One of the greatest fallacies about history is the belief that what is commonly presented to us as our past is somehow a complete history. Somehow, the realities that millions of Americans lived were white-washed from history books and often do not return. B. Vikki Vintage's blog is valuable in that it reminds us that the American experience was broad and all-encompassing.


These students are walking to a Negro College Aid function, while still fashionable. Love the dress on the right.


I have nothing to say but: bad-ass.


Back when homecoming was an event.


This scene took my breath away. It belongs in a Turner Classic Movie.


At some point, petticoats came back in style.


We even had pulp comics (which I am now obsessed with).


Some things never go out of style. I'd put this on and happily walk out the door.


This type of pose - allowing the fabric to billow around the body - was super popular. It appears in many of the homecoming photos on the B. Vikki vintage site.


The caption reads "What a difference a year makes!" As we transitioned from the 50s into the 60s, the Afro began to be a popular hair style option.


Her look is part-Mod, part-Twiggy, all fabulous.


Fixed up and looking sharp in suits, gloves, and heels.


And of course, Coca-Cola got in on the action.


Sarah Vaughn was doing her thing.


And so was Dinah Washington.


All this happened while women were working on breaking down barriers in all aspects of life.


And while we were fighting segregation.


As Restructure puts it so well: "People of colour are not a story of suffering . . . Or resistance. We are multifaceted."


What is important to remember that only by finding all the pieces will we, as Americans, have a clear understanding of our whole history. There are many people who were here, living, breathing, loving, dancing - and their stories have been deemed unimportant. I'm most familiar with African-American history, but there is also an Asian American History, a Latin American history, an Indigenous history - all of which overlapped with popular culture and helped to create our American tapestry. To be written out of history is one thing - to do so in a way that the contributions of others are completely forgotten is another. As Threadbared points out, there's still so much more to find.

The article opens:

Nearly 60 years later, Garnet Kozielec still marvels at the journey that took her from a job wrapping porcelain dishes to doing so-called "man's work" making bombers and fighter jets and from her home in West Virginia to Michigan and then California.

In 1942, she and 27 others from the Dunbar, W.Va., area joined millions of women recruited as workers during World War II. Collectively, they were known as Rosies, after Rosie the Riveter, a fictional character at the center of a 1940s government campaign. Wearing a bandanna and bright red lipstick, with her sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular arms, Rosie was portrayed in song and illustration as a tireless, patriotic worker.

A small aside here: The image most often associated with "Rosie the Riveter" isn't the Rockwell painting used to grace this post. It's actually a poster titled "We Can Do It" created by the Westinghouse Corporation and the War Production Coordinating Committee to be displayed in the factories where women worked. (The reason for why one image is more popular than the other appears to be related to copyright - see the related link below for more details, including Rockwell's interpretation of Rosie as a righteous, god-like figure.) However, it isn't known exactly how many women became Rosies, despite the large push by the war effort to engage women. The NY Times explains:

Estimates of how many women participated in the wartime workforce vary from 6 million to 16 million. No official tally exists because "when the war ended, they just lost all the paperwork," said Donnaleen Lanktree, is president of the American Rosie the Riveters Association, a group that has identified some 800 living Rosies. Ms. Lanktree said her own mother, the daughter of Belgian immigrants, worked nearly 70 hours a week for two years riveting the wings of Navy planes in Detroit.

Anne Montague, president of the group Thanks! Plain and Simple, has reached out to the Rosies as an effort to honor all those who participated in the war effort.

Ms. Montague's group is racing against time make a documentary about the experiences of Rosies from West Virginia. Ms. Kozielec is the only survivor of the group from Shepherdstown. Nationwide, the age of the living Rosies ranges from the late 70s to the mid-90s.

"Through the war, they really thought and very deeply felt that what they did was in comparison to the men, was so minor," Ms. Montague said. "But now that they look back on it, they really are beginning to understand that it was an incredibly important contribution."

60 Years Later, ‘Rosies' Have Their Day [NY Times]
"Rosie the Riveter" Is Not The Same As "We Can Do It!" [Docs Populi]
Official Site [Thanks! Plain and Simple]

Related (aka More Cool History and Images):

"Rosie The Riveter" [Pop History Dig]

In the latest Vanity Fair, James Wolcott unleashes the sort of despairing tirade that intellectuals have been haplessly aiming at our culture's demise since the dawn of Survivor. "The influence of Reality TV has been insidious, pervasive. It has ruined television, and by ruining television it has ruined America," he proclaims dramatically, and enters into the sort of acid-tongued dismissal of televised whoredom that's become an armchair sport of its own in the past decade. America's obit also contains the lines "it is also true that the mega-dosage of reality programming has lowered the lowest common denominator to pre-literacy," and "Reality TV wages class warfare and promotes proletarian exploitation."

But fruitless as such rhetoric may seem in our benighted times (and, I'm sorry, but Super Nanny is an excellent and educational show that has taught me how incredibly easy raising other peoples' kids is) there was one salient point I found to be tragically apt. Quoth he,

Reality TV has annihilated the classic documentary. When was the last time you saw a prime-time documentary devoted to a serious subject worthy of Edward R. Murrow's smoke rings? Since never, that's when. They're extinct, relics of the prehistoric past, back when television pretended to espouse civic ideals. Murrow and his disciples have been supplanted by Jeff Probst, the grinny host of CBS's Survivor, framed by torchlight in some godforsaken place and addressing an assembly of coconuts.

Well, anyone who's spent much time on Netflix knows that reports of the documentary's death have been exaggerated, but let's talk about the greatest casualty of the last decade: The History Channel. Yes, I know: before it was all-Hitler, all the time. If you were lucky, you got a dash of Churchill, or maybe a few re-enactors running onto a battle field. Historians talked. Voiceovers intoned. Hitler's final days approached inexorably, while an actor who didn't really resembled him gesticulated wildly. Sometimes we saw the holy land or a weathered piece of parchment. You know, the History Channel!

Now, the network is beyond parody. The viewing public is, the programmers seem to feel, unwilling to watch anything that doesn't involve Da Vinci-Code-style speculation, cryptic pseudo-historians, and, whenever possible, the paranormal. Three times in the past week I tried to find a comforting educational program. I was presented with Ancients Behaving Badly, something about Lord of the Rings involving what looked like a reenactment of the movies, and Ancient Aliens, respectively. Take a smattering of shows from the current schedule: Nostradamus Effect: Satan's Army; MysteryQuest: The Lost City of Atlantis; Fort Knox: Secrets Revealed and UFO Hunters: The Silencers. I never thought I'd be so glad to run across Civil War Journal: Stonewall Jackson.

I don't want "mysteries" unless they're staid Mysteries of the Bible, thanks very much. I don't want buried treasure. I don't need the founding fathers to have hidden a treasure map in the Constitution because, call me a nerd, but the Constitution is interesting sans Nic Cage. Templars don't need to be skulking around for Church history to have a bearing on the development of England. And, oh yeah, aliens have nothing to do with history. To put this in terms the New History Channel will find more engaging: It's like Indiana Jones. The ones based on real history (yes, I'm talking about the holy grail and the arc of the covenant; work with me) are better. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was idiotic. (I'd say these aren't actually suggestions, but programs already exist pertaining to each of the films. The Crystal Skulls are ancient alien artifacts - maybe.)

Old programming has been shunted onto History International, where you can still get a comforting fix of Medieval weapons and Nuremberg (although the homepage gamely advertises Cults: Dangerous Devotion, Ku Klux Klan: A Secret History and the perfectly dignified show that for some reason has been christened The Naked Archaeologist.) It's not the same. It knows it's second-rate, that the powers that be don't think it can pull in the youngsters. It's not sexy. The History Channel was always for the regular joe; it wasn't for academics or historians. But it assumed people like history, because we're living it, and it's interesting, and it has a bearing on who we are today. Now, we're controlling the programming instead. Maybe it does have to do with reality TV, or the general dumbing-down of the culture. Personally, I blame Dan Brown (although not in a grand-conspiracy way.) All I know is, these half-facts and bits of speculation and scholars' cautious assertions quickly cut with a more dramatic reenactment are, well, boring. And while I'm more than happy to don a gratuitous explorer's fedora and say cryptic things about the role of ancient dolls any time the History Channel wants me to, that's not really the kind of history we need to make. Hmph.

I'm a Culture Critic … Get Me Out of Here! [Vanity Fair]

Here are my initial impressions:

• Her first known relative, Melvinia, had a tough, complicated life.
  The article opens:

  In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475.

  It is later revealed that Melvinia had a child around age of fifteen that was categorized as "mulatto," the official term then for someone who was biracial. The reporters note:

  It is difficult to say who might have impregnated Melvinia, who gave birth to Dolphus around 1859, when she was perhaps as young as 15. At the time, Henry Shields was in his late 40s and had four sons ages 19 to 24, but other men may have spent time on the farm as well.

  "No one should be surprised anymore to hear about the number of rapes and the amount of sexual exploitation that took place under slavery; it was an everyday experience, " said Jason A. Gillmer, a law professor at Texas Wesleyan University, who has researched liaisons between slave owners and slaves. "But we do find that some of these relationships can be very complex."

  What happened with Melvinia cannot be determined. The article indicates later that another child was born post-emancipation. That could mean that the relationship continued - or it could mean that, like sharecropping, certain practices continued for lack of better options. Later on, Melvinia left the area and reunited with other people she had worked with at her original plantation. On her death certificate, it is written that her parents are unknown.

• Passing and the promise of education figure prominently in Michelle's family history.
  
  When discussing the path of Melvinia's offspring, it was noted:

  Dolphus Shields was in his 30s and very light skinned - some say he looked like a white man - a church-going carpenter who could read, write and advance in an industrializing town. By 1900, he owned his own home, census records show. By 1911, he had opened his own carpentry and tool sharpening business. [...]

  At a time when blacks despaired at the intransigence and violence of whites who barred them from voting, from most city jobs, from whites-only restaurants and from owning property in white neighborhoods, Dolphus Shields served as a rare link between the deeply divided communities.

  His carpentry shop stood in the white section of town, and he mixed easily and often with whites. "They would come to his shop and sit and talk," Mrs. Holt said.

  Dolphus Shields believed race relations would improve. "It's going to come together one day," he often said, Mrs. Holt recalled.

• Don't ever read the comments on these kind of things.

  I should know better by now, but I occasionally take a peek. I stopped when one of the comments listed said "I have no sympathy for the Obama's who are rich and influential...Eastern Europeans and Asians really had to struggle when they got here." Twenty-six people recommended that comment.

• It is important to remember that the Obama family did not necessarily participate in the information gathering of the article.
  

  Mrs. Obama and her family declined to comment for this article, aides said, in part because of the personal nature of the subject.

  Probing one's past can lead to all kinds of revelations, all of which are not necessarily for public consumption. While the story is both fascinating and complex, the Obamas have not faded away into the history books. And having a deeply personal part of one's ancestry out for the world to comment upon is a little unnerving. I don't think what the reporters did was wrong - but as a person who also only has a hazy grasp of her ancestry, I just find it unsettling.

• This article illuminates the past but, sadly, will not eradicate bigotry.

  As I read the piece, reminders of the dismissive comment about Michelle Obama's "slave blood," was bandied about by the likes of Charles Steele and Rush Limbaugh during the election cycle, kept resurfacing.

  Some people have lauded this as an American story, one of triumph and uplift. But viewed through the lens of all the racist vitriol churned up since 2008, the story also seems to function as a reminder that some of us are more American than others.

In First Lady's Roots, A Complex Path From Slavery [NY Times]
Yeah They Said It!: "Slave Blood"- SCLC and Rush Limbaugh [Michelle Obama Watch]

Says Hilary Swank, "Amelia Earhart is an iconic figure. She was so ahead of her time. I'm inspired by her. It's incredible this woman from Kansas who died so many years ago is still so talked about." And that abpout sums up how most people feel about Lady Lindy, even if the rest of us don't get the chance to play her. Amerlia Earhart is, without question, an icon: an independent, adventurous woman recognizable enough as both a face and an idea that she's inspired the Gap and Ms. magazine with equal ease. We know her as the first woman to fly the Atlantic, the second pilot to do so, and a mysterious figure cut down in her prime somewhere over the Pacific in 1937.

If you have read any of the major biographies of Earhart, it's true that even at the time, she was more complicated than we acknowledge: she was considered something of a show-boater, a fame-lover, whose PR and connections helped her eclipse the achievements of less glamorous and more dedicated female pilots, like Ruth Law, Louise Thaden or Gladys O'Donnell. Despite her well-known progressive stance, many have pointed out that the only jobs and commitments she really stuck with were those of fame - although an advocate for women's education, she never finished school, and gave up social work when she became famous. In short, she was a complicated person. As Judith Thurman, doubtless wary of a new, simplified canonization in the form of a new Hilary Swank vehicle, puts it, "Earhart was saintlike only as a martyr to her own ambition, who became an object of veneration and is periodically resurrected-her unvarnished glamour, like a holy man's body, still miraculously fresh."

But how much does that matter? Because there's still this.

When she lectured at colleges-as she did frequently, to promote careers for women, especially in aviation-she urged the coeds to focus on majors dominated by men, like engineering, and to postpone marriage until they had got a degree. On Earhart's own wedding day, in 1931, the thirty-three-year-old bride handed her forty-three-year-old groom, George Palmer Putnam, a remarkable letter, which read: 'You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which means so much to me. . . . In our life together I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. . . . I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all the confinements of even an attractive cage.'

Thurman's point is that whatever Earhart was as a woman, an individual, she's been eclipsed by the myth. She's become an "icon" with all that implies - public property whose popular perception is more enduring than any reality. But I'd say that in this case, there's nothing wrong with that. Thurman writes,

Her flights were feats of courage and endurance, but compared with the achievements of the women in her scrapbook their significance was ephemeral. Her unique experience might have yielded a memoir that would still be read, yet she published only three slight books, one of them posthumous, which were rushed out, for commercial reasons, in weeks.

And yet, her legacy is so much greater than that. Whether she deserved to be canonized in the public mind - become the face of bold female courage in a male world - is almost besides the point. There is something to be said for the fact that Amy Adams in flyer helmet and slacks, even in a gratuitous sequel like Night at the Smithsonian, can automatically spell "courageous, brave, pioneering iconoclast" to a little girl. The important thing is that that icon existed, and continued to exist, and has inspired a lot more than biopics.

Missing Woman [New Yorker]
Hilary Swank On Dating Her Agent [Google News]
Ruth Law [Early Aviators]
Biography: Louise McPhetridge Thaden [Women in Aviation]
Gladys O'Donnell

Freydis Sharland was a 21-year-old spitfire pilot ferrying planes between factories and the front lines. Emma Smith was a barge worker, moving cargo, who went on to write a best-selling memoir about her work. Margaret Pawley was a spy decoding German messages in Italy.

All of them, profiled at greater length in this article, had remarkable, bittersweet experiences that would have been unthinkable outside of war-time. We've had the advantage of growing up with mothers and grandmothers whose experiences were shaped by the War. It's sobering to realize that it's a generation that is dying, and their remarkable stories with them. We're a culture that, even as it increasingly values the contributions of women - and seems to have an unwavering interest in dramatic representations of World War II - is less engaged by the individual story when it's not packaged in costumes or given the importance of a PBS caption. And while not everyone, certainly in America, has stories of comparable drama, everyone does have stories. Let's hear them.

WW2: The Role Of Women In The Second World War [Telegraph]

Many of us know "the flapper," vaguely, as a shingle-haired Charleston-dancer throwing back bathtub gin and generally defying mores in a burst of nihilistic post-War independence. We think of The Great Gatsby, or maybe one of those cheap Halloween costumes with yards of synthetic fringe and a long string of plastic pearls.

But how exactly did the phenomenon start? There's a fun summary on MentalFloss that gets into the term's antecedents -the arm-flapping dancing, and a 1920 movie called The Flapper about a free-spirited young woman named Ginger - and the pop culture phenom was further expanded by the bob-haired Dixie Dugan comic strip. A lot of factors coalesced to create the flapper: beyond the post-war lust for life, Hollywood, with its bad girls and colorful stars, was becoming a force and giving women a whole new set of lacquered role models - perhaps disseminating trends and attitudes more quickly than in the past. Cars gave women mobility. And the country was prosperous and carefree.

It was the first youth culture as we know it: a culture designed to reject everything old and venerate youth - but as commercial and widespread as it was defiant. This wasn't counterculture; it was counterculture made mainstream. Makeup, jazz, drinking and smoking may have been the privilege of only the truly liberated, but their fashions and ethos trickled down to effect every sphere of conventional culture. And, as MentalFloss points out, even the androgynous modern fashions, worn over a mere bra and made to facilitate dancing - and pioneered by the self-made Chanel - were more democratic:

The straight shapeless dresses were easy to make and blurred the line between the rich and everyone else. The look became fashionable because of the lifestyle. The short hair? That was pure rebellion against the older generation's veneration of long feminine locks.

Jazz, Fitzgerald and Gentleman Prefer Blondes may have celebrated a vanguard, but they were also bestsellers. And the flapper movie stars - Joan Crawford, Louise Brooks - were as popular with moviegoers in small towns as the big city.

In this way, it was a highly modern phenomenon: youth culture venerated, made into a fad, commercialized, and unavoidably brought into the mainstream. And, as now, smart people could dismiss it: Dorothy Parker was contemptuous of what she considered shallow displays of rebellion and anti-intellectualism - and "petting parties," bunny-hugging and slang like "snugglepup" and "barney-mugging" didn't exactly lend the flappers credence as ambassadors of the new womanhood. Indeed, for all their reputation as a harbinger of liberated womanhood, the flapper was deplored by many of the suffragette old guard, who felt the flappers were throwing away the freedoms they'd worked for, and undermining women's seriousness. Writes one scholar, "To the dismay of early feminists, these unruly daughters of feminism were driven by an apolitical appetite for clothes, boys, and the outward signs of freedom." Says Amanda Marcotte,

Taking swipes at the shallow-minded flappers is pretty much standard operating procedures in feminism; even Betty Friedan does it in her essay that was a run-up to The Feminine Mystique. I'm not sure what to make of that, though, because the huffy insinuation that flappers rolled back feminism through their lack of seriousness reminds me of nothing more than the same accusations being aimed at third wave feminists, who are routinely accused of being oversexed fluff-heads who are too busy enjoying our freshly won freedoms to worry about continuing the fight...It might be true to an extent, but since I see these things as cyclical, I have to wonder if the "women party down with their new freedoms" part of the cycle isn't a necessary one for a progressive movement to stick, and more importantly, move forward. Without the drinking, smoking, and most importantly, fornicating flappers pushing young women to grab ahold of the more sensual pleasures of life, how would the long-evolving sexual revolution of the 20th century get underway?

And the flapper herself might have been more aware of her freedoms than her predecessors feared: in "A Flapper's Appeal to Parents," one young woman wrote,

I want to beg all you parents, and grandparents, and friends, and teachers, and preachers—you who constitute the "older generation"—to overlook our shortcomings, at least for the present, and to appreciate our virtues. I wonder if it ever occurred to any of you that it required brains to become and remain a successful flapper? Indeed it does! It requires an enormous amount of cleverness and energy to keep going at the proper pace. It requires self- knowledge and self-analysis. We must know our capabilities and limitations. We must be constantly on the alert. Attainment of flapperhood is a big and serious undertaking!

The Rise Of The Flapper [MentalFloss]

The Next Step Towards Our Goals Was The Charleston [Pandagon]
Modern Girl Project Views Women Between The Wars [Harvard]
Women's Fashions 1920s [1920-30]
The JAZZ AGE [Geocities]
Five Fascinating Flapper Facts [Neatorama]
A FLAPPER'S APPEAL TO PARENTS [Geocities]
Slang of the 1920's [AACA]

Books references: Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?
Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern by Joshua Zeitz
The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s by Paula S. Fass
Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade

A terrific piece in History Today discusses the phenomenon of the "whore memoir," a popular genre of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Writes Julie Peakman,

Real-life prostitutes such as Sally Salisbury, Fanny Murray and Kitty Fisher became the subject of a genre of memoirs now known as Whore Biographies in books such as The Effigies, Parentage, Education, Life, Merry-Pranks and Conversation of the celebrated Mrs Sally Salisbury (1723), Memoirs of the celebrated Miss Fanny M*****(1759) and The uncommon Adventures of Miss Kitty F*****r (1759). Their full names in the titles were tantalisingly omitted, although everyone would have recognised who they were. Gossip around these women and their lovers filled the taverns. Broadsheets and pamphlets rec orded their activities. Songs and poems were written about them and cartoons depicted them.

Famous courtesans - some of them actresses - were among the most famous celebrities of their day, revered by the common people and notorious amongst the nobles who served as their protectors - and their wives. I'm no historian, but the appeal seems obvious: in addition to the lurid taint of sex and scandal the women carried, theirs were tales of social mobility in an era where most people didn't even dream of it, and accounts of their humble origins and fine carriages must have proved irresistible to contemporary readers. One could even read about a fallen woman's life on a moral pretext: an account of Sally Salisbury stabbing her noble protector with a bread knife might have served, ostensibly, as a cautionary tale, but also served to make the courtesan a popular heroine.

The genre, as Peakman tells it, was born with male writers: hacks trying to make a buck with a series of generic, lurid "biographies." Seeing a chance to set the record straight - or at least on their own terms - many of the women decided to cash in with memoirs, and the "blaming and shaming" that ensued is what really made them must-reads. In addition to establishing themselves as good-hearted and merely prey to human frailty, many of these memoirs served as a means of publicly shaming the notable men who'd seduced or cheated them - and slandering rival courtesans. This was surely a level of power most women could never dream of - even those courtesans who'd managed to achieve a level of autonomy and financial independence.

But in addition to the thinly-disguised bold-faces, respectable readers also received a dose of reality. As the women told it, they were not morally reprehensible, but at the mercy of an unforgiving world and in the power of men: many of them related that their careers started as a result of rapes or abandonment that left them with no options; many of the memoirs featured beatings and abuse. As Peg Plunkett put it in her memoir,

The ill usage of Lawless, had changed me to what I never was before. In short, I was become a compleat Coquet. I entertained every one who fluttered about me, I received every present that was offered, accepted every entertainment that was made for me; gave them all the hopes, yet yielded to none. I was disgusted with the man of my heart, therefore gave my heart to none. I looked upon all men as my lawful prey, and wished to punish the crimes of one on the whole sex.

While it would be hard to argue that this genre did a lot to elevate the social dialogue, it's also true that - in combination with a new wave of free-thinking and the works like Mary Wollstonecraft's, the "whore memoir" coincided with a consideration of women as disenfranchised and ill-used rather than morally or intellectually inferior. If they were jaded, these stories seemed to say, it was the fault of men - surely a charge that many less-obviously beholden members of their sex must have silently echoed. Indeed, it's pretty clear that the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope can be traced directly to these memoirs. It's always dangerous to romanticize courtesans, as much today as then - viewing them as liberated mistresses of their own destinies, influencing powerful men and bucking the codes of the time. At the end of the day, these memoirs say, they were still chattel. But by living a life of open "vice," they also had the ability to exploit it openly - and this genre is a marvel of savvy.

Blaming And Shaming In Whores' Memoirs [History Today]

I have a fondness for behind-the-scenes, what-the-secretary-saw style stuff, like the recent piece by Madoff's secretary, or that rather disappointing Downfall about Hitler's final days as seen through his secretary's eyes. (Oh, and if you ever run across 1962's My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House, grab it.) So obviously I was psyched when Radio 4 announced a documentary on the so-called "Garden Room Girls," the "elite band of secretaries" who serve at number 10, Downing Street.

Named for the view of the garden their office affords rather than any horticultural associations, the Garden Room Girls continue to keep things running, albeit discreetly. For their documentary, the BBC reunited a group of secretaries from prior eras, who were presumably more free to share their memories. While several of them tell of weekend trips to the Duke of Norfolk's castle and Concorde flights - "I had to take dictation from one civil servant whilst I was being fed canapés by another to keep me going" - it was often far from glamorous. Wartime employees recall the barrack-like overnight accomodations, the iron beds and cold water. And then, of course, there was Churchill. Says Ann Finchett,

"He had a budgerigar which used to fly about his bedroom," [which] would land in her lap and start nibbling the edges of the paper. "I often wondered what ministers made of the letters they used to get with bits taken out of them," Ann adds.

The full documentary broadcasts 1100 BST tomorrow on Radio 4; don't worry, it'll be archived. (Also, never image-search "Garden Room Girls"; the results are highly artistic.)

Secrets Of No 10's Garden Room Girls [BBC]

Related: What the Secretary Saw [Vanity fair]
Lillian Parks, 100, Dies; Had 'Backstairs' White House View [NY Times]

We can't say how well HerStoria magazine is doing, because the quarterly only launched in February. But the UK-based magazine is all kinds of awesome. Think of it as a cross between American Heritage and a gender studies journal: accessible history, but smart and unpatronizing. As they put it, the mag "explores the past to discover how the other half lived, telling the story of ordinary - and extraordinary - women. We'll bring you opinions about the fairer sex from across the centuries, and investigate the ways in which women responded and lived their lives." If, like me, you find the juxtaposition of the quaint "fairer sex" with the also kinda-quaintly earnest title curiously endearing, you're in serious luck.

Issue one includes stories on women pirates, "unexpected aspects of the lives and loves of Sappho and the women of ancient Greece" and Bess of Hardwick, as well as examinations of how women's history is taught in schools, interviews with historians, and "a women's history walk around Bloomsbury in London." In short, a history nerd's dream come true! I don't mind admitting that I've shelled out the admittedly steep £29 for a subscription, both because I'm tantalized by descriptions of the new issue's focus on Victorian traveler Isabella Bird, "life in the workhouse" and the applications of Darwin's Descent of Man for women, and because I want to support this magazine. Yes, the title is goofy, and no, it's not designed for serious historians. But it's smart and well done and aimed at thinking women who find history fun - and there's a lot right with that. And yes, I may accidentally put masking tape over the title.

HerStoria [Official Site]
HerStoria Magazine [BrandLady]
HERSTORIA Magazine [OUHistory]
New Women's History Magazine - HerStoria [TheFWord]

Although the terrible-but-somehow-compelling Becoming Jane claimed that the great love of Austen's life was James MacAvoy Tom Lefroy, now a literary historian, Dr Andrew Norman, says the real culprit was a clergyman named Dr Samuel Blackall. As the Telegraph puts it, "Few of Austen's letters between 1801 and 1804 survive, making corroboration of the relationship difficult." But Blackall's correspondence, together with Austen's work from the period and a little sleight-of-geograohgical-timeline, point towards a (possible!) romance.

It's long been thought that this same period saw an estrangement between Jane and her beloved sister Cassandra - and, quite obviously, it was over this clergyman. At any rate, this is what Norman speculates, largely because The Watsons, which Austen wrote around this time, features a love affair doomed by a sister with "no faith, no honour, no scruples, if she can promote her own advantage" and a poem from the period which, read in the right way, supports the theory. Given the hijinx of many of Austen's heroines, it seems taking the biographical approach too far is a slippery slope - but yes! By all means let this be a movie! We recommend Hugh Dancy for the clergyman, and we'd like to direct casting directors' attention to Scarlett and Natalie's unimpeachable record of playing rival sisters who look nothing alike in very poor period pieces.

Mystery Jane Austen Suitor Who Sparked Riff With Sister Named [Telegraph]

Despite having, according to legend, invented the cocktail, the female bartender has had a hard road. According to a WSJ article on the history of the profession, since the 19th century there have been laws on the books prohibiting women from working behind the bar. Post-war, even more legislation went into effect, including a Michigan prohibition that four female bartenders challenged (unsuccessfully) all the way to the Supreme Court. Female bartenders didn't become legal in California until 1971 - and then only because "a topless bar called Sail'er Inn...wanted to move some dancers behind the bar to mix drinks in dishabille." Indeed, the first wave of 1970s female bartenders were considered a profitable investment but not, as the article says, due to "skills in actually making drinks."

The rationale for excluding women was a combination of cronyism and paternalism. Men wanted the jobs; others didn't want women corrupted by the atmosphere. According to my boyfriend, his grandfather wouldn't let Grandma Minnie anywhere near the saloon he ran for local steelworkers; that the one time she came in she found him fox-trotting with a "floozie" to some hot jukebox jazz may have had a little something to do with it too.

Nowadays, although male bartenders still outnumber their female counterparts, it's largely an open playing field. I queried some of beer-slinging gals I know for their take. One career bartender, Betsy, asserted that "it used to be, like in the 70s, you had two kinds: the sexy girl who got big tips, and the bitch who kept order. Now, I feel like you don't need to play to that." Everyone said there are jerks who regard female bartenders as fair game - "but the flip side of that card is big tips, however philosophically problematic. Way more than male counterparts" - and no one I talked to felt that their sex was problematic in terms of physical stuff like throwing drunks out. "Although once I called for reinforcements on a rowdy night," says on Brooklyn woman. I also wanted to hear their takes on one bartender's assertion in the article that female bartenders employ "a nurturing nature not common to men in the business." "Oh yeah," replied one. "All those tender squeezings of limes." Said Betsy, "in one of the fancy new cocktail bars? Maybe sometimes women have an attention to detail...but whatever, I have ADD, so forget the generalizations, ok? And when it comes to pulling beers, who cares?"

Women Behind Bars [Wall Street Journal]

According to Reuters researchers using radar technology have come across a spot high on a hill, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, that appears to have "three chambers as deep as 20 meters under the rock." It is believed that these chambers, buried beneath an ancient temple to the Goddess Isis, may be the final resting place of both Cleopatra and her lover, Marc Antony. Researchers have recently uncovered coins bearing Cleopatra's name, as well as a mask bearing the likeness of Marc Antony, near the ancient temple.

Originally, archaeologists assumed that Cleopatra's burial site was submerged, due to Ancient Alexandra's decent into the sea. But lead researcher Kathleen Martinez of the Dominican Republic, believes the Queen may have felt safer outside of the city, making the rocky hills a perfect location: "She needed a place to be protected in the afterlife," says Martinez, "If she had used the other burial site, she would have disappeared forever."

Archaeologists Hunt For Cleopatra's Tomb [Reuters]