In 1942, the directors of the New York Stock Exchange met to discuss a problem. The exchange―its air charged with testosterone, its floor scuffed by the frantic paces of men racing one another for shares of the American dream―was off-limits to women. This, it was agreed, was how it should be. However, it had recently become public knowledge that one of New York’s most prolific and respected financial writers, S. F. Porter, was a woman. If Porter trained her eye on the all-male stock exchange, the NYSE might find itself the subject of some unwanted controversy during the electrified “Rosie the Riveter” days of World War II. But should women really be allowed into the stock exchange? The board finally saw its way around the dilemma and voted on a resolution: “Sylvia is one of the boys. We hereby award her honorary pants.” Sylvia Porter (1913–1991) was the nation’s first personal finance columnist and one of the most admired women of the twentieth century. In Sylvia Porter: America’s Original Personal Finance Columnist, Lucht traces Porter’s professional trajectory, identifying her career strategies and exploring the role of gender in her creation of a once-unique, now-ubiquitous form of journalism. A pioneer for both male and female journalists, Porter established a genre of newspaper writing that would last into the twenty-first century while carving a space for women in what had been an almost exclusively male field. She began as an oddity―a woman writing about finance during the Great Depression―and rose to become a nationally recognized expert, revered by middle-class readers and consulted by presidents. As the first biography of Sylvia Porter, this book makes an important contribution to the history of women and the media.

Sylvia Porter: America's Original Personal Finance Columnist (New York State Series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Lucht, Tracy

Community & Culture

Syracuse University Press

Mad Men and Working Women: Feminist Perspectives on Historical Power, Resistance, and Otherness

This book offers interpretive and contextual tools to read the AMC television series Mad Men, providing a much-needed historical explanation and exposition regarding the status of women in an era that has been painted as pre- or non-feminist. In chapters aimed at helping readers understand women's lives in the 1960s, Mad Men is used as a springboard to explore and discover alternative ways of seeing women. Offering more than a discussion of the show itself, the book offers historical insight for thinking about serious issues that «modern» working women continue to face today: balancing their work and personal lives, competing with other women, and controlling their own bodies and reproductive choices. Rather than critiquing the show for portraying women as victims, the book shows subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) ways that feminism functioned in an era when women were supposedly caught between the «waves» of the women's movement but when, the authors argue, they functioned nonetheless as empowered individuals. By doing so, it provides historical context and analysis that complicates traditional interpretations by (1) exploring historical constructions of women's work; (2) unpacking feminist and non-feminist discourses surrounding that work; (3) identifying modes of resistance; and (4) revisiting forgotten work coded as feminine.

Humor & Entertainment

Engstrom, Erika

Marcellus, Jane

Voss, Kimberly Wilmot

Television

Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

This book was featured as one of thirty-four Epic Feminist Books in Teen Vogue magazine. This book offers interpretive and contextual tools to read the AMC television series Mad Men, providing a much-needed historical explanation and exposition regarding the status of women in an era that has been painted as pre- or non-feminist. In chapters aimed at helping readers understand women’s lives in the 1960s, Mad Men is used as a springboard to explore and discover alternative ways of seeing women. Offering more than a discussion of the show itself, the book offers historical insight for thinking about serious issues that «modern» working women continue to face today: balancing their work and personal lives, competing with other women, and controlling their own bodies and reproductive choices. Rather than critiquing the show for portraying women as victims, the book shows subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) ways that feminism functioned in an era when women were supposedly caught between the «waves» of the women’s movement but when, the authors argue, they functioned nonetheless as empowered individuals. By doing so, it provides historical context and analysis that complicates traditional interpretations by (1) exploring historical constructions of women’s work; (2) unpacking feminist and non-feminist discourses surrounding that work; (3) identifying modes of resistance; and (4) revisiting forgotten work coded as feminine.

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Books by Lucht, Tracy