American Madam - Part I

Given her middle-class Eisenhower-era upbringing as a daughter of a conservative nuclear family, Bella Cummins seems an unlikely person to have become America’s longest-serving proprietor of a business providing sexual services. But here she is today, the self-described 'American Madam,' owner of Bella’s Hacienda Ranch: a legal brothel in Nevada.In Part I of Bella’s two-volume memoir and manifesto - American Madam: One Woman’s Journey to Empowerment as a Proprietor of Sexual Services - she chronicles her journey as Shauna Lynch: a socially awkward young woman in love with horses, seeking her Mr. Right in high school and college in the chauvinistic America of the 1960s, then struggling doggedly and often despairingly through the 1970s and ’80s as a single mother toiling in a series of menial day and night jobs to support herself and her daughter. Never finding the stability she craves as one husband or boyfriend after another proves to be a disastrous failure as a partner and provider, she finally accepts the marriage proposal of David Andrews: a cocky older man with a masonry business who presents himself as wealthy.This sets the stage for major surprises in Part II - including a career Shauna never could have imagined in her wildest dreams . . . leading to her transformation into 'Madam Bella.'American Madam - tracing one woman’s journey from impoverished single mother to economic liberation and role as an espouser of a humanistic 'sexual evolution' - is a book for the 21st century.