Monday November 11, 2024
7pm ET
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In this illustrated talk, Feral House editor Christina Ward will upend what mainstream history tells us about women’s lives during the early 1900s, bringing forward two extraordinary women who lived their lives with fearless gusto. Violet McNeal and Helen Cromwell exemplify the tension between the dominant elite, white, Protestant culture and the transgressive urge to break free of societal norms. In exploring their lives and choices, Ward recasts these women as both extraordinary and ordinary, while placing them in the canon of female anti-heroes. Violet McNeal was a teenage patent-medicine conwoman and carny who earned millions of dollars swindling (mostly) men with her skills… all while strung out on opiates. Helen Cromwell found a pathway to independence through sex work, and documented her adventures with the famous, the infamous, and everyone in-between. Yet there is more to Helen and Violet’s stories. And there is more to be discovered about women who rejected the rules and lived on the margins. Ward will discuss Violet and Helen’s respective lives and what it tells us about the darker side of American culture in the early twentieth century. Attendees will also receive a PDF of Carny-Patent Medicine Pitch slang as used in the early 1900s.

Christina Ward is a cultural explorer and excavator. Her work in writing and publishing sees her working with emerging authors and bringing forgotten voices back to modern readers. She is one-half of the two-person team running Feral House / Process publishing, an internationally acclaimed independent publisher founded by Adam Parfrey in 1989. She loves every single thing about books. Ward is also the author of Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat—An American History, American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam, Bananas, and Jell-O and Preservation: The Art & Science of Canning, Fermentation, and Dehydration.