First came the secretaries from Brooklyn and Queens--the smart cookies who saw that making money, lots of it, might be within their grasp. Then came the first female Harvard Business School graduates, who were in for a rude awakening because an equal degree did not mean equal opportunity. But by the 1980s, as the market went into turbodrive, women were being plucked from elite campuses to feed the belly of a rapidly expanding beast, playing for high stakes in Wall Street's bad-boy culture by day and clubbing by night.
In She-Wolves, award-winning historian Paulina Bren tells the story of how women infiltrated Wall Street from the swinging sixties to 9/11--starting at a time when No Ladies signs hung across the doors of its luncheon clubs and (more discretely) inside its brokerage houses and investment banks. If the wolves of Wall Street made a show of their ferocity, the she-wolves did so with subtlety and finesse. Research analysts signed their reports with genderless initials. Muriel Mickie Siebert, the first woman to buy a seat on the NYSE, threatened she'd have port-a-potties delivered if the exchange didn't finally install a ladies' room near the dining room. The infamous 1996 Boom-Boom Room class action lawsuit, filed by women at Smith Barney, pulled back the curtain on a bawdy subculture where unapologetic sexism and racism were the norm.
As engaging as it is enraging, She-Wolves is an illuminating deep dive into the collision of women, finance, and New York.
De la historiadora y autora galardonada Paulina Bren, nos llega un retrato cautivador, conmovedor e intrigante de la fascinante historia del hotel residencial más famoso de Nueva York y las mujeres que se alojaron allí, incluidas Grace Kelly, Sylvia Plath y Joan Didion.
Bienvenidos al Barbizon, el legendario hotel para mujeres de Nueva York.
Después de la Primera Guerra Mundial y con nuevos derechos políticos, las mujeres llegaron a los nuevos y deslumbrantes rascacielos de Manhattan para estrenar su independencia económica. Pero no iban a aceptar menos comodidades de las que disfrutaban los hombres.
Construido en 1927, el hotel Barbizon se diseñó como un lujoso refugio para la mujer moderna que deseaba hacer carrera en el mundo del arte. A lo largo de los años, sus casi 700 pequeñas habitaciones alojaron a muchas jóvenes ambiciosas que buscaban alcanzar la fama y la fortuna: entre ellas, a Molly Brown, superviviente del Titanic; a las actrices Grace Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw y Jaclyn Smith; y a las escritoras Joan Didion, Gael Greene, Diane Johnson y Meg Wolitzer. Sylvia Plath relató su estancia allí en La campana de cristal. Asimismo, la revista Mademoiselle y la escuela de secretariado Katharine Gibbs alojaban allí a sus estudiantes, y la agencia de modelos Ford, a sus jóvenes modelos.
A pesar de que no todas las mujeres que atravesaron las puertas del Barbizon estaban destinadas al éxito, el hotel ofrecía a sus residentes una habitación propia y una vida sin obligaciones familiares: les dio a las mujeres la oportunidad de rehacerse a sí mismas como quisieran.
El hotel Barbizon es una brillante historia cultural, un colorido y glamuroso retrato de la vida de las jóvenes que, desde la era del jazz de la década de 1920 hasta el agitado período del movimiento de liberación de la mujer en los años 60, llegaron a Nueva York en busca de algo más.
Winner, 2012 Council for European Studies Book Award
Winner, 2012 Center for Austrian Studies Book Prize
Shortlist, 2011 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize (ASEEES)The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia brought an end to the Prague Spring and its promise of socialism with a human face. Before the invasion, Czech reformers had made unexpected use of television to advance political and social change. In its aftermath, Communist Party leaders employed the medium to achieve normalization, pitching television stars against political dissidents in a televised spectacle that defined the times.The Greengrocer and His TV offers a new cultural history of communism from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution that reveals how state-endorsed ideologies were played out on television, particularly through soap opera-like serials. In focusing on the small screen, Paulina Bren looks to the normal of normalization, to the everyday experience of late communism. The figure central to this book is the greengrocer who, in a seminal essay by Václav Havel, symbolized the ordinary citizen who acquiesced to the communist regime out of fear.Bren challenges simplistic dichotomies of fearful acquiescence and courageous dissent to dramatically reconfigure what we know, or think we know, about everyday life under communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Deftly moving between the small screen, the street, and the Central Committee (and imaginatively drawing on a wide range of sources that include television shows, TV viewers' letters, newspapers, radio programs, the underground press, and the Communist Party archives), Bren shows how Havel's greengrocer actually experienced normalization and the ways in which popular television serials framed this experience.Now back by popular demand, socialist-era serials, such as The Woman Behind the Counter and The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, provide, Bren contends, a way of seeing--literally and figuratively--Czechoslovakia's normalization and Eastern Europe's real socialism.
First came the secretaries from Brooklyn and Queens--the smart cookies who saw that making money, lots of it, might be within their grasp. Then came the first female Harvard Business School graduates, who were in for a rude awakening because an equal degree did not mean equal opportunity. But by the 1980s, as the market went into turbodrive, women were being plucked from elite campuses to feed the belly of a rapidly expanding beast, playing for high stakes in Wall Street's bad-boy culture by day and clubbing by night.
In She-Wolves, award-winning historian Paulina Bren tells the story of how women infiltrated Wall Street from the swinging sixties to 9/11--starting at a time when No Ladies signs hung across the doors of its luncheon clubs and (more discretely) inside its brokerage houses and investment banks. If the wolves of Wall Street made a show of their ferocity, the she-wolves did so with subtlety and finesse. Research analysts signed their reports with genderless initials. Muriel Mickie Siebert, the first woman to buy a seat on the NYSE, threatened she'd have port-a-potties delivered if the exchange didn't finally install a ladies' room near the dining room. The infamous 1996 Boom-Boom Room class action lawsuit, filed by women at Smith Barney, pulled back the curtain on a bawdy subculture where unapologetic sexism and racism were the norm.
As engaging as it is enraging, She-Wolves is an illuminating deep dive into the collision of women, finance, and New York.