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Women's History Review

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Mojave mirages: gender and performance in Las Vegas

Joanne L. Goodwin
a a

University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA

Available online: 20 Dec 2006

To cite this article: Joanne L. Goodwin (2002): Mojave mirages: gender and performance in Las Vegas, Women's History Review, 11:1, 115-132 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612020200200313

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Womens History Review, Volume 11, Number 1, 2002

Mojave Mirages: gender and performance in Las Vegas

JOANNE L. GOODWIN University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA

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ABSTRACT The article explores the permeable boundaries between image, perception, experience, and realities through a series of personal observations on gender and performance in Las Vegas. The authors observations on this resort destination in the middle of the Mojave Desert are mingled with the narratives of women who came to the area during and after World War II. Lucrative jobs in wartime industries followed by the post-war tourist economy gave women opportunities to earn more money than they could back home. A work in progress, the article explores why women came to Las Vegas and stayed and how they, like many visitors to the city, play out their fantasies in its public theater.

People around the world know Las Vegas for its famous strip and the luxury hotel-casinos that line both sides of old Highway 91. Millions of tourists flock to these properties every year to partake in the gaming industrys spectacle of fantasy, consumption, and leisure. Illusionists, magicians, and performers of all types entertain the visitors. The tourists enact their own performances of wealth, sexuality, and gender as they move within and between the monumental theme-styled casinos. They leave their money behind, unwittingly helping casino owners amass remarkable fortunes as well as supporting the states schools, parks, and other services. In the publics imagination, Las Vegas is the set upon which to take a new identity, to relax, to dream. Visitors, with their vision impaired by the lights and illusions, often ask Las Vegans, Does anyone really live in Las Vegas? For those of us who do live here, Las Vegas means many different things. It is the fantasy state-ofmind that the tourist industry creates and recreates. It is an oddly shaped political entity that covers the original section of the city as well as newer master-planned communities. To those who traveled through this part of the Mojave Desert before gamblers attracted the worlds attention, it was the meadows, an oasis created by the valleys springs and the place used by
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Paiute Indians, Spanish explorers, Mormon missionaries, and pioneers to take water and to rest. Today, when people say Las Vegas, they refer to the red desert basin ringed by mountains and situated on the eastern edge of the Mojave Desert, which in fact comprises several cities and unincorporated areas of Clark County. Despite the differences in our images and their meanings, the Las Vegas valley has attracted people chasing jobs as well as those chasing dreams for decades.[1] This article explores the permeable boundaries between image, perception, experience, and realities through a series of personal observations on gender and performance in Las Vegas. My own observations on this place are mingled with the narratives of women who came to the area during and after World War II. Lucrative jobs in wartime industries followed by the post-war tourist economy brought women and men to Las Vegas during the 1940s and 1950s. Women, whether single or with families, had opportunities to earn more money than they could back home. They worked as cashiers, clerks, waitresses, and housekeepers. At the same time, the gambling and entertainment industries literally and figuratively used womens bodies as attractions in the showrooms and as advertising for the resort city. The choices made by these women offer a new slant on womens lives during an era previously referred to as the Age of Cold War Domesticity in a place that we know as Sin City.[2] Las Vegass self-appropriated title as the entertainment capital of the world makes it essential that I clarify my use of the term performance. My definition begins with the premise that we understand ourselves and our communities through signs, symbols and images. Our perception and interpretation of those images constitutes that which we share or contest with one another. Performance in that context consists of interactions. An individual conceives of and enacts gender and sexuality, but those ideas and actions become dynamic when another responds to them. The exchange between actor and observer becomes the site upon which shared or contested meanings compete and create our cultural reference points. Lastly, this article incorporates a literal definition of performance as enacted in the lived experience of women workers. This usage to perform to the best of ones ability, resources and opportunities includes the material realities of women who came to Las Vegas during or shortly after World War II.[3] This article is a work in progress. It presents my thoughts along the way rather than my findings from an empirical project. As such, the ideas are largely hypothetical, based as they are on personal recollections and others memories. I have attempted to avoid the hackneyed caricatures of women and Las Vegas and to examine, instead, the signs, symbols and images that visitors bring to the city and play out in its public theater.

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Illusions: things are not as they appear Most of what the general public knows about Las Vegas comes out of the imagination of writers who use the city as a canvas for their own interpretations of twentieth-century life. During the 1940s and 1950s, casino publicists and city business interests shaped the fantasies that we identify with Las Vegas today: the last frontier, resort fun in the sun, entertainment capital of the world, and a vacation with something for everyone. City boosters changed the public relations spin as frequently as casino owners changed their properties faades. The illusion continues upon arrival to the city today. Casinos bring the worlds treasures to the Mojave Desert. Visitors may visit Paris, New York, Venice, Bellagio, and the obelisk of Luxor all in one American city. I dont need to go to New York City now, residents and visitors have been heard to say. In a manner similar to the magic cape in a childs fairy tale, the fantastic reinterpretations of the worlds cultural landmarks seduce visitors with an illusion that they happily embrace. During my first year in Las Vegas, I found it curious that a significant portion of showroom entertainment included illusion, magic or impersonation. The most popular long-running show (and the most expensive ticket) was that of two illusionists who, I am told, made a lion disappear on stage. Magicians and character impersonators have long-term engagements in casino showrooms. The popularity of this genre surprised me, having lived in areas with diverse cultural venues, theater, and live music performances. Within months of my arrival, I took my mother to a show that boasted the best impersonators of entertainment personalities. They were in fact remarkably good impersonators of film or music celebrities (Judy Garland, Madonna, Elvis, and Michael Jackson), but I wondered why such a talent would be content to copy. I have since revised my thinking. It is not a matter of authenticity or originality. The performers have talent and have found reasonable jobs. The popularity of illusionist entertainment reflects the appeal of Las Vegas itself. It creates the context for impossible possibilities and extraordinary occurrences. It offers the visitor the chance to step out of the commonplace and step into the spectacle. Blurring the boundaries between perception and reality became one of the great attractions of Las Vegas in the years between 1945 and 1965 as stage performers entered the casinos after their shows to mix and gamble with the guests. Stories of Frank Sinatra and other Rat Pack members playing and dealing cards elbow to elbow with customers are legendary. Not only could the tourist-gamblers win a fortune for a lifetime, but also they might gamble alongside the rich, the famous, and the beautiful. Women who worked as dancers at some properties were contractually obligated to blur the boundaries. Their contracts required that they mix with the public in

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between the shows. As one dancer recounted in her oral history, the owners wanted them to dress up the casino and mingle with the customers:
They want to see pretty girls hanging around the hotel. They want to see pretty faces. You dont have to talk to anybody, if you dont want to. You certainly dont have to take any guff off of anybody. Theres security guards all over there. But you do have to get dressed and go out there and sit in the bar ... they just wanted pretty girls to wander around.[4]

The illusion of availability, cultivated in the showroom performances particularly by showgirls, moved out of the virtual realm of entertainment into the physical realm of the hotel-casino with the mixing rules. I experienced another version of the look but dont touch illusion at a second show of character impersonators. This show, Le Cage, not only featured performers pretending to be famous entertainers, but it had the added dimension of an all-male cast. In New York City, we called this form of entertainment drag shows. Men impersonated women by enacting their own ideas about female characteristics. Unlike the target audience in New York City, the casino showroom production played to a general audience, neither avant garde nor gay. In Las Vegas, anyone could buy a ticket and take a chance. I wasnt particularly interested in the shows genre, but I did find the long engagements of these shows intriguing. They were popular, like the magicians and other illusionists. On the pretense of conducting cultural research, I went with a few loyal and curious friends. The research took a dramatic turn, at least within my mind, as we entered the showroom and found it filling up rapidly with men in ten-gallon hats. The National Finals Rodeo was in town and those rodeo fans had bought their tickets. I wondered if they knew what they would see. Would they throw things at the stage? Would they leave the showroom in a protest of affronted masculinity? These questions played in my mind as I took my seat at the too small table reserved for guests. The dramatic potential that I anticipated remained only in my mind, however, as the show began. I imagine that the rodeo patrons wondered who was what. That was one of the attractions of the show, after all. A dancers awkwardness in high heels provided one of the few transgender signs. An exaggerated parody in another act, a remnant from burlesque, provided another. My scrutiny for signs of a concealed male body in the female persona rapidly ended as I fell into the theater of the piece. I imagine the cowboys did too. This appreciative reception might not happen in Abilene or Cheyenne, but anything goes in Las Vegas. The fantastic is expected here. Yes, the local rodeo back home would be an unlikely forum for the cross-dressing actors of Le Cage, but while in Las Vegas, they enjoyed what Las Vegas offered. A different aspect of illusion and performance emerges from accounts of African-American performers and workers in the years before integration.
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Dozens of stories about de facto segregation share the same details; only the individual actors change. African-American entertainers, prohibited from staying or eating in the same hotels in which they performed, found accommodation in boarding houses in the predominately black West Side of Las Vegas. Similarly, the service workers of the hotel-casinos during the 1940s and 1950s, who were predominately African-American, worked in the invisible part of the hotel, the part referred to as the back of the house. One woman who came to Las Vegas in 1953 and began to work in housekeeping described the social relations between blacks and whites during the 1950s as similar to the South:
It was like an understood thing. You knew what you were supposed to do. You were not allowed in there [casinos]. ... When you got through working, you headed right on back over here [the West Side]. You were only allowed there for washing dishes and making beds, whatever your job was and then you came on back over here where you belonged, they thought. ... You didnt go down there and go into those casinos or do anything, so we just came on back over here and had our fun over here.[5]

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The hotel-casinos maintained the appearances of a smooth tourist operation, organized to meet their visitors every need from entertainment to housekeeping. By doing so, they obscured race relations in cold war Las Vegas and maintained separate communities and separate lives. Performance in Everyday Life This city invites performance from its visitors. It is, after all, a city of fantastic fabrications, a tourist destination that capitalizes on dreams of wealth, leisure, indulgence, sex, and abundance. These acts make Las Vegas unique to and emblematic of the American culture; unique because this is the place where it all exists. Other places have gambling, showroom entertainment, or fabulous shopping, but Las Vegas brings it together. Tourists come to Las Vegas to submerge themselves in their fantasies and to act them out upon the streets and casino floors. They come to see the spectacle, perhaps unaware of their own role in it. Within a few months of moving to Las Vegas, I saw my first street performance. I was rushing to meet out-of-town guests on the Las Vegas strip when, suddenly, a throng of people came down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. I stepped back to avoid them and became an observer for an instant. At that moment, a bride and groom in full wedding attire burst past as part of the crowd. The brides long formal train, beaded bodice and net veil, as well as the grooms tuxedo, no longer conveyed the sense of perfection intended for the chapel. The bride had exchanged her heels for tennis shoes. The groom perspired heavily from his exertions. Huffing and
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puffing, stomping and sweating, they merged with the crowd on the boulevard. I looked for signs of the performance artist, the cameras or artistic entourage, or the social critique of marriage in Sin City with its multifaceted possibilities. None existed. I had definitely seen my first performance art in the entertainment capital, but it was one in which the actors remained entirely oblivious to their audience. A second memorable performance occurred during another trip to the strip with out-of-town company. My guest wanted to play roulette so we strolled through the newest mega-resort at the time, one designed to attract the truly wealthy as well as the wannabes. We stopped near a table, but the minimum bid was too high, so we watched the players for a while. Some players sprinkled their chips liberally over the numbers before the dealer began to spin the wheel and drop the little silver ball that would make or break that round of play. My attention fell upon a stunning couple, expensively dressed, coifed and practiced in their every move. In another setting, words like gracious or mannered might describe the two, but on the casino floor, I saw them as an updated version of film stars in a European casino. They played their parts elegantly, unlike others around the gaming tables in tee shirts and sneakers. They had several towers of chips in front of them. I do mean towers. Still fresh from graduate school and an annual salary that was approximately the cost of the womans necklace, I wondered about the money already invested by them in this game. She bet what I estimated to be a graduate students salary for a month one large and one medium chip tower. The wheel turned again as her money rode on two numbers, only two out of so many possibilities. She must be a pro to take such risks, I thought, as the ball found its notch on the wheel. Twentythree the dealer called as he swept all the losing bets aside, to be counted and stacked for future play. All the bets, including that of the gambling goddess, swept aside and credited to the house. I gasped at her loss. My eyes turned rapidly toward her to witness her expression. But she showed none. No pain. No surprise. No disappointment creased her face. She and her partner, who also lost that round, continued to smile and talk pleasantly with one another. The strangeness of that scene overtook me. What did it mean to them to lose so much, yet appear to care so little? What did it mean to enjoy that much risk with such apparent lack of regard for their loss? What did they intend to convey with their placid demeanors? Although I will never know what they thought of that evening, I felt comfortable with my own assessment. The gorgeous couple wanted me to see that they not only possessed wealth sufficient to play, but wealth sufficient to lose badly and not care. Tourists are not alone in performing their ideas of gender and class. They just do it with such self-conscious flair. Residents also engage in the

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small daily acts that together express their own identity. Men with men, women with women, men and women, old or young act out their ideas of gender in public and private places. They assert, assuage, persuade, manipulate, or empower themselves through their actions, their costume, and the meanings they attach to them. I have a favorite gender persona that I have named hyper-femme. The style is characterized by its exaggeration of form: big hair, elaborate makeup, highly decorated nails, and back-breaking high-heeled shoes. Sequins are a vital element, whether they adorn sweatshirts, leather coats, or evening attire. Although the style is not indigenous to Las Vegas, hyper-femme women feel comfortable in this city of artifice. One can find variations of the hyper-femme in every income group, but the majority that I see at the airport, grocery store, casinos, or Cineplex do not let discretionary income influence or restrain their enthusiasm. In fact, the hyper-femme outfits herself as if to scream, Honey, I just love being a girl. Ive given considerable thought to this particular persona. If a hyper-femme and I were stuck in an elevator together, I expect that we would have the same question about each other: why would a woman choose to look like that? I have concluded that at least in the area of dress and their performance of gender, the hyper-femme and the female impersonator have more in common with each other than with me. Performing Gender in Post-war Las Vegas
Mama thinks Im living in a convent, a secluded little convent, in the southern part of France. Mama doesnt even have an inkling that Im working in a nightclub in a lacey pair of pants. (Sally Bowles, Cabaret)

The character of American-born Sally Bowles in Cabaret describes a predicament shared by her countrywomen throughout the twentieth century. Bowles contrasts the conventional image of a virtuous life expected of her with the reality of her modern life as a dancer in a 1930s German cabaret. Sally Bowles did not go to the German cabaret to break conventions. She went for the prospects of a well-paying job and adventure. Jobs outside the margins of respectability often provide women with wages that would be unimaginable in traditional fields of employment. The lounges, showrooms, and casino floors of post-war Las Vegas held similar attractions. Las Vegas, more than any other American city except Hollywood, has used the female body to shape its identity. The casinos public relations offices, entertainment venues, and the promotion of every sort of indulgence trained the American and international public to think girls, girls, girls when they imagined Las Vegas. Legalized prostitution in Nevada helped to promote the sexualized image, even though Las Vegas and Clark County officially prohibit prostitution. The trailer-housed brothels that gave Sin City
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a part of its fame exist in remote areas of the state. More important, brothel prostitution has been outrun in popularity and profits by virtual sex venues such as stripper bars, gentlemens clubs, and cyber-sex, all of which provide the fantasy without the risk of sexually transmitted disease. Womens bodies are most visibly appropriated in sex work, but that is not unique to Las Vegas.[6] For over thirty years, feminists have discussed and debated the commercialization of womens bodies throughout the culture, in the media, and in the marketplace. However, Las Vegas is unique in the carefully constructed image of women used historically to promote the area as a tourist destination. The remainder of this article offers some preliminary observations on the evolution of the image, what it meant to women who worked in Las Vegas, and what it symbolized to Americans who flocked to the newest post-war vacation destination.

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Figure 1. Last Frontier Hotel and Casino dancing girls, 1945. Photograph courtesy of the Manis Collection, UNLV Special Collections.

The earliest hotel-casinos built on the old Los Angeles highway (known to the world as the strip) combined the imagery of the Wild West, conquest, and the liberties mythically associated with wide-open western spaces. Hotel architecture departed from the earlier mission-style buildings
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used by other southwestern hoteliers. Similarly, it did not emphasize the indigenous cultures of southwestern Indians to attract tourists. The Last Frontier Hotel and Casino, which opened on the Strip in late 1942, used the motto, the early west in modern splendor, to attract business. Cancan dancers, modeled on ideas about Parisian revues, performed in the showroom while cocktail servers worked their shifts dressed as cowgirls (Figures 1 and 2).

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Figure 2. Cocktail waitress in costume at the Last Frontier Hotel and Casino. Photograph courtesy of Eileen Noreen McClintock.

The idea of working in a party town appealed to several of our interviewees. Several grew up in nearby Los Angeles, studied dance as teenagers or entered beauty contests of the era. Many came to Las Vegas for the fun, the work, and the great tips. Images of service workers performing in their daily life and jobs are uncommon, yet these photographs offer such a rare view. Desert Inn food servers were included in the first anniversary celebration of the hotel-casino.
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In Figure 3, they play to the camera, but are they showing they have finished their work serving the cake, or that they are props of the celebration. In Figure 4, service workers at the El Rancho Vegas as they turn the tables on class roles and perform as showroom entertainers in this 1950s photograph.

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Figure 3. Desert Inn waitresses survey ruins of the cake at the First Anniversary Party, 1951. Photograph courtesy of the Wilbur Clark Collection, UNLV Special Collections.

Figure 4. Servers as performers at El Rancho Vegas. Photograph courtesy of Margaret Price.

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As the USA emerged from World War II a global superpower, a few Las Vegas promoters cultivated a new image for their new properties: one of glamour, wealth and power. Resorts like the Flamingo, the Thunderbird, and the Desert Inn expanded their Hollywood connections to bring in entertainers as well as patrons. In the 1950s, newer properties like the Sands, Sahara, Dunes, and Stardust continued to project glamour and luxury at affordable prices. As Figure 5 illustrates, these desert resorts were not intended as exclusive retreats for the glitterati, but as all-American resorts with something for everyone. Within the context of American postwar supremacy and heralding the superior advantages of capitalism over communism, resort owners democratized their attractions to anyone who was white and could pay.

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Figure 5. El Rancho Vegas chorines with servicemen, c. 1950. Photograph courtesy of Margaret Price.

The image for this gambling Mecca during the 1940s and 1950s had to be fun and exciting, yet attractive and safe. Before the topless shows carrying French names became identified with Las Vegas entertainment, publicists used the image of the innocent glamour girl to attract visitors to the city. The image followed in the footsteps of famous predecessors, the wartime pin-up and the movie starlet. Like those earlier images, the glamour
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girl image portrayed a healthy, young, and attractive woman, never nude, but dressed only in a bathing suit (see Figure 5). She shared nothing in common with the bad girls of the 1950s whose erotic curiosity and use of drugs or alcohol sold paperback novels and B movies. Instead, the glamour girl image served to mediate moralists fears about debauchery, loose women, free alcohol and gambling in the otherwise conservative consensus of the Eisenhower years. The manufactured image of the post-war all-American girl combined nationalism, innocence, and powerful sexuality in a palatable form for public consumption. It also followed the race rules of the era. As in other forms of popular culture such as Hollywood movies, magazines, and the new media of television, a distinct color line existed. In the terms of the post-war racial consensus, the innocent-looking, modest, and attractive young woman could only be white. When the Moulin Rouge Hotel and Casino opened in 1955, it was the only interracial resort in Las Vegas. Though short-lived, it created opportunities for professional dancers, musicians and entertainers who had been working their own separate entertainment circuits and clubs for decades (Figure 7). Interestingly, the style of publicity shots for the Moulin Rouge used the same standard glamour girl poses (Figure 6).
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Figure 6. Moulin Rouge showgirl relaxes at the pool, 1955. Photograph courtesy of the Don T. Walker Collection, UNLV Special Collections.

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Figure 7. Showgirls at the Moulin Rouge Casino, 1955. Photograph courtesy of the Don T. Walker Collection, UNLV Special Collections.

Near the end of the 1950s, the iconography of the glamour girl changed again. A more worldly, sophisticated, nearly nude, sexually suggestive, yet tastefully distant figure emerged. The Las Vegas showgirl, as we know her today, came of age. The Dunes receives the credit for initiating the first nudity in its shows, but the production by Harold Minskys company styled a show after the French but in line with its own burlesque traditions. The Stardust brought the first European-style production show, the Lido de Paris, to Las Vegas in 1958 as its featured entertainment. Madame Bluebelle formed the troupe, one of many she selected and trained, known as the Bluebelle dancers. Their stature (they had to meet a height requirement out of heels) as well as the discipline established by their director, contributed to the allure of the production and the showgirl image. The Tropicana followed with the Folies Bergre in 1959. The mannequin of the early 1950s, who wore a bodysuit to appear bare while remaining covered, was permanently

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replaced by the nearly nude showgirl who carried more fabric in her headdress than she wore on her body.

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Figure 8. Showgirl Sue Johansson, Casino de Paris, 1978. Photograph courtesy of the Las Vegas News Bureau Collection, UNLV Special Collections.

In the hedonistic 1960s and 1970s, an era that institutionalized Playboy Clubs, skin magazines, and topless bars, it was easy to perceive the Las Vegas showgirl as one and the same. The casino promoters used sexuality and the presentation of the female body to draw in the heterosexual playboy or those who fantasized about being one. Women participated as producers and consumers of the image, as seen in Figure 8. Not only did they perform as perfect women, but they also consumed the ideal and supported its beauty culture.
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Contemporary interviews with former showgirls emphasize their positive views on the use of nudity in the performance. They report that they are not bothered by their objectified beauty. Like the showgirls interviewed for our project, they saw the image as empowering. Out of costume, these performers were not remarkably different in appearance from other tall and fit women. In costume and on stage, however, they projected an image recognized as a cultural icon of idealized beauty. Not only did they portray this character, many enjoyed the power it represented. They understood at the end of the night that the image came off as the performer removed her make-up and costume and went home to buy groceries, take care of children, or walk the dog. However, for that moment, while performing the icon of western European beauty, she imagined that through that image she had control and power.[7] Conclusion One of the premier hotel properties on Las Vegas Boulevard declared on the cover of a recent annual report, Life is What You Make It. We Make Dreams. The theme continued in its message to shareholders: When we dream, we escape to a world outside of our everyday lives. Dreaming allows us to transcend reality, to be calmed when we need to relax or to be thrilled when we need excitement.[8] The dream created by casino owners of the late twentieth century touched upon a deeply cherished belief of a century earlier the pursuit of the American Dream. The entrepreneurs, gamblers and professionals who made Las Vegas the phenomenon that it is understood the power this dream had in Americans consciousness and continually updated it. They took advantage of the post-war leisure economy. They capitalized on Americans desire to escape the tensions and scarcities of the War; to exult in a newly earned, borrowed, or leased disposable income; and to celebrate their days off from work in glamour and security. By creating a resort destination out of a spot in the Mojave Desert, the dream-makers offered tourists a chance to embrace their perception of an egalitarian and classless American society by mingling movie stars and reputed mobsters with all-American families in a resort destination that offered something for everyone. To sell the dream, promoters first used the image of a youthful, innocent beauty. Her appearance as a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant maintained the ideological consensus of normalcy. It also reflected the race and gender systems of power in post-war culture. Like Libert, the female icon of the French Revolution, or Amerca, the symbol of the USA, the icon of the innocent glamour girl represented the democratization of American capitalism, the health and well-being of the nation. She welcomed visitors to

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Las Vegas to display their consumer superiority in pursuit of leisure and luxury. But what did women who moved to Las Vegas want and why did they stay? Beyond the post-war iconography of white womanhood, women from all backgrounds moved to Las Vegas during and after World War II for the jobs in the expanding tourist economy. They did not find the boundless opportunities portrayed in the fantasy illusions. The sex and race segregation in jobs and housing shocked many. But those who stayed did so because they could do better in the tip-based tourist economy, despite the sex and race segregation. Why did some embrace roles that from our contemporary perspective appeared more limiting than expansive? Unlike the tourist visitors, the women working in the hotel-casinos knew the difference between the roles they played at work and their private lives. The showgirl or performer knew the illusion she created as she donned the stage attire for an evening show. The managers understood that their business success depended upon creating the illusion. The cocktail servers knew their tips increased when they exposed more skin. The change girls who walked the casino floor providing slot players with ready change knew the poor odds of a pay-off from slot machines, yet always wished their customers good luck. For the past fifty years, they played with gender to leverage their assets into a living. Notes
[1] For a sample of recent studies on Las Vegas, see Eugene Moehring (2000) Resort City in the Sunbelt, Las Vegas, 1930-2000 2nd edn (Reno: University of Nevada Press); Mike Davis & Hal Rothman (Eds) (forthcoming 2002) The Grit Beneath the Glitter: tales from the real Las Vegas (Berkeley: University of California Press); and Sally Denton & Roger Morris (2001) The Money and the Power: the making of Las Vegas and its hold on America, 1947-2000 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). [2] This article evolved from an ongoing project that documents the lives of women who came to Las Vegas to work in the gaming industry between 1940 and 1980. The author and graduate students from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas conducted the interviews included in the Las Vegas Women: Oral History Project. Theories of gender systems and the social construction of sexuality informed our interview questions, as did the context of post-1945 power and social relations. We have tried to interpret the themes within their stories without romanticizing or attributing false consciousness. When the research project is completed, the tapes and transcripts will be made available to the public through UNLVs Lied Library, Special Collections Department. The depiction of women as limited or restricted within the world of domestic affairs during the post-1945 era is best described by Elaine Tyler May (1988) Homeward Bound: American families in the cold war era (New York: Basic Books). See also, Betty 130

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Friedan (1963) The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton). For a critique of this idea generally and of Friedans thesis specifically, see Joanne Meyerowitz (1994) Introduction: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, in Joanne Meyerowitz (Ed.) Not June Cleaver: women and gender in postwar America, 1945-1960, pp. 1-16 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). [3] The ideas explored within this article were initially explored in a reading group with Barbara Brents, Kate Hausbeck, and Martha Watson, my colleagues at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The writings of Joan Wallach Scott, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault were particularly influential. [4] Joyce Marshall & Betty Bunch (1997) An Interview with Betty Bunch (UNLV: Women in Gaming and Entertainment Oral History Project). [5] Claytee D. White & Lucille Bryant (1997) An Interview with Lucille Bryant (UNLV: Women in Gaming and Entertainment Oral History Project), p. 34. [6] For a study of the sex industry in Nevada, see Barbara Brents & Kate Hausbeck (forthcoming 2002) The State of Sex: the Nevada prostitution industry (New York: Routledge). [7] This perception was most recently captured by Rick Bragg (2001) The Era of Showgirls is Leaving Las Vegas, New York Times, 22 March, A1. [8] Mirage Resorts (1998) Annual Report, p. 2.

JOANNE L. GOODWIN is Associate Professor in the History Department and Director, Womens Research Institute of Nevada, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Box 455020, 4505 Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, NV 89154-5020, USA (jgoodwin@unlv.edu). She received her PhD in US History from the University of Michigan in 1991. Her publications include Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform (University of Chicago Press, 1997) and articles on gender and US social welfare policy in the Journal of Social History and Gender and History. Since taking her position at UNLV in 1991, her research interests have expanded to include gender, sexuality, and work in post-1945 Las Vegas. She is currently collecting oral histories of women who worked in the casino and entertainment industries after World War II.

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North West Labour History Journal

As a follow-up to its 2001 issues on The North in the 1960s the North West Labour History Journal intends to publish an issue in 2002 on The North in the 1970s, looking at some of the radical social, political and cultural movements of the decade. We are interested in articles both from researchers and those active themselves. The kind of areas we are interested in include the Womens Liberation Movement, trade unions, factory occupations, miners strikes of 1972 and 1974, radical political groups, e.g. Flame, anti-fascism, squatting, Ireland, punk/new wave, radical drama and much more. We also hope to run a series of shorter autobiographical accounts entitled My Seventies in which those submitting the most embarrassing photographs of fashion crimes will get published. For more information please contact: Michael Herbert +44 (0)14547 838885 or michael@mossleybrow.demon.co.uk.

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