Second paragraph of third chapter:
Marjorie rose with a most winning smile to greet—Mrs. Brown!
I dug this 1892 book out of the internets after getting the impression from Simon Guerrier’s biography of David Whitaker that it was the inspiration for the 1969-1971 BBC series Take Three Girls. In fact I was completely wrong, the book that I am writing up here is set in Chicago, while the TV show, set in London, was really inspired by another book of the same title by Ethel F. Heddle, also set in London and published three years after the Chicago one, in 1896. But I have my own interests in fin-de-siecle America and in modern sculpture, so I don’t regret reading this one.
It’s the story of three young women architects involved with preparing the World’s Columbian Exposition, aka the Chicago World’s Fair, in 1893 – and specifically with preparing the Woman’s Building, a really interesting project designed, managed and implemented entirely by women, showcasing women’s achievements in the arts in a way that seems strangely twenty-first century, at a time when only two states in the USA allowed women to vote. (New Zealand and Colorado both extended the vote to women in 1893.)
The book is probably mostly by Laura Hayes, who as well as being a trainee architect was the secretary of Bertha Palmer, the Chicago socialite who was the prime mover behind the initiative to have a Woman’s Building in the first place (at least her name is given as the copyright holder). Enid Yandell, who gets top billing on the title page, became a very well-known sculptor whose career started with the Chicago Exposition. The third credited author, Jean Loughborough, was another architect who designed the Arkansas building for the Fair.
The book is a brief and warm account of apartment life for young professional women in a city which was just getting used to that concept. It is beautifully illustrated – eight illustrators are credited and I suspect that the authors contributed some pictures as well; there’s something to look at on every page. What got me was the tremendous sense of optimism; America and the world as a whole were opening up, and the three young women are convinced that the future will be better than the past. You can get it for free off the internet here and here.
(And I think every one of the short chapters passes the Bechdel test.)
