Review of the Day: Women Daredevils – Thrills, Chills, and Frills

If there’s one thing I know about human beings it is this: They’re much more likely to pay attention to you if they think you’re about to get hurt. That’s sort of the basis behind everything from the success of Harry Houdini to the extreme sports you run across on daytime TV. Basically, if someone thinks that you are mere moments from an untimely demise, they are MUCH more inclined to give you their money. Men have been doing stuff along those lines for years, but less lauded in today’s Fear Factor age are the women who also willingly, repeatedly, placed themselves in harms way. I’m talking about the girls that threw themselves into Niagara Falls, walked on planes, or dove with horses. Now, Julie Cummins has compiled a book giving props to the more than thirteen ladies between the years of 1880 to 1929 that made names for themselves by doing the impossible over and over and over again.

One hundred years ago if you were an average woman living in America your career choices pretty much began and ended with marriage and childbirth. One hundred years ago if you were an extraordinary woman living in America your career choices pretty much began with getting shot out of cannons and riding horses bareback, or ended with taming tigers and doing plane stunts. Welcome to the world of women stunt performers. In this book, author Julie Cummins has compiled a list of various high stunting dames, risking their lives over and over to give their audiences the requisite amount of thrills desired. You’ll see the LaRague Sisters doing a dangerous one-car somersault act in 1908. Georgia "Tiny" Broadwick jumping out of planes to test aerial life preservers. Or Mlle. D’Zizi leaping over elephants on a bike traveling at "a terrific clip". Collected here for our contemporary amusement and edification are a group of women that looked death right at the eye on a regular basis and achieved a modicum amount of fame in the process

I don’t consider myself an uninformed individual, but of all these women in this book the only one that I had heard of before was Sonora Webster Carver. And to be perfectly truthful, the only reason I’d even known her story was because it was turned into a live action Disney movie in 1991 called Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken. So it is a pretty good guess that this book will cover characters the like of which your kids, students, and patrons have never known. Maybe you’ll encounter the stray child familiar with the Robert Redford film The Great Waldo Pepper who knows what a wingwalker is, but don’t get your hopes up. Plus I enjoyed the fact that lots of little facts in this book ended up explaining things I’d never even thought to consider. Why were pilots sometimes called "barnstormers"? Cummings speculates that "some showoff pilot may have actually flown through a barn, christening the Barnstorming Era." Sounds like as good an explanation as any I could come up with.

The end of the book contains a Chronology of the events listed as well as a section dedicated to Sources and Acknowledgments. I would have preferred a straight out Bibliography, but the ways in which Cummins got her information made this impossible. Listing her Sources also allows Cummins to detail how difficult it was to get some of this information. "Only two women had books written about them." That meant finding sources elsewhere. "The early period proved to be the biggest challenge: in many cases the only resources were archival files, newspaper clippings (often so fragile the paper crumbled in your hand), and tidbits in out-of-print books." The rest of the page details how she found her information, the places she had to go, and the people and historical societies that provided her with her facts. It makes for fascinating reading in and of itself.