Sian Evans' nonfictional work documents the lives and careers of women connected to early Twentieth Century Ocean Liners. The documentation is epic. As the great vessels are transformed from pleasure palaces to war ships and back again, the lives and career of these women change. This is a history of how the "big ships" propelled women's independence, creating careers for them, saving families, and raising some of them to celebrity status!

Maiden Voyages is an interesting account of women , who served as stewardesses and then nurses, on cruise ships, because they enjoyed the “working life afloat, despite its many tribulations, discomforts and dangers.” From the Titanic to the Queen Elizabeth, these voyages are historically described. Kudos to Sian Evans for her extensive research. Thank you St. Martin’s Press for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.

Maiden Voyages by S. Evans, published by St. Martin's Press, is a history nonfiction novel about the magnificent ocean liners and the women who traveled and worked there.
A story of Schifffahrt, shipmates, pioneers and commoners set in the 19 hundereds. A story well researched, full of history, famous people, complex and suspenseful, ein Sittengemälde of the early 19 hundereds.
I liked the storyline, liked reading about famous and non-famous passengers, a great read.

A marvelous and unique social history focused on woman passengers and workers who sailed the seas during ocean liners’ golden age. Well-researched and written, with a keen look at how such travel forever altered women’s lives. Highly recommended!

4 of 5 Stars
Pub Date 10 Aug 2021
#MaidenVoyages #NetGalley

Thanks to the author, St. Martin's Press,
and NetGalley for the review copy. Opinions are mine.

I received Maiden Voyages as part of a NetGalley giveaway.

During the first half of the twentieth century, between the first and second world wars in particular, ocean liners were a major source of transportation: used for both business and pleasure, in peace time and in wartime, transporting rich and poor alike. While they comprised a small percentage of the employees on board, women provided important services to passengers of all classes. In turn, the industry allowed women to gain a measure of economic and social independence that would have been denied to them on land. Meanwhile,, women from all walks of life traveled on ocean liners to begin new lives, vacation in luxury, and even scam fellow passengers. Maiden Voyages is the story of women on ocean liners and the opportunities and struggles they presented during a period of rapid change.

I really enjoyed this. Told in roughly chronological order, it's filled with the stories of women from all walks of life, the circumstances under which they found themselves on board, and their experiences before, during, and after their time on the ship. While there are a few different women whose long-term affiliation with the industry means that their stories are threaded throughout, we're an otherwise broad range of "characters" and experiences, from the dire (steerage passengers escaping poverty and war, or single women needing to make a livelihood for themselves and their children) to the decadent (the first-class passengers who expected every convenience they enjoyed on land). There's admittedly a bias towards transatlantic crossings (and on a petty note, I could have done without the Trump family anecdote), but on the whole this was an excellent and insightful read.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Maiden Voyages explores how women’s lives were transformed by the Golden Age of ocean liner travel between Europe and North America. This was an absolutely fascinating study of women whose lives were changed, indeed history was sometimes changed, by their travels on these magnificent ocean liners. First, hats off to all the working women who became stewardesses, conductresses, chaperones, nurses, chambermaids, support workers and even engineers aboard these ships. The work was hard, the hours long, conditions could be grueling and they spent so much time away from home, but their ultimate payday was that there was enough money to support their families. One of those women was The Unsinkable Stewardess, Violet Jessop. She survived the sinkings of the Titanic and the Brittannic, and was aboard the Olympic when it collided with a British warship.

There are entertaining stories of the celebrities who traveled by ocean, and how their lives were changed. For instance, would the Duke of Windsor and the former British King Edward VIII ever have abdicated the throne if it weren’t for Wallis Simpson? Before Wallis, the Duke was enjoying a domestic life with Thelma Furness, also twice-divorced and an American like Wallis. Thelma needed to return to the States for family reasons. Seems her sister, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, was in a bitter custody battle for her daughter, also named Gloria, who became known as the poor little rich girl. Thelma felt bad about leaving the Duke on his own, and asked her best friend Wallis to watch over him. While in the States, Thelma met Aly Khan, who was smitten with her and booked himself on the same ship returning to England. Thelma did not return Khan’s advances, but rumors started, news leaked, and the Duke used it as his excuse to break-up with Thelma. And the rest is history, but what would the royal family look like today if the Duke/King had married someone acceptable to his station in life?

Hedy Lamarr’s story was quite interesting. She was of Jewish descent, and married Fritz Mandl, the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. He was also an arms dealer, and had ties to the Nazi party. While she had worked in film, Mandl was controlling and insisted she give up her career. After a fight with Mandl one evening, he went to his hunting lodge to spend the night. Finding her marriage intolerable, Hedy packed some clothes and jewelry, and left. She had little cash, but decided to use it for a ticket on an ocean liner headed to America. Louis B. Mayer was on board, and offered her work at $125 per week. She turned it down, and proceeded to dress up in her evening wear and jewels, making a grand entrance each evening down the staircase. Mayer ended up offering her work, at $500 per week.

There are also heart-rending stories of refugee families and their children, all dreaming of a better place. The wartime stories of the ships carrying children from Europe to America was sad and tragic.

The book is full of stories, facts, a lot of history, and is highly entertaining as well as informative.

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Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, the travel industry has been all but grounded for more than a year. Instead of being able to explore the world in person, we have been restricted to armchair travel in order to broaden our horizons. Siân Evans's Maiden Voyages: Magnificent Ocean Liners and the Women Who Traveled and Worked Aboard Them, planned before the pandemic began, fits the bill. Maiden Voyages considers the experiences of women from a variety of social classes sailed across the Atlantic during the early decades of the century. This book suggests that women’s travel opportunities were both a result of changing gender roles and a driver of those changes.

“From the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second,” writes Siân Evans in Maiden Voyages, “women of all cultures and backgrounds went to sea for an infinite variety of reasons.” On the upper luxury decks of ocean liners, wealthy women spent their days eating breakfast in bed, taking swimming lessons with Olympic-quality instructors, dining at the Captain’s table, and dancing to the ship’s orchestra while wearing bejeweled ballgowns. These guests were provided with lists of shipmates which might include celebrities such as Nancy Astor, Marlene Dietrich, or Wallis Simpson.

Less expensive rooms often housed passengers traveling for career opportunities abroad. Some female business travelers traversed the Atlantic in order to build international connections in the fashion industry or some other field. British women, especially “those left single and self-supporting as a result of the appalling loss of men during the Great War,” sometimes sailed from the Old World to the New, full of hopes to become starlets on Broadway or in Hollywood.

The lowest levels of the ship were filled by refugees—people displaced by war, fleeing poverty, or facing persecution in pre-World-War-II Europe—who hoped to build new lives in America. Despite the fact that the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor all traveled together on the same boats, the passengers on the upper decks had little contact with passengers on the floors below. Nevertheless, as Evans cheerfully says, “For the women onboard the ocean liner, the great ship offers hope, opportunity, romance. Whether they are traveling for leisure or pleasure, by virtue of their celebrity or to preserve their anonymity, as matrons, migrants, or millionairesses … the journey they undertake will change their lives forever.”

Evan’s book is strongest when she discusses the women hired to work aboard the ocean liners. Before World War I, most women who applied for jobs on ship were widows financially responsible for supporting their families. While their children stayed with extended family members, women drew paychecks as stewardess. They brought meals to wealthy passengers, helped them get dressed, tidied their rooms, and took care of them when they were seasick. Having female employees onboard ensured that gendered “proprieties could be observed.”

Although war interrupted vacation cruising and temporarily made their jobs all but unnecessary, women stewardesses frequently retrained as nurses whose shipboard skills were useful on floating military hospitals. Following the war, commercial ocean liners sailed the seas once more, and women returned to the ships as passengers and as workers. The high number of “war widows” migrating to find independent financial opportunities ensured that female attendants were in increasing demand aboard ships. Over the next few decades, national financial depressions, women’s suffrage, the growth of commercial culture, and the experience of another war forced the experiences of female employees to continue to evolve.

Evans argues that the lives of the women they write about were radically changed by travel experiences as well as by new work experiences that travel allowed. Maiden Voyages shows that female workers aboard ocean liners earned enough to support their families, passengers in steerage fled poverty and persecution for new opportunities, and a few women built independent lives with new career opportunities in show business or fashion.

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<p>This book had some amazing material that's much easier to find here than a lot of other places and was generally a lot of fun to read in most chapters, and also it was a disorganized disaster and included a lot of tacked-on extraneous stuff for fairly shaky reasons! It's both! Life is a glorious tapestry and so is this book!</p>
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<p>The good: a lot of in-depth detail about what it was like to work as a conductress, a stewardess, or other ocean-going professions in the first half of the twentieth century. What their housing was like, their duties, their meals, their pay, how they were treated by various individual passengers and types of passengers, how their jobs first appeared in these ocean liners and how they developed. Side notes about women shipboard engineers, seagoing nurses, and so on. Details of how metallic threads and sequins on evening gowns would rust; details of how female staff on sinking vessels were actually treated. The intrusion of each of the World Wars in their very different ways, and their effects on women's maritime employment thereafter. This part is a book very much worth having.</p>
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<p>The bad: I'm not sure why, exactly, Evans felt that this was insufficient, but possibly she felt that more popular and well-known figures were needed. Some of them even did have a relationship with ocean liners that would justify their appearance here. Others...used an ocean liner I guess? Not notably except that they needed to get from Point A to Point B, but they sure...did that? Such as: Donald Trump's mother, whose life story rambled on in these pages for no reason particularly germane to ocean liners. I've really had a great deal more of Random Trumpage than I care for, and I don't need it intruding on Tallulah Bankhead (who is not actually in these pages to great effect either, but at least is mildly entertaining here).</p>
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<p>Evans also seems to believe that history began with James Watt, making sweeping statement about women never having worked away from home before in all of history, which is tiresome but usual from a certain kind of modern historian who never looks up from their own period. This could be spun more positively into staying in their own lane, so: I wish that Evans had stayed in her lane with this book and just written about the colorful, interesting work and lives of the women who staffed the ocean liners of the early twentieth century. It would have been a much easier book to get through, and to recommend.</p>
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Thanks to NetGalley for this advance reader copy in exchange for a fair review.

Stop for a moment and think of transatlantic crossings in the golden age of ocean liner travel. You might conjure up images of the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the captain and crew. You may think about women on these ships as the wealthy adornments of powerful men, or the shuddering steerage passengers looking for a new life in America. You may even remove the humanness of these women and leave them as vague images.

This book ends that. These are the untold stories of the female crew, the refugees, the aristocrats, the famous and not known. They each contributed to the right history of the trans Atlantic passage. My grandmother could be among these woman, as she was one of many who fled Ireland in search of a better life. She came alone in 1914, when women couldn’t vote or make many decisions.

This book certainly captures the imagination. Researching all of these women is a feat! Compliments to Ms Evans. For anyone fascinated by the era or by ocean liner history, this is for you.

Always been a huge reader when it comes to ships and shipwrecks, so was ready to dive into this one. Very well done and would definitely recommend.

This was such an interesting social history about the golden age of ocean liner travel and the special impact it had on women's lives. I saw the Queen Mary when she left New York for the last time and was fortunate to have been a passenger on the Queen Mary 2. It was a wonderful time and I enjoyed all the back stories.

Jam packed with fascinating history, Maiden Voyages highlights heroic women in life-changing circumstances during the Golden Age, including circumstances and effects of war. I've long wondered what it must have been like for parents to send their children on ships, knowing they probably wouldn't see them again, in hopes for a better life for them. This book includes information about refugees trying to escape, some successfully; smuggling; women working on the ships as stewardesses, chaperones and engineers; travelers including aristocrats such as the Astors and celebrities who "used" travel to promote themselves and circulate. The author explains what it was like for women to work just as hard as men (harder, as they needed to prove themselves) in a predominantly male world. A hierarchy needed to be upheld. But female employees were a boon as they were needed for propriety of female travelers. Some were sailors or chambermaids, hairdressers or hostesses, others nurses or masseuses. All had to be weatherproof. And the storms could be terrifying.

The bibliography at the beginning is very useful and includes people who make appearances throughout such as Victoria Drummond, Martha Gellhorn, Maida Nixson and Edith Sowerbutts. The author describes different ships in detail, distances traveled, storms, rescues, torpedo damage, mail and commodity carriers, etc. She includes quotes from the likes of Charles Dickens who meticulously journaled his trip, But the stories like that of Violet, The Unsinkable Stewardess, and Fannie Jane Morecroft who became the Chief Stewardess of the Lancastria, are what grabbed me in particular. Christiana's story on the Pittsburgh is incredible!

So much to absorb! I didn't realize passengers usually slept in all their clothes the entire trip for modesty. Well, except for the wealthy who changed outfits up to seven times a day which Louis Vuitton capitalized on. De luxe suites could cost up to $70,000 in today's currency. Read the crushing story of Hilda who trained for the Olympics and about the nurse, Edith, who assisted with baby deliveries on board. One of my favourite stories is about Victoria Drummond, an engineer, and her challenges. Reading about the medical advances and emergencies on board is also interesting. I had no idea there were pamphlets for war brides arriving in America. And thank goodness for Nancy Bell!

There was room for advancement in positions and previous experience on other ships counted. Courageous rescues are described as are the dreadful experiences of Titanic survivors, the sinking of the Lusitania and the horrendous carnage of the Britannic caused by its deadly propeller.

As an international traveler, one of my greatest joys is exploring different cities and cultures. I fully understand the pull of the sea as well. But you needn't be a traveler to enjoy this fantastic book. All you need is curiosity.

My sincere thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for the privilege of reading this engrossing book!

In this book, author Evans offers up stories of women who went to sea on the great steamship ocean liners of the first half of the 20th century. While many of the stories are interesting and offer some insight into how women worked and traveled on these ships, Evans repeats a lot of information and anecdotes, reaches for stories to tell (a particularly bad example is speculating on the journey Donald Trump's grandmother made, about which she actually has little info, so it's filled with a description of her hometown instead), and falls short on doing anything more than making superficial connections between women's roles aboard ship and the changing roles and expectations of women in society at large. Disappointing.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an eARC of this book.
Recounts the era of the great ocean liners and the women who worked and travelled on them. Tells the stories of the famous and the unknown aboard the ships including during the war years.
A bit dry and disjointed but I learned a lot and mostly enjoyed the journey.

A well researched and interesting collection of anecdotes and snippets of history, this book provides a look into an otherwise untold bit of the past. It not only goes into fascinating detail about how transcontinental sea travel affected womens' lives, but also about the industry itself.

The subtitle of Maiden Voyages is Magnificent Ocean Liners and the Women Who Traveled and Worked Aboard Them. This is an anecdotal social history that is set primarily between the world wars, the golden age of transatlantic travel. It contains much more.
Much space is devoted to women taking jobs during the Great War, enabling the Allies to win the war. After the war, they had to give up their jobs to returning servicemen, but they liked the independence earning a wage gained them.
Women were employed by the shipping companies to pamper female passengers. Sea jobs provided excellent opportunities to earn good livings, travel the world, and acquire knowledge and sophistication not available on dry land.
Many of the women profiled worked on the ships: Violet Jessop, famous for surviving the Titantic; Edith Sowerbutts, a conductress who guarded women and children; Hilda James, an Olympic swimmer employed as a swim coach.
Other women were passengers: Hedy Lamarr, who used Normandie’s staircase to make grand entrances and secured a lucrative film contract; Martha Gellhorn, a correspondent who took any ship available to get her stories; Mary Anne MacLeod, who left abject poverty in Scotland, married real estate developer Fred Trump, and became the mother of a president.
Not all the women are admirable: Tallulah Bankhead and Josephine Baker sailed to Europe to embark on scandalous stage careers.
Interesting biographical sketches of both women and ships.
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

Siân Evans gives us a fascinating look at an unexpected piece of history. Luxury liners are made up of many different social and cultural stratas which the author reveals through research into archives and personal correspondence. Very enjoyable and interesting read

20th-century, Atlantic ocean, passenger-ships, historical-places-events, historical research, history-and-culture, nonfiction, women, WW1, WW2, post WW1, post WW2, memoirs*****
This book is a history geek's dream!
The detailed research through archives and personal records and correspondence of some of the women who worked as stewardesses and more for the Cunard and White Star lines is beyond impressive. As advertised, there are many stories of individual women who needed to go to sea to support those at home, including one woman who served on the Titanic, Lusitania, and another torpedoed ship! There are selected notes about well known women of the era between the wars such as Josephine Baker and Nancy Astor and mentions of film stars Rudolph Valentino, Johnny Weissmuller, and Douglas Fairbanks.
Luxury shipping is detailed from the beginning of the 20th century. These same ships and many of the women were also in service during each of the world wars, including the ill fated Kindertransports. It is interesting to note that the Queen Mary was not only the best in luxury, but as of 1927 had a Jewish prayer room and also a rabbi to keep kosher in the kitchen.
Another geeky tidbit is that the Aquitania made 580 crossings in 40 years and was the only Trans Atlantic liner to have served in both world wars putting on 3 million miles and transporting 1.2 million passengers.
Fantastic book for geeks like me!
I requested and received a free temporary ebook copy from St. Martin's Press via NetGalley. Thank you!

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for the opportunity to read Maiden Voyages so I may provide an honest review.

Extensively, or perhaps exhaustively researched, this book takes a look at the combination of women and transatlantic sea travels from myriad points of view. I enjoyed how author Sian Evans included her family's historical connection and found the stories of the unique roles of women working onboard the ships to be particularly interesting as they have not widely (to my knowledge) been written about previously. As the spotlight shifted to the era's Hollywood stars and Royalty, I found the writing to be redundant and a bit tedious but perhaps that is just because some of these stories, such as the back story of the relationship between the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson, are quite well known. Even without focusing on the importance of the women who were passengers and employed at sea, it is an interesting overview of the role the major ship lines had on transatlantic travel and how the industry constantly pivoted and reinvented itself in response to demand, the outbreak of war, and humanitarian efforts in the early 20th century.

I must give enormous credit to Sian Evans who has combined social history, military history and delicious anecdotes in this non-fiction delight about women who worked at sea. I loved the style of personalizing the general history with anecdotal stories about specific women who either staffed the ships or traveled on them. I was totally fascinated and I admired the author’s selection of women to highlight.

Personally, I am a great fan of the history of the great sailing ships, referred to as the Atlantic ferry. I probably was on one of the final sailings of the United States and I am a frequent traveler on the Queen Mary II and the Queen Elizabeth. So, this book was really engaging for me. As a historian, obsessed with British history I loved the stories about famous characters who the author connected to their travels.

The story of a poor Scot, headed on a ship to become a domestic certainly will bring a smile to the face of every reader as we learn she became the mother of Donald Trump. Obviously, ease of immigration impacted his life.

This book is endlessly fascinating and I highly recommend it. Thank you Netgalley for this very special book.