Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "Powerless" Woman Who Took on Washington

By Patricia Miller

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Book Overview

"I'll take my share of the blame. I only ask that he take his."

In Bringing Down the Colonel, the journalist Patricia Miller tells the story of Madeline Pollard, an unlikely nineteenth-century women's rights crusader. After an affair with a prominent politician left her "ruined," Pollard brought the man--and the hypocrisy of America's control of women's sexuality--to trial. And, surprisingly, she won.

Pollard and the married Colonel Breckinridge began their decade-long affair when she was just a teenager. After the death of his wife, Breckinridge asked for Pollard's hand--and then broke off the engagement to marry another woman. But Pollard struck back, suing Breckinridge for breach of promise in a shockingly public trial. With premarital sex considered irredeemably ruinous for a woman, Pollard was asserting the unthinkable: that the sexual morality of men and women should be judged equally.

Nearly 125 years after the Breckinridge-Pollard scandal, America is still obsessed with women's sexual morality. And in the age of Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein, we've witnessed fraught public reckonings with a type of sexual exploitation unnervingly similar to that experienced by Pollard. Using newspaper articles, personal journals, previously unpublished autobiographies, and letters, Bringing Down the Colonel tells the story of one of the earliest women to publicly fight back.

Format:Hardcover

Language:English

ISBN:0374252661

ISBN13:9780374252663

Release Date:November 2018

Publisher:Sarah Crichton Books

Length:384 Pages

Weight:1.40 lbs.

Dimensions:1.3" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Related Subjects

History Law