her and her girls. These men were in the top ranks of New York society, business, and government and even included the infamous Judge Joseph Crater, who disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. Gordon's murder generated a press frenzy and a public outcry, revealing the entrenched corruption of the New York legal system and the blatant corruption and incompetence of the city's charismatic Mayor Jimmy Walker. In fact, Walker was a firm ally of Governor Franklin Roosevelt before the murder, but the public nature of the mishandled and bungled investigation led FDR to turn against the Mayor so that his rising presidential campaign suffered no damage. Was the murderer one of her angry clients, a man afraid that she could testify about the system, of someone else? DeStefano is a Pulitzer-winning journalist who's written several books about historical organized crime figures, and he takes the reader through Gordon's story, the various theories about why she was murdered, and the political ramifications that resulted.
The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an Organized-Crime Boss. Margalit Fox. Random House, 2024. 336 pages.
When one hears the words "organized crime in New York," one naturally thinks of the gangster era of the 1920s and 1930s, when Italian, Jewish, and Irish mobsters competed to control the lucrative bootlegging, gambling, drugs, prostitution, and extortion rackets and went to actual war against rivals. Few, if any of us, would picture a 6 foot tall, 300 pound German Jewish immigrant peddler's wife, known as "Ma" or "Marm" Mandelbaum, but she was a towering - pun intended - figure in New York City in the last quarter of the 19th century. Fredericka Mandelbaum arrived in New York City in steerage and struggled alongside her street peddler husband to make a living before opening a shop. With the family living above the shop, she sold high end items, silk cloth, cashmere, jewelry, and luxurious furnishings and accessories, all at wholesale prices. Some of her customers were upper class, but most were from the rising middle class and those nouveau riche moving into the newly burgeoning Gilded Age upper class. What her customers didn't, or did know, was that everything she sold was stolen by highly trained and organized pickpockets, shoplifters, and burglars who scoured the city and surrounding area for goods to take back to "Marm," as they called her. She gave them a fair, fast payoff, made sure all identifying marks were removed, and then sold the items at about 60-65% of their value, still taking in a handsome profit. Not only was she the city's most successful and prosperous fence, but she selected, trained, and organized the criminals and planned their jobs, taking in hundreds of millions of dollars of stolen goods in today's dollars. Meanwhile, she entertained well-known and connected figures in government, business, and society at her dinner table and maintained a very protective network of policemen, lawyers, and judges. She became a neighborhood philanthropist, paying rent for some, usually wives of men arrested in her employ, and making donations to worthy causes and to her synagogue. Her world finally crumbled when she set her sight on banks, and one miscue after another led to her downfall. It's a great and too little-known rags to riches story. Margalit Fox's research is incredible, and it's not only the story of Mrs. Mandelbaum, but also a real history of crime and corruption in Gilded Age New York. I highly recommend it.
Mistress of Life and Death: The Dark Journey of Maria Mandl, Head Overseer of the Women's Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Susan J. Eischeid. Citadel, 2023. 464 pages.
"She was a nice girl from a good family." Maria Mandl was the last of four siblings born to a highly respected and successful shoemaker in a small Austrian village and a devoutly religious mother who suffered from depression and other illnesses throughout her life. Her father scrimped and saved to send Maria to a convent school, unlike her older sisters. There, she learned to play the piano and developed a great appreciation for and knowledge of music. When WWII began, Maria joined the new corps of women guards for German concentration camps. She quickly stood out. She was refined and educated compared to most of her colleagues who typically had little to no education and were often former criminals and prostitutes. She also surpassed them in sheer brutality and sadism, and she rose through the ranks quickly, eventually becoming the head women's overseer at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest death camp. Meanwhile, her parents were known for their staunch opposition to Nazism and for their kindness to all. Her father risked arrest by making anti-Nazi comments and by using leather scraps to make free shoes for village children during the war. Her mother went to church daily to pray for Maria's soul. They only had a vague idea of what she actually did in her job, and probably couldn't have imagined that she regularly, and without provocation, beat prisoners with whips, rubber clubs, and her fists, oversaw their torture and starvation, oversaw hideous medical experiments, demanded inspections in terrible weather - standing for 10 to 14 hours- which led directly to hundreds, if not thousands of deaths, ordering poison injections of pregnant women and infants, and personally leading children to the gas chambers after showering them with affection and treats for a few days. Oh, she also created the infamous Auschwitz women's orchestra which she forced to play as work details left and returned to camp and during some selections and arrivals of trains filled with the doomed. How can this happen? This book is an incredibly important addition to the history of the Holocaust.
Mercury Pictures Presents. Anthony Marra. Hogarth, 2022. 432 pages.
Whew! This was a long one! It was an audiobook that we listened to together in the car, and it took a while, but it was worth it. If you're a fan of James McBride's big sweeping, slow-moving epics with lots of characters like Deacon King Kong and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, you will enjoy this book.
The central character is Maria Lagana. As a little girl in Rome, she developed a love of movies, bonding her with her father, an attorney whose principles made him an enemy of Mussolini's regime and led to his arrest. When she and her mother immigrate to the US, she begins to work for a small struggling studio called Mercury Pictures, and she quickly becomes the indispensable right hand of the quirky studio head, full of great ideas and able to get things done, but constrained by her gender. She begins a romance with a talented Chinese-American actor, himself constantly struggling to break through the racial barrier and become a leading man. Her family is adjusting to life in the new country, and the studio is full of interesting characters, each with his or her own unique backgrounds and issues. Many are refugees forced to leave their European homes. Then, one day a visitor from Italy, who had been imprisoned with her father, arrives, World War II begins, and their lives are all upended. I must admit that there were times when the book seems to drag and nothing much was happening, but there was lots of character development. I did become invested in the characters and their lives. It's very witty, and it paints a richly detailed picture of wartime Hollywood and the movie industry of the 1930s and 1940s. It's a good read.
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Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World. Edward Dolnick. Scribner, 2024. 352 pages.
Natural history was all the rage in Victorian England. It seemed that everyone spent their leisure time communing with nature, walking, climbing, and beachcombing, collecting animals, plants, rocks, and fossils. They assembled personal collections which they proudly displayed, museums were established and attendance bloomed, and scientific lecturers drew standing room only crowds across the country. Scientists who were charismatic and attractive had audiences of adoring female fans hanging on every word. The prevailing attitude was that God had created a perfect world functioned smoothly according to his plan, and that science existed in order to prove and illuminate His work. That worldview began to deteriorate around 1800 when fossilized remains of previously unknown creatures were discovered and studied. They had been found before, explained away as dragons, cyclops, unicorns, animals that didn't catch Noah's ark, fakes planted by either God or Satan to confuse, but a handful of people began looking at them differently, and their claims shook the Victorian mindset, raising confounding questions. How can this be when the earth is only 6,000 years old? Extinction was impossible -how could God make that part of His plan? How could there possibly have been an entirely different world with entirely different creatures long before Man ever arrived on the scene when the world was created for Man to enjoy?
This book is incredibly entertaining and educational as it describes the work of these important, and eccentric, pioneers, the discoveries and theories that preceded their work, and the effects of their work on Victorian thinking. It's one of my favorite reads of the year so far.
Wild Women and the Blues. Denny S. Bryce. Kensington, 2021. 384 pages.
1920s Chicago: speakeasies, bootlegging, gambling, Al Capone, mob wars, numbers running - the backdrop for this historical fiction work, but with a difference. The action takes place in black Chicago, the section called Bronzeville, so it's a 1920s story that's both different and familiar simultaneously. The center of the story is centenarian Honoree Dalcour, a sharecropper's daughter who moved to Chicago as a child, telling her life story to an aspiring young filmmaker, Sawyer Hayes, who has discovered a possible unknown film by the successful black filmmaker of the era, Oscar Micheaux. Honoree had a role in that film, and Sawyer can't resist tracking down the last living link. Honoree tells him her story. Abandoned as a teen by her mother and by her first love, she becomes a dancer in a speakeasy at 19, but she has dreams of bigger things, even stardom on Broadway. She gets a break when she's hired to dance at Chicago's most prestigious black-and-tan (club that allows integrated audiences) speakeasy, the Dreamland Cafe. Her revelry is cut short, however, when she is unwittingly involved in murder and mob double-crosses that forever alter her life. The result is page-turner revealing a well-researched world and multiple family secrets that had been hidden for nearly a century.
An entertaining read.
The Paris Girl. Francelle Bradford White. Citadel, 2024. 256 pages. Release date December 24, 2024, Advance Reader's Edition.
When Francelle Bradford White was six years old, she learned for the first time that her mother was a World War II heroine, with the war medals to prove it. Andree Griotteray was19 when German troops marched into Paris. She and her brother Alain, who later became a celebrated French journalist, immediately began working in the French Resistance. She had just begun work in the French passport office. Her brother created an underground network called Orion, and she proved to be a valuable member of the organization, secretly typing up and copying resistance newspapers, and collecting and forging identity paperwork used by agents in their work and by Jewish citizens in their escape attempts. She then became an undercover courier delivering critically important military intelligence to Resistance contacts and to Allied forces beyond. She participated in the creation of a major escape route through the Pyrenees Mountains into neutral Spain; this allowed hundreds of French men to join the Free French forces in Algeria and also allowed downed Allied pilots and crewmen and Jewish refugees to escape. Throughout it all, Griotteray displayed incredible courage and poise, allowing her to evade capture for a while and to survive arrest and interrogation when she was eventually captured. Here, the author uses her mother's thorough diaries and letters in addition to research not only to document her mother's extraordinary courage, but also to paint a very detailed picture of daily life in occupied France. It's a fine read for those who looking for a unique perspective on World War II.
Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins' Efforts to Aid Refugees From Nazi Germany. Rebecca Brenner Graham. Citadel, January 21, 2025. 336 pages. Advance Reader's Copy.
This biography ended up on my favorite ten reads list for 2024. I always knew Frances Perkins as a footnote, albeit a major footnote, in American history, and I always made sure to mention her when I taught, but I never did her story the justice that she deserved. American history buffs might recognize her as the first female in the presidential cabinet, serving as FDR's Secretary of Labor. More than casual buffs might know that she was a literal eyewitness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, standing on the street below the building as dozens of young immigrant women jumped to their deaths to escape the fire, and that motivated her to become one of the driving forces behind occupational safety and labor regulations that had a tremendous impact on American society. She became a leading figure in the New York state government administration before FDR took her to Washington, and she continued to make history and real fundamental, lasting changes, making a real case for consideration as the most effective and important American woman in the 20th century. Yet, few, including history buffs and teachers like myself know enough about the real Frances Perkins.
She had major struggles in her life and career, a husband who spent most of their marriage in and out of mental institutions as a manic depressive, probably what would be bipolar disorder today. She had to deal with the sexism that women in any career faced, especially politics, as she was always the only woman in the room. She was the object of vitriolic attacks in the press, and voluminous hate mail that accused her of being a communist and Jewish (She was Episcopalian.). She was impeached (but not removed) from Congress, and even FDR, who had been an ardent supporter and admirer, turned his back on her when her progressivism threatened his support. (Another strong, accomplished woman who made him what he was that he betrayed.) At the time of her tenure, immigration fell under the purview of the Labor Department, and she made it her mission to help refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. This book gives the reader a look into her phenomenal character and career, particularly this part of it. She was a real American hero.
The Good Wife of Bath: A Novel. Karen Brooks. William Morrow, 2022. 560 pages.
My classmates and I read parts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in high school, and one of my major papers that year was about "The Miller's Tale." (Shout out to Mr. Tony Turner and my other English teachers. The quality of teachers of all subjects that I enjoyed in high school in rural south Georgia in the early 1980s was incredible, although I did not recognize how incredible at the time.) Those excerpts were challenging, and maybe they weren't thrilling, but they were intriguing glimpses into a long-ago age that revealed the humanity of humanity and the universality of the human condition, an important reason to study literature.
Karen Brooks, a writer of historical fiction, was inspired by the story of Chaucer's fictional Wife of Bath and decided to bring her to life in a new novel, telling her story, from her point of view. If you don't remember the original tale, this character is one of the standouts, mainly because she broke all the traditional constraints on women of the 14th century. She was assertive, bawdy, intelligent, and quite scandalous in the way that she lived her life and dealt with men. Brooks gives the reader the full story, back, front and all-around. The story begins when young Eleanor is orphaned and made a servant girl until she is forced into marriage at age 12 to a 60 year old man. Eleanor is a fighter, however, and she has a very keen mind for business. Thanks to her ambition and drive, a bit of good of good fortune here and there, and a life-long friendship with Geoffrey Chaucer, she navigates through five marriages, ups and downs, and many tragedies to build a family and quite a legacy, always in pursuit of the Holy Grail for women in 14th century England, her greatest desire: the right to control her own life.
This was a great read. We listened to the Audiobook version and found it to be exceptionally well done.
Can't We Be Friends: A Novel of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. Eliza Knight and Denny S. Bryce. William Morrow Paperbacks, 2024. 384 pages.
Thanks to the internet, people are becoming more and more aware of an extraordinary friendship between two of the most famous women of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald, legends in their fields, at the peak of their careers. I've never been a jazz fan, and I've never sat down and listened to Fitzgerald. To me she was just that lady who popped up on 1970s variety shows and broke the glass with her voice in a commercial in the 1980s, but I recognized her great talent. I've seen some of Monroe's movies and thought they were interesting, but I know much more about her personal life because of the "scandals" and conspiracies. Historical fiction authors Denny Bryce and Eliza Knight have written a very entertaining novel about the deep friendship that emerged from letters that Monroe wrote to Fitzgerald asking for voice lessons. Their common bond, besides real mutual admiration for each other's talents, was struggle. For Fitzgerald, the external struggles were against racism, sexism, and body-shaming, while she struggled internally with finding true love and doubting her mothering because she left her son to be raised by an aunt while she toured the world. For Monroe, there was the sexism of Hollywood which not only affected her earning power and personal control over her career, but it also led to type-casting and unfair accusations of unprofessional behavior. Then, there was her horrible track record with men, which was both a cause and a symptom of her mental instability, depression, and self-doubt that led to major alcohol and pills addiction.
The book is not a biography, but the authors obviously did a great deal of research, and they created an enlightening and entertaining novel which has added to my understanding of and appreciation for both women. (By the way, much of the recent internet storytelling gets it wrong, apparently. Yes, Marilyn may have helped Ella get bookings in certain L.A. clubs, but Ella wasn't ignored by those clubs because she was black. Black women like Dorothy Dandridge, Earth Kitt, and Lena Horne performed in those clubs frequently. Ella was ignored because she had a fuller figure than those women.)
