Book Description

Steadfast Sisters of the Silver State was created by the Southern Nevada Women's History Project. Its volunteers combed the state for evidence of the lasting contributions by one hundred noteworthy Nevada women to the growth and culture of their communities. To paint a vivid profile of each woman, the organization's volunteers conducted interviews, unearthed private papers, consulted public records, and collected historical accounts from newspapers and oral histories. In these pages, the refined--such as Hollywood fashion designer Edith Head--rub elbows with the infamous, including adult-film star Marilyn Chambers. Each had an indelible connection to the Silver State. Likewise, the obscure--Rhyolite dance-hall pianist Pauline Atterbury Wilson and Storey County's one-room schoolhouse teacher, Elizabeth Davis McKay, who both lived in the nineteenth century--mingle with such modern Nevadans as state controller Kathy Augustine and casino magnates Jeanne Hood and Claudine Williams. Black singers and dancers including D.D. Cotton and Ruth Brown took the high moral ground in Nevada's slow but satisfying move toward racial equity in casino workplaces. Las Vegas educator Mabel Welch Hoggard and nurse Bertha Sanford Woodard, a Northern Nevadan, waged the same war in their respective spheres. Forty-two women authors are responsible for the rich accounts of these one hundred women. Each made her mark in arenas ranging from civil rights to animal rights, from casino ownership to casino operations, as well as in marketing, modeling, medicine, mining, the media, or the military. Also documented are female leaders in the arts, education, philanthropy, public safety, sports, politics, and government of Nevada. Steadfast Sisters continues the mission of a prior volume, Skirts that Swept the Desert Floor, by the Southern Region of the Nevada Women's History Project, which documented the achievements of another set of one hundred superlative Nevada women.