Sharp, resourceful, and with a style all her own, Althea Altemus embodied the spirit of the independent working woman of the Jazz Age. In her memoir, Big Bosses, she vividly recounts her life as a secretary for prominent (but thinly disguised) employers in Chicago, Miami, and New York during the late teens and 1920s. Alongside her we rub elbows with movie stars, artists, and high-profile businessmen, and experience lavish estate parties that routinely defied the laws of Prohibition. Anchored by extensive annotation and an afterword from historian Robin F. Bachin, which contextualizes Altemus’s narrative, Big Bosses provides a one-of-a-kind peek inside the excitement, extravagances, and the challenges of being a working woman roaring through the ’20s.
Robin F. Bachin is the Charlton W. Tebeau Associate Professor of History and Assistant Provost for Civic and Community Engagement at the University of Miami. Her areas of research and teaching include American urban, environmental, immigration, and cultural history. Her first book, Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890-1919, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004 and won the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Illinois History and Heritage. Bachin’s current book project is Tropical Urbanism: Modernity, Exoticism, and the Creation of South Florida, 1890-1965. She has received fellowships from the Graham Foundation for the Advancement of the Fine Arts, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Teagle Foundation, and the Driehaus Foundation. She was one of the first recipients of the University of Miami Library Digital Fellowship, which supported the creation of her digital archive on “Travel, Tourism, and Urban Growth in Greater Miami.”
