In Changing the Game: Women at Work in Las Vegas, 1940-1990, UNLV history professor Joanne Goodwin deftly deploys oral history to chronicle how — during a period when workplaces remained deeply divided by race and gender — the rules of the employment game gradually shifted from discrimination to greater, if not equal, opportunity.
The book, Goodwin’s second, details the lives of 11 women who defied the odds to succeed in the Las Vegas hotel/casino industry during a pivotal time in the evolution of Southern Nevada. Among her subjects were casino owners, dancers and dance company managers, hotel administrators, dice dealers, and housekeepers.
Today, we might be tempted to celebrate such pioneering figures as feminist icons. Central to Goodwin’s work, however, is the context of historical possibilities during the decades after World War II.
“Women needed to work around and within the constraints of a workplace that hired women and men, blacks and whites, for different jobs,” Goodwin said. “Historians have focused on activists who struggled to open doors yet missed the significance of non-politicized women, who, by their presence, pushed boundaries and sought greater opportunities once the doors were opened.”
Through Goodwin’s interviews, readers will meet Hattie Canty and Lucille Bryant, two African-American “back-of-the-house” workers who became active in the Las Vegas Culinary Workers Union Local 226. Canty became Local 226’s president in 1990, eventually leading 550 Frontier Hotel culinary workers in a six-and-a-half year strike – one of the longest labor actions in U.S. history.
“Bryant and Canty’s stories describe women who are wage-earners in a traditional position for the time — housekeeping,” Goodwin says. “Both were part of the a mother and homemaker. When her husband, the family provider, died, she found an inner strength to do what needed to be done to take care of her children. The union held the greatest potential for achieving this.”
Goodwin also profiles casino owners Sarann Preddy and Claudine Williams. Preddy was a civil-rights activist best known for her efforts to revive the Moulin Rouge, the valley’s first interracial hotel, which closed a few months after opening in 1955. Williams ran the Silver Slipper and then the Holiday Casino (which became Harrah’s), at first in a partnership with her husband, then by herself when his health failed.
“Claudine and Sarann had a number of similarities,” Goodwin notes, “yet their outcomes were remarkably different because of the era and one’s ability to finance a casino. They both had a marvelous way with words and were pretty honest about the ups and downs of the business. For these businesswomen in the years before equity protections, they each cultivated networks and adopted styles that enabled them to advance in their chosen fields.”
Fluff LeCoque and Bernice Jaeger also proved adept at advancing in discriminatory workplace environments, as each moved up the chain of command at a time when women were rarely promoted. LeCoque was particularly successful, progressing from dancer to production director.
“The skills [they] used are prototypical of contemporary women in business,” Goodwin says. “They started with specialized knowledge, utilized relationships, wove around sexism — whether blatant or subdued — and advocated for themselves.”
Goodwin says the book owes it origins to two of her graduate students, both employed in hotel-casino jobs, who approached her with the idea of collecting life stories from women in the gaming industry. Goodwin encouraged them to pursue the idea. Other students joined and when they completed their degrees and moved on, Goodwin was left with the foundation of what became the Las Vegas Women Oral History Project. The project has since encouraged nearly 100 community members “to share their life stories, thereby enriching the teaching of Las Vegas history,” she says.
“This type of research could not have been done without extensive interviews or oral histories,” Goodwin says. “The texture of a person’s daily life, her choices, her trials, her dreams are not available to the historian in any other documentary source.”
The women’s stories in Changing the Game, she adds, aim to add to historians’ understanding of an economic and cultural moment that transcended Las Vegas’s gambling industry.
“These women were joined by thousands of others across the country,” she says. “Their presence in the workforce by the ’70s created a watershed moment, not because of the majority’s activism, but because there were so many women who were not going to ignore opportunities any longer.”
Goodwin, who also leads UNLV’s Women’s Research Institute of Nevada, is currently on sabbatical conducting research for her next project on the implementation of equal opportunity policies in the West.
