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Dream (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973) is a thorough sociological and historical accounting of women’s roles in film from the silent era through the 1960s; Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), takes a psychoanalytic approach to the female characters and film tropes of the same period. Two period studies that attempt to assess the effects film had on young women are: Herbert Blumer and Philip M. Hauser, Movies, Delinquency and Crime (New York: Macmillan, 1933) and Henry James Forman, Our Movie Made Children (New York: Macmillian, 1935); Kate Simon’s memoir A Wider World (New York: Harper & Row, 1986) is one of many memoirs and stories of taking refuge, and plotting out a life, at the movies. As she writes, “The brightest, most informative school was the movies. We learned how tennis was played and golf, what a swimming pool was and what to wear if you ever got to drive a car…and…we learned about love, a very foreign country like maybe China and Connecticut.” Also: Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1988); Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1976); John Margolis and Emily Gwathmey, Ticket to Paradise: American Movie Theaters and How We Had Fun (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).

On New York:

Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low of the Last Hundred Years (New York: Random House, 1951); Hank O’Neill, Berenice Abbott: American Photographer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), on the premiere photographer of the city; Mary McCarthy, Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–1938 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992); Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995); James McCabe, Light and Shadows of New York (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1872); Dan Wakefield, New York in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Elizabeth Hawes, New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (New York: Knopf, 1993); Luc Sante, Low Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).

ON THE PRESS:

American journalism:

Frank Luther Mott, A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690–1940, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Single Blessedness, or the Single Ladies and Gentlemen Against the Slanders of the Pulpits, the Press and the Lecture Room (C. S. Francis and Co., 1852); Don C. Seitz, The James Gordon Bennetts: Father and Son (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1920); Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: JB Ford, 1868); Hans Bergmann, God in the Street, New York Writing from the Penny Press to Melville (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Paul H. Weaver, News and the Culture of Lying (New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1994). Godey’s Ladies Book, founded in 1830, became the premiere women’s magazine, the model for all others, throughout the nineteenth century. Stories, lectures, allegories, storiettes I used in research: “Woman” (1831), “An Old Maid” (1831), “Husband Hunters” (1832), “The Bachelor’s Dream” (1832), “Mary, the Prude” (1832), “Female Accomplishments” (1835), “Female Education” (1835), “Women at Twenty-one” (1835). Books on Godey’s include: Ruth Finley, The Lady of Godey’s, Sara Josepha Hale (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931). Also, on magazines: Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, reprinted and updated, 1938–68).

CHAPTER 1: THE CLASSICAL SPINSTER

Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Women and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), a wonderful study of women in England and their attempts to live communally in the mid to late nineteenth century; Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). Working from four famous novels the author charts a fascinating and original