Discover essays on Ziegfeld Girls, early modern dance, silent film, and the evolving popular culture of the early 20th century.
Louise Brooks arrived in New York in 1922, a fifteen-year-old from Kansas with a chaperone to study dance with the Denishawn company. Within three years she transformed herself into the Jazz Age icon that persists in popular memory. Rereading Louise Brooks’s writing of her early years in New York City, published as Chapter One in…
The telephone and “Hello Girls” were wildly disruptive when they arrived at the end of the 19th century. They were radical innovations that brought change, not least for single women, both in the workplace and in the male imagination. Women dominated the ranks of telephone operators early on, starting with Emma M. Nutt in 1878…
Women doctors now make up about 60 percent of practitioners under 35. The situation was very different in the past. No Women Doctors Need Apply In her book “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply”: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835–1975, Mary Roth Walsh recounts the terrible difficulty women faced in studying medicine and in…