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This book grew out of my scholarly interest in the lives of women in the urban West. With one side of my family rooted in Nebraska, the other side in Texas, and as a second-generation Angeleno, I have long been fascinated with how women survived, physically, emotionally, and particularly economically, in the American West. Many of our family stories revolve around the struggles my grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and great-great-grandmothers faced in providing for themselves and their families. Shortly after advancing to candidacy at the University of Utah, I thus suggested women’s work in the urban West as a possible dissertation topic to my graduate committee. They gave me their blessing. But which city to study? Relatively little had been written about the urban West, and even less on women in western cities. Just about any location would have proved a rich field for study. It was during a holiday break, while on a visit to my family in Southern California, that I hit upon the idea of studying Los Angeles. Like most Angelenos, even though I had been born and raised in the area, I knew little about its history prior to World War II, save the stories my father and grandfather had told me. More important, Los Angeles and the surrounding area also provided a case study with racial diversity, tumultuous labor relations, and complex politics. These dynamics added to my study of gender to make for an exceptionally rich and complex story about the many ways such variables can impact daily life. It is my hope that other scholars and students will pick up where I have left off, and reconsider the role of gender in shaping America’s cities, particularly those west of the Mississippi River. We now know a great deal about women’s roles in the historical development of East Coast cities like New York. But only now is a picture of their western counterparts—in Denver, in San Antonio, in Seattle, and, yes, in Los Angeles—beginning to emerge. Further research may create a picture of the many roles played by women in the western United States and their vast contributions to regional history. P R E FAC E ...

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