Before Hollywood made her a film legend, in 1926 Mae West served a jail sentence for corrupting the morals of youth with her play Sex. Bessie Smith, Queen of the Blues, sang “I’m a good woman and I can get plenty men.” But her love of men didn’t stop her from sleeping with the chorus girls in her 1920s traveling shows. And Victoria Woodhull, an ex-prostitute and fortuneteller of the 1870s, didn’t let her dark reputation prevent her from standing for election as America’s first woman President – on a platform of free love, female orgasm, women’s suffrage and communism.
Welcome to the world of Bad Girls, a collection of biographies about the sex and love lives of notorious women in history. Writer Joyce Hanson has spent three years, including a six-month research foray in the British Library, investigating 10 women whose rebellious behavior was outrageously ahead of its time.
Joyce Hanson is a journalist whose work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, New City and the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers and magazines in Chicago, New York and Pennsylvania. She also has participated in fiction writing workshops in New York and published her work on www.pisalou.com, an online e-zine. Bad Girls is her first book project.
This spring in Chicago, the writer will read and discuss selections from her book-in-progress at the following events:
Friday, April 18, 8 p.m., The Last Kiss Café & Art Gallery, 6326 N. Clark, Chicago, 773-381-5480
Mae West, Sex Goddess of the Silver Screen
Bessie Smith, Queen of the Blues
Saturday, June 7 (Printers Row Book Fair weekend), 8 p.m., Echo Gallery, “Chicago’s Most Provocative Gallery,” 1529 W. Chicago, 312-666-0858
Victoria Woodhull, Free-Loving Spiritualist & Candidate for U.S. President
Bessie Smith, Queen of the Blues
For more information, call Joyce Hanson at 312-593-2926, or e-mail her at joyce_e_hanson@hotmail.com.