Quotes from Karen Abbott

In the sudden absence of husbands, fathers, brothers and beaus, white Southern women discovered a newfound freedom - one that simultaneously granted them more power in relationships and increased their likelihood of heartbreak.

In 2001, I moved from Philly to Atlanta, where I lived for six years. I had never lived anywhere but Philly, and you can imagine the culture shock; the Civil War seeps into daily life and conversation down South in a way it never does up North.

Women, it seemed, were capable not only of significant acts of treason, but of executing them more deftly than men.

Sweet? Submissive? May as well be a housewife Ã¢â'¬Â¦ it dims my luster, makes me resemble others—that's the worst thing that could happen.

the blustery talk of civic leaders—and not Chicago's weather—had inspired the "Windy City" moniker.

We discovered that the scrupulously strict were correspondently keen to discern suggestions of sex where nobody else would think of looking for them.

The sisters' acquaintance Madam Nell Kimball recalled the sage advice of her aunt Letty, a retired courtesan: "Every girl, if only she knew it, is sitting on her fortune.

Men in general, the sisters concluded, were gullible but not to be trusted, greedy but frivolous with money, predatory but easily trapped.

When trouble came, as the sisters feared it would, it didn't knock at the mahogany doors. Instead it waited, lying dormant inside heads and silent inside mouths until it passed, undetected, into the Club. And then it was too late.

If it weren't for married men, we couldn't have carried on at all, and if it weren't for cheating married women we could have made another million.

If the ship sinks, we're going down with a cheer and a good drink under our belts anyway.

In Rome, they stared for hours at the magnificent Apollo and Daphne. Minna described the piece in a letter to a friend. "The Greeks construed Apollo's loss of Daphne," she wrote, "as symbolizing that all mortals shall be denied the Heart's Desire, ever the unattainable.

You can get much farther with a smile, a kind word, and a gun than you can with a smile and a kind word. -Al Capone

discover what could make you famous, and then proclaim that it already has.

It was a fairy tale, Hovick style, in which drama trumped veracity and the women always won. On

by a new burlesque trick: fish swivels affixed to her pasties. The mechanism allowed Finnell to pinwheel her tassels in any direction, from any position, at any speed

Female spies typically represented one of two extremes: the seductress who employed her wiles to manipulate men, and the cross-dresser who blended in by impersonating them.

Before the Great Chicago Fire, no one took notice of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, two Irish immigrants who lived with their five children on the city's West Side.

I had spent five years not earning a penny, getting rejected. Thank God I had a husband who was supportive and encouraging. But I still said to myself, 'If the Everleighs doesn't sell, I'm finished with writing forever.' I was going to get an office job.

By 1865, all Southern women - the happily and regrettably single, the perpetually engaged, the wives and widows - had tired of the war. The Confederacy was shrinking, and the morale of its remaining men shrinking with it.

Gypsy [Rose Lee] wasn't a linear person, and she didn't live life in a linear fashion. She was relentlessly self-inventing, and moved backward as often as she moved forward.

I wasn't really a dark kid, but I was in my head a lot. I got good grades all through my 16 years of Catholic school, but I was always writing these weird - and, I have to say, really bad - stories, filled with murder.

An amusing city, Chicago, any way you look at it. I'm afraid we are in for the time of our lives.

In Gypsy [Rose Lee] the musical, her mother, 'Mama Rose', is portrayed as a slightly eccentric, pushy, ambitious stage mother, but that version doesn't come close to the truth.