Avery Trufelman

She legally couldn't.

I mean, there were other ones.

I kept going through the book.

New laws kept popping up all the time.

It's like, well, women were required to wear a hat.

It's like, seriously?

When they went swimming, they had to wear swim stockings.

Like, are you kidding me?

Like, there's so many things that they had to wear and keep track of

at risk of being fined or put in jail.

And this lasted kind of a long time.

It wasn't just like, oh, when she was a little kid, it was like in her lifetime.

I mean, one of my favorite slash least favorite stories was about the kindergarten teacher in Los Angeles.

I forget this.

Being a woman was a very different experience in the early 20th century.

When Claire McArdle left her home in Maryland to move to New York City, it wasn't like being Carrie Bradshaw.

Women couldn't rent a hotel room because then it was thought you were a prostitute.

So women usually had to live in boarding houses with very strict rules and early curfews like you were a kid.

So Claire McArdle was amazing.

She was a woman at a time when it was exceedingly difficult just to be a woman.