In her memoirs, Leni Riefenstahl—the German actress and filmmaker famous for her association with Hitler—describes her first and only meeting with her compatriot and colleague Marlene Dietrich: I was struck by her deep, husky voice, which sounded a bit vulgar and suggestive. Maybe she was a little tipsy. I heard her saying loudly, “Why does …
THIS IS HOW I FEEL….
ON A GOOD DAY: AND THIS IS HOW I FEEL ON A BAD ONE:
WOMEN OF THE FIFTIES REDUX: A MAD MEN ANTIDOTE My February Column at Bookslut
"One of the great up-sides of being the first of a kind," journalist Rachel Cooke writes in her chatty, informative, and inspirational book Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties, "was that guilt, at least as it pertained to working women, had not yet been invented. You looked at magazines for recipes and …
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The Scarlet Empress, The Iron Lady, and My Cab Driver
Since the phenomenon of women in power is still rather rare, inevitably we develop a fetishistic relationship to those exceptional women who do somehow manage to rise to the very top of the political ladder. We regard these women as at once bewitching and bewitched, and they arouse in us the tantalizing dread of being …
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Jenny McPhee 