The Girls in 3-B
-
- $18.99
Publisher Description
This classic pulp novel about three young women who leave behind their small-town roots for the big city is "a remarkable slice of bohemia from the 1950s" and a "wondrous tale of love, lesbianism, poetry, and sex" (Jack Halberstam).
Annice, Pat, and Barby are best friends from Iowa, freshly arrived in booming 1950s Chicago to explore different paths toward independence, self-expression, and sexual freedom. From the hip-hang of a bohemian lifestyle to the sophisticated lure of romance with a handsome, wealthy, married boss to the happier security of a lesbian relationship, these three experience firsthand the dangers and limitations of women’s economic reliance on men.
Lesbian pulp author Valerie Taylor skillfully paints a sociological portrait of the emotional and economic pitfalls of heterosexuality in 1950s America—and then offers a defiantly subversive alternative. A classic pulp tale showcasing predatory beatnik men, drug hallucinations, and secret lesbian trysts, The Girls in 3-B approaches the theme of sex from the stiffened vantage point of 1950s psychology.
Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Originally published in 1959 and reissued as part of the Feminist Press's new Femme Fatale series of pulp fiction by women writers, this is genre literature with a few twists. Three young women move to Chicago and room together; each wants to emancipate herself from smalltown mores. Annice, a would-be poet, dreams of associating with the intelligentsia; Pat is a secretary in a publishing firm who develops a powerful attraction to her engaged boss; and Barby is a stunning shop clerk whose sexual desire for her supervisor a female takes her by surprise but ultimately enriches her life. Searching for their true identities in an era that values sanitized, middle-class, heterosexual conventions, the girls are faced with the classic choice between "good boys" and "bad boys." Annice is torn between nihilistic artist Alan and stable Midwesterner Jackson, who is studying to be a physicist; Pat must weigh Blake, her philandering boss, against Stan, a junior company man with a longstanding crush on her. The book's insights into issues like sexual abuse, infidelity, the corporate glass ceiling, drug experimentation (there is a wild three-page peyote trip that rivals some Beat writers' renditions) and sexual double standards (and how to manipulate them) are surprisingly modern, though two of the three protagonists eventually drift toward conventional happiness. This is a refreshing entry for the genre, mercifully devoid of the moralistic and cautionary elements common in much 1950s pulp.
