368 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates illustrations 24 cm
Type:
Books
Biography
Biographies
History
Place:
United States
États-Unis
Date:
2018
19th century
19e siècle
Contents:
Gold to be made -- A bright and brainy woman -- A bastard catch'd -- The left-hand road -- The wanton widow -- Not so easily handled -- What shall we do with our daughters? -- For the likes of me -- The needle, the school room, and the store -- A house of mercy -- A good woman -- Miss Pollard's ruin in Lexington -- Somebody's daughter -- A man of passion -- Hindered, not ruined -- The front parlor and the back gate -- The cavalier and the puritans -- Refusing to behave -- Redemption
Summary:
"In the summer of 1893, headlines across the United States screamed of one thing: a virtually unknown woman was suing a well-respected congressman for fifty thousand dollars. ... The Cincinnati Enquirer declared, 'Nothing in recent years has created such a social agitation.' In [this book], journalist Patricia Miller unveils and explores the unknown story of Madeline Pollard, whose suit illuminates a crucial moment in the history of women's rights. It was the culmination of a scandal ten years in the making. In the early 1880s, Colonel W.C.P. Breckinridge, a handsome, married, moralizing lawyer running for Congress, called on Madeline Pollard, a young student at the Wesleyan Female College, thus beginning a lengthy affair, one Pollard thought might someday end in marriage. When it didn't, she sued Breckinridge for breach of promise--and thereby revealed their affair, her past pregnancies, and her now-sullied reputation. The audacity of Madeline Pollard's suit utterly shocked the nation. Even more shocking: she won. As Miller tells Pollard's story, she also introduces other women worth knowing--from Maria Halpin, raped and sent to an insane asylum by the future president Grover Cleveland, to Nisba Breckinridge, the colonel's daughter and the first woman to receive a Ph. D. in political science from the University of Chicago--and charts the changes in attitudes about women and sex over the years. [This book] is a riveting chronicle of lost American history: Madeline Pollard's story is resonant and redemptive."--Jacket
