Daniel Goldin joins us on What's Brewing Wisconsin to discuss the Boswell Book Club that is highlighting women's history. The three books are fiction and nonfiction about women in America who are not well known today.
Let’s Call Her Barbie – This is historical fiction about Ruth Handler, who not only developed Barbie but had a second career making prostheses for women post-breast cancer. She based the doll on a German bar toy – but then her chief engineer, who became a celebrity in the Hugh Hefner mode, started taking all the credit. This book sets the record straight.
When Women Ran Fifth Avenue. Retail for the 20th century was marketed to women but the key players were men. This is about three women who ran important retail chains and what happened to them.
Ex Fie, by Ursula Parrott. Parrott was a novelist and screenwriter. This book from the 1920s was more popular than The Great Gatsby and became the basis for an Academy Award-winning film, but the author died penniless, and the book is now obscure. It’s about the problems facing a woman going through divorce in the 1920s while still trying to live the roaring lifestyle.
