1920s
A01=Althea McDowell Altemus
Author_Althea McDowell Altemus
bachelor playboy
Category=DNC
chicago edison
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
great gatsby
high society
high-profile businessmen
influence
international harvester
italianate mansion
james deering
jazz age america
lavish estate parties
memoirs
miami
money
movie stars
new york
power
prohibition era
roaring twenties
samuel insull
secretary
self-aware style
sex
social problems
struggling single mother
us history
vizcaya
wealth
witty
womens issues
working woman
Product details
- ISBN 9780226423593
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 15 x 22mm
- Publication Date: 22 Nov 2016
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Sharp, resourceful, and with a style all her own, Althea Altemus embodied the spirit of the independent working woman of the Jazz Age. In her memoir, Big Bosses, she vividly recounts her life as a secretary for prominent (but thinly disguised) employers in Chicago, Miami, and New York during the late teens and 1920s. Alongside her we rub elbows with movie stars, artists, and high-profile businessmen, and experience lavish estate parties that routinely defied the laws of Prohibition. Beginning with her employment as a private secretary to James Deering of International Harvester, whom she describes as "probably the world's oldest and wealthiest bachelor playboy," Altemus tells us much about high society during the time, taking us inside Deering's glamorous Miami estate, Vizcaya, an Italianate mansion worthy of Gatsby himself. Later, we meet her other notable employers, including Samuel Insull, president of Chicago Edison; New York banker S. W. Straus; and real estate developer Fred F. French.
We cinch up our trenchcoats and head out sleuthing in Chicago, hired by the wife of a big boss to find out how he spends his evenings (with, it turns out, a mistress hidden in an apartment within his office, no less). Altemus was also a struggling single mother, a fact she had to keep secret from her employers, and she reveals the difficulties of being a working woman at the time through glimpses into women's apartments, their friendships, and the dangers sexual and otherwise that she and others faced. Throughout, Altemus entertains with a tart and self-aware voice that combines the knowledge of an insider with the wit and clarity of someone on the fringe. Anchored by extensive annotation and an afterword from historian Robin F. Bachin, which contextualizes Altemus's narrative, Big Bosses provides a one-of-a-kind peek inside the excitement, extravagances, and the challenges of being a working woman roaring through the '20s.
Althea McDowell Altemus (1885 1965) was born into a family of factory workers in Woodstock, Illinois. She was married in 1910 and divorced in 1917, prompting her to work as a secretary in the years that followed. Robin F. Bachin is the Charlton W. Tebeau Associate Professor of History and assistant provost for civic and community engagement at the University of Miami. She is the author of Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
