Books like The Sewing Circle by Axel Madsen

A biographical exploration of early Hollywood's lesbian stars, featuring the lives and careers of Nazimova, Dietrich, Bankhead, and Garbo as celebrated motion‑picture actresses in the United States.

Swimming Underground is Mary Woronov's candid account of her years spent in the Factory with Andy Warhol. It is not the usual rose-colored story of America's legendary icon. This is the startling flip side of that icon, where drugs, perverse sex, and distorted reality were the norm.

Shirley Temple’s radiant optimism lit up 1930s America, offering hope amid the Great Depression and leaving a lasting imprint on Hollywood and popular culture.

This photo-illustrated history tells how women fought for and won the right to vote in the United States. The book starts with basic history on the struggle for women's rights, other groups' battles for the vote, and background on the 19th-century women's suffrage movement before focusing on the ultimately successful 20th-century efforts to enfranchise women. It details and illustrates the political lobbying and public protests as well as the backlash against these efforts, including intimidation, imprisonment, hunger strikes, and forced feeding of prisoners. Carrying cloth banners and with determined spirits, suffragists marched, picketed, and paraded tirelessly until they were heard and their rights were inscribed into the Constitution.

A biographical examination of prominent lesbian actresses in American cinema.

Cheryl Crane recounts her turbulent life as the daughter of Hollywood icon Lana Turner—from a childhood marked by abuse and scandal, through personal struggles, to a successful business career and eventual reconciliation with her mother.

"Film noir was the dark side of the movies' happily-ever-after mythology. Sinister and sexy, it forged a new icon: the tough, independent, take-no-guff dame. Determined, desirable, dangerous when cornered, she could handle trouble - or deal out some of her own.". "If you thought these women were something special onscreen, wait till you meet the genuine articles. In Dark City Dames, acclaimed film historian Eddie Muller profiles six women who made a lasting impression in this cinematic terrain - from veteran "bad girls" Audrey Totter, Marie Windsor and Jane Greer to unexpected genre fixtures Evelyn Keyes, Coleen Gray and Ann Savage. The book surveys the lives of these formidable women during the height of their careers circa 1950, as they balanced love and career, struggled against typecasting, and sought fulfillment in a ruthless business. Their personal stories - teeming with larger-than-life characters like Howard Hughes, L. B. Mayer, Robert Mitchum, Otto Preminger and John Huston - offer an illuminating counterpoint to their movies, such as Out of the Past, Detour, The Lady in the Lake, and The Killing. Then Dark City Dames revisits each one of these women today, fifty years on, to witness their hard-won - and triumphant - survival. On every page their own voices ring through, reflecting on their lives with as much passion, pain, intelligence, energy and humor as any movie script."--BOOK JACKET.