Remarkable Women Of San Diego

San Diego enjoys a diverse legacy of formidable female leaders. Ellen Browning Scripps financed and established the groundbreaking Scripps Oceanography Institute. In 1927, Belle Benchley became the nation's first female zoo director and for nearly thirty years pioneered new forms of exhibition and developed the world-class San Diego Zoo. Guatemalan activist and advocate Luisa Moreno established the United Fish Cannery Workers Union to protect the rights of workers during World War II. Ruth Alexander set new altitude records for light planes at the peak of the city's aviation boom. Bertha Pendleton became the first female and first African American San Diego school superintendent in 1993. Authors Hannah Cohen and Gloria Harris document these and many more stories of extraordinary local women.

San Diego enjoys a diverse legacy of formidable female leaders. Ellen Browning Scripps financed and established the groundbreaking Scripps Oceanography Institute. In 1927, Belle Benchley became the nation's first female zoo director and for nearly thirty years pioneered new forms of exhibition and developed the world-class San Diego Zoo. Guatemalan activist and advocate Luisa Moreno established the United Fish Cannery Workers Union to protect the rights of workers during World War II. Ruth Alexander set new altitude records for light planes at the peak of the city's aviation boom. Bertha Pendleton became the first female and first African American San Diego school superintendent in 1993. Authors Hannah Cohen and Gloria Harris document these and many more stories of extraordinary local women.

Old Lyme's illustrious history owes much to innovative women. Suffragist Katharine Ludington was co-founder of the League of Women Voters. In the 1830s, Phoebe Griffin Noyes started a school for art and general subjects. At the turn of the twentieth century, Florence Griswold welcomed the artists of the Lyme Art Colony by creating the "Birthplace of American Impressionism." By World War II, Teddy Kenyon had made her mark as a test pilot. Old Lyme's artistic tradition was continued by Elisabeth Gordon Chandler, who founded the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in 1976. Authors Michaelle Pearson and Jim Lampos honor the women whose triumphs made Old Lyme the popular summer resort and artists' colony it is today.

Remarkable Women: Perspectives on Female Talent Development is the first book to consolidate and expand existing knowledge about highly capable women and the internal and external forces that lead them to extraordinary adult accomplishment. The collected studies include women from a wide variety of backgrounds and talent domains whose paths to exceptional achievement illuminate the nature of female talent development and provide models to help more women fulfill their promise in adulthood.

Woman Lawyer tells the story of Clara Foltz, the first woman admitted to the California Bar. Famous in her time as a jury lawyer, public intellectual, leader of the women's movement, inventor of the role of public defender, and legal reformer, Foltz has been largely forgotten until recently. Woman Lawyer not only recreates her eventful life, but also casts new light on the turbulent history and politics of the late nineteenth century and the many links binding the women's rights movement with other reform movements.

What we now call "the good life" first appeared in California during the 1930s. Motels, home trailers, drive-ins, barbecues, beach life and surfing, sports from polo and tennis and golf to mountain climbing and skiing, "sportswear" (a word coined at the time), and sun suits were all a part of the good life--perhaps California's most distinctive influence of the 1930s. In The Dream Endures, Kevin Starr shows how the good life prospered in California--in pursuits such as film, fiction, leisure, and architecture--and helped to define American culture and society then and for years to come. Starr previously chronicled how Californians absorbed the thousand natural shocks of the Great Depression--unemployment, strikes, Communist agitation, reactionary conspiracies--in Endangered Dreams, the fourth volume of his classic history of California. In The Dream Endures, Starr reveals the other side of the picture, examining the newly important places where the good life flourished, like Los Angeles (where Hollywood lived), Palm Springs (where Hollywood vacationed), San Diego (where the Navy went), the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (where Einstein went and changed his view of the universe), and college towns like Berkeley. We read about the rich urban life of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in newly important communities like Carmel and San Simeon, the home of William Randolph Hearst, where, each Thursday afternoon, automobiles packed with Hollywood celebrities would arrive from Southern California for the long weekend at Hearst Castle. The 1930s were the heyday of the Hollywood studios, and Starr brilliantly captures Hollywood films and the society that surrounded the studios. Starr offers an astute discussion of the European refugees who arrived in Hollywood during the period: prominent European film actors and artists and the creative refugees who were drawn to Hollywood and Southern California in these years--Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Man Ray, Bertolt Brecht, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, and Franz Werfel. Starr gives a fascinating account of how many of them attempted to recreate their European world in California and how others, like Samuel Goldwyn, provided stories and dreams for their adopted nation. Starr reserves his greatest attention and most memorable writing for San Francisco. For Starr, despite the city's beauty and commercial importance, San Francisco's most important achievement was the sense of well-being it conferred on its citizens. It was a city that "magically belonged to everyone." Whether discussing photographers like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, "hard-boiled fiction" writers, or the new breed of female star--Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, and the improbable Mae West--The Dream Endures is a brilliant social and cultural history--in many ways the most far-reaching and important of Starr's California books.

Cleopatra is renowned as one of the most famous female leaders in all of history, but often her importance as the Macedonian dynasty’s last queen is obscured by her reputation for a lavish life and her tumultuous, high-profile romances with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Countless books, movies, plays, and operas have highlighted the drama and downplayed her keen political acumen and dedication to increasing Egypt’s power. Cleopatra, who began ruling Egypt when she was only eighteen years old, was a witty, stimulating conversationalist who was able to use her charm and intelligence for the good of her country.