America, 1935-1945

I just realized that this is my 100th post! I'm glad that it's one that I think is really special, and that I'm genuinely excited to be sharing with you all.
One of the famous images of the Great Depression is the pea picker's wife, her face dirty and creased with concern, two of her children hiding their faces against her and a third, a baby, in her lap.

That photo was taken by a photographer from the Farm Security Administration, and there are a lot more where it came from. Like, a lot a lot. Almost 175,000 more, to be exact, and they've recently been digitized by the Library of Congress, and tagged with information like who took them, where, and who the people in the photos are, if it's known.
A project at Yale University, Photogrammar, has taken those archives and organized them into an interactive map, viewable by county. I just found this yesterday, and of course that last few hours of my day were given over to poring over the images. I started with Chicago, but I'm excited to see images from everyday life from around the rest of America as well. Here are some of my favorites from the place I call home.
Anything with a well dressed woman prominantly featured obviously caught my attention.

Bidding farewell to someone departing on a Greyhound bus.

A woman in a fur coat kissing her boyfriend, a soldier, goodbye in Union Station.

A WAC waiting for her train in Union Station.

I don't remember who exactly this young woman is, but I believe that she also works at Union Station. Just look at the beautifully set hair.

A young African American woman on the South Side tries on a skirt. Love the strong-shouldered silhouette.

A nurse working in a clinic on Chicago's South Side. Her eyes just have such depth.

The floor show at an African-American cabaret.

A young couple walking down Michigan Avenue. I really want to try to recreate her outfit.

This photo of three women waiting for the Easter Promenade outside of a South Side church is one of my favorite images. THOSE HATS.
There are some fantastically atmospheric shots as well.

Like this one, taken inside Union Station. At its peak during WWII, Union Station saw 300 trains and 100,000 passengers a day.

Two women waiting for a streetcar on a foggy day.

A ship heads down the Chicago River. I know exactly where this was taken, because the building on the far left is still standing.

I really, really encourage all of my fellow vintage enthusiasts to check out this fantastic archive. I love the glimpse that it's given me into the everyday lives of people living in my city so long ago, and I think it's really fantastic that this project focused on people that we don't really have that many surviving images of.

Badasses in Bustles

Although I'm not as into steampunk as I used to be (it's just gotten a bit diluted, as if you can add clockwork robots to any shitty Victorian-era story and make it better), but some of the real life women from that time period are inspiring me to want to write my own piece of steampunk fiction.
One of the bloggers that I enjoy, Porcelina of Porcelina's World, said something that I found really interesting in her book review of The All Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion by Fannie Flagg, the author of Fried Green Tomatoes. She had been reading other reviews of the book and disliked the way that they characterized the main character, calling her weak or a pushover, when she saw her as kind and self-sacrificing. I agree that there are all kinds of strength in the world, and the kind of strength that lets you make sacrifices for your family, support others, and respond with gentleness and kindness in any situation should not be thrown over in favor of traditionally masculine, physical strength. It's less obvious, less flashy, but no less valuable in society or in fiction.
That said, there is something undeniably awesome about the unexpected ass kicker, and what is more unexpected than a woman from the turn of the 20th century doing the kicking? The corsets and bustles and gowns and culture that said that women are weak, fragile things that must be protected for their own good - they had to overcome all of that, which makes a display of physical toughness all that more interesting. 
Victorian Strangeness: The Tale of the Women Who Turned Vigilante
A historical antecedent to the Gulabi Gang of India, this group of women decided to make sure a wife-beating miller never brutalized his family again. They dragged him from his house, flogged him with whatever came to hand, and then threatened to drown him in the mill pond if he ever hit his family again.

Now, we could go into all of the causes of domestic violence, and I realize that this kind of retaliatory violence often leads to escalation. That said, who hasn't thought that people like this just deserve a taste of their own medicine?
The Amazons of Edwardian London: Kick-Ass Suffragette Bodyguards
This one is my favorite. Seriously, if I ever have a chance to get reincarnated, I want to suffragette who knows jiu-jitsu.

Police and civilians alike were incredibly violent against suffragettes in Britain, and in order to protect their leaders, they formed the bodyguard - about 30 young women who provide security, and keep the leaders from being arrested. Many of them trained in jiu-jitsu, and would also practice with wooden clubs.
After the battle of Glasgow, in which 50 police with truncheons brutalized 25 members of the bodyguard armed with simple wooden clubs, then dragged Emmaline Pankhurst, the leader of the movement, off the jail, things began to change in the movement. Members began to resort to acts of vandalism and arson in order to get their point across, which of course endeared them to absolutely no one. With the outbreak of WWI, the issue was temporarily shelved, but in 1918, British women finally won the right to vote.
If You Will: Topless Female Duelists
Game of Thrones fans, you probably already love a girl with a sword. This topless duel, though, takes the cake. It was the first duel ever to take place between two women, with female seconds and a woman presiding over the whole thing, and at the suggestion of the presiding judge, it was done topless. For, you know, health reasons. (No, really. The judge, who had worked as a nurse, realized that wounds that became fouled with cloth were more easily infection, and the obvious solution was to get rid of the clothes. Duh.)

Also great - the fact that they were fighting over floral arrangements.
Badass of the Week: Milunka Savic
I am a massive fan of Terry Pratchett, and one of his best novels, in my opinion, is Monstrous Regiment. After endless years of war and famine in an Eastern European analog, a young woman disguises herself as a man to join the army and try to track down her beloved brother. Of course, she's not the only woman to have that bright idea.

Milunka Savic is the most decorated female soldier in military history. Very handy with a hand grenade and utterly fearless in the face of what normal people would be sensibly afraid of (like gunfire and cannon fire and lots of enemy soldiers), this Serbian broad fought in three different wars, personally taking over 50 soldiers captive over the course of it. Even in her 60s, after marrying and having children, she remained tough as nails, refusing to attend a Nazi banquet during WWII and then surviving her subsequent internment in a concentration camp.

There is no shortage of tough women in history who decided that the rules were not going to apply to them. These are some of my favorite from this particular time period, but who are some of yours?

Links to Love

1. Rare shots of New York's 1990s drag scene
It seems appropriate, since I was posting photos of my guy and I in drag yesterday, to post some photos of folks who are actually good at it.


2. The Rules of Being Glamorous
The first thought I had when I saw the title of this post from the awesome British blogger Retrochick was "really? I thought you were cooler than that." And then I read it, and it's way more about how to just have a happy, engaged life. These are good rules to follow, whether you're looking for glamour or not.

Jean Harlow is always glamorous, even when she's just running lines.

3. Why are we grossed out by women with armpit hair?
Best guess - all of the sexy pheromones hair diffuses makes us think of sex, and since sex is a taboo, we have to get rid of the hair to get rid of all the dirty thoughts it gives us. *shrug* Ok, works for me.

Sophia Loren: Sexy armpit hair having lady.
Also, did anyone else watch Golden Girls? Remember that episode where Rose talks about how she wasn't allowed to shave her legs, and so her classmates came up with the meanest nickname for her? And it was "Rose with the hairy legs"? I think about that every time someone discusses body hair on a woman.
4. Pocahontas: Fantasy and Reality

The divide in interpreting her story is not just between cultures; in academic circles, there are still factions with brittle pride warring over whether Pocahontas really saved John Smith from death, whether he made the story up, or whether the narrative was about a ritual drama John Smith simply didn't understand. Some experts argue about the appropriation of Pocahontas as an American Indian woman that the larger public has reduced to a “Pocahottie” Halloween outfit. None of these tropes is centered within a firm Algonquian indigenous worldview, perhaps an almost impossible task 400 years later. Divergent takes on historical events will not always be reconciled.

5. How the bicycle paved the way for women's rights
I don't bike as much as I would like to (my iron steed needs some maintenance before I start commuting on it again), but I love the sense of freedom and speed that it gives me. The best part might be the illustrations that accompany it, which were taken from an 1897 magazine article about the state of ladies' legs after all of that manly cycling activity.


6. My Imaginary Friends: The Beauty YouTuber Economy
I don't watch a lot of YouTube videos like this, but I love what the writer has to say about the way we relate to bloggers in general. There are some people that I read where I'm like, "I want to be your friend, I think it would be a hoot to stand around with cocktails in our hands pretending like we're famous while people covertly check us out." Glad to know I'm not alone in this.

Talia Castellano was a young beauty blogger who used makeup to keep her spirits up as she fought her battle with cancer.