Excellent!
This book by Sian Evans is a must read if you're interested in what it was for women to work or travel on steamships. Following the careers of a few of the women who worked on these ships as well as celebrities who were passengers on them, we almost wish we could travel back in time and experience a historical voyage. There is much to learn here for anyone interested in writing a family history book that you can spice up with some research about the conditions of travel in the great steamship era, the 1890s through the World War II era.
When it came to accommodations, women and men employees were to lodge apart on board, when it came to women and children passengers traveling alone, male crew might keep an eye out for their safety, but it was female crew, stewardesses, who there for them, staving off sea sickness, even helping deliver babies.
In this book, you learn about the Unsinkable Violet Jessop who, in a career on ships of over four decades, survived three maritime disasters! One of them being the Lusitania. Another heroine of the seas was Edith Sowerbutt who among many other tasks, interviewed women who were traveling alone with the help of a translator.
You'll read about the people in steerage as well as the buyers traveling back and forth to Europe and the rich who were on board for adventures. Tallulah Bankhead, Thelma Furness and her twin Gloria Vanderbilt, and Spanish war journalist, Martha Gellhorn, and many more are mentioned. Ships like the Queen Mary, the Zeeland, the Aquitania, and the Lusitania... The health inspections and the card sharks and con artists.... Since shipboard romances took place, the blackmailers...
Although an easy and delightful read, I think some the information presented in Maiden Voyages is important and I've decided to do some excerpting over the next few weeks to give you a feel for the book and entice you to buy a copy since this is definitely a book for my own collection.
Quite an accomplishment for author Sina Evans, I've never come across anything like it.
C 2022 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy.
