← Civics & Coffee: A History Podcast
Civics & Coffee: A History Podcast
Women's Secrets: The Double Standard Sporting House with Dr. Nancy Bernhard
00:34:45
Loading summary
Transcript29 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Civics and Coffee, a history podcast. The show all about United States history delivered to you and the time it takes to enjoy your morning cup of coffee. I'm your host, Alicia, a historian trained in United States history with a passion for telling both the known and unknown parts of America's past. So grab your coffee and get ready for some bite sized history. Hey everyone. Welcome back. I recently had the chance to sit down with historian and historical fiction author Dr. Nancy Bernard to talk about her Gilded Age novel, the Double Standards Sporting House. As you'll hear in our conversation, the book explores themes that may resonate today, including gender norms and the power and issues of journalism. Enjoy. Hello everyone. Joining me today is Dr. Nancy Bernhard. She is a journalism historian, yoga teacher and author. She recently turned her indignation over the sexual double standard into an engrossing historical novel rooted in the 19th century History of Tamity hall, titled the Double Standard Sporting House, which will be the focus of our conversation today. Welcome, Nancy.
- [01:20]
B
Thank you so much.
- [01:22]
A
Thank you so much for coming on. Let's go ahead and dive into this fantastic book. How did you decide to write a fictional tale about greed, prostitution and women in Gilded Age New York?
- [01:35]
B
Well, you have to actually go back to my adolescence, my teenage years. My grandmother, who was a very flamboyant, very fun human, she had been at flapper in 1920s New York. And when I was a teenager in the 1970s, she told me that when she went to visit one of her aunts in Manhattan, she lived in Far Rockaway in the suburbs of New York. And when she went in to visit her aunt on the Upper west side of New York, she discovered that this aunt be was a madam. This is what she told me. And I had no idea what to say to that. I think I'd probably change the subject, but I wondered about it over many years. You know, I, I studied history and occasionally I would wonder, how does a middle class girl from a very large supportive family, this Beedi Aunt Beatty was one of seven very close siblings of which my great grandmother was the oldest, how does that girl end up in the sex trade? And so I would, you know, it would flip through my mind every once in a while. And finally, at the beginning of the pandemic, I asked my father, who was then still alive, he was 88, what's the deal with Beedi? Was Beatty actually a madam? And he just about bust a gut laughing, the funniest thing he'd ever heard. His mother, fun as she was, tended to exaggerate everything. And it Turned out that Beatty lived with a married man. This man's wife had been long institutionalized, and I really wish I knew that story, but they lived together in this beautiful apartment on Riverside Drive. And when this man's wife died, they married and they spent their entire lives together, together, and were by all accounts, very happy. So it turned out, you know, my grandmother was basically slut shaming her on and, you know, but at that time, in the 20s, I mean, not so much in the 70s, but in the 20s, any woman who was not living with the blessings of married monogamy, heterosexual, married monogamy, was basically considered a sex worker. And my grandmother kind of carried that around with her. And it's funny because she was kind of a wild child herself, but that's, that's a whole other story. But anyway, I wandered around with this over decades with this question of how a middle class girl would end up in the sex trade. And as the, that first summer of the pandemic was starting to turn to winter here in Massachusetts, I thought, I need a project. So I really started to read. I really started to try to understand how a girl in 19th century New York would, would end up in the sex trade. And the answer, it turns out, is usually by no fault of their own. For many women, it was sheer poverty. Women had so little access to well paid work, there was almost no way to earn a living wage. If you were a single woman, you know, needlework or domestic service did not pay a living wage. And for a woman with some resources, with some family or some education, the answer is generally rape, assault, right? You would suffer an assault and then have no way to go home. You know, there was so much shame around it, you couldn't go back to the life that you had before. So in 1868 New York, when I ended up setting the book, 10% of women were actively engaged in some kind of sex work. And you can compare that to today where it's about 1%, because we have so many more ways to earn a living. And for, for the sum total of women who were alive in New York in 1868, 30% of them would have done sex work at some point. And often it was like as a supplemental wage, you know, to, to, to make ends meet. So a character began to take shape in my mind as I did this research. Someone who had a lot of skills and capabilities, turned out in medicine, somebody of good character who ends up on the wrong side of respectability, again by no fault of their own. And the women of an elite brothel would have had really great access to very powerful men who probably would have wildly underestimated them. So it's seemed like a good set of antagonists and it seemed like a good setup for a story. So that is how this book was born.
- [05:40]
A
Well, and that actually leads me to my next question, because you were talking about, you know, developing this character. One of the characters that you develop is one of the main character, Nell Hastings. Is this very strong, very. Just not what you would, not what you would expect in 19th century New York, the anti heroin heroine, Nell Hastings. So who provided the inspiration for your main character, Nell Hastings?
- [06:16]
B
Well, sad to say, nobody. We have no sources for these women, right? There were. In 1868, there were probably 600 brothels in New York of, of different quality, right? Could be very, you know, inexpensive, cheap. And it could be. There were many that were very elite, very premium, very expensive. But we have no primary sources whatsoever from these women. We know they were very accomplished. This was pretty much apart from Broadway or the very few women who were making money on Wall Street. This was the only way women had to accumulate real property was to run a brothel. So there were at least hundreds of them and they have been completely erased. So I believe that there were probably many capable and accomplished women in the demimonde, but we have no. And there's. So there's two reasons why we don't have any records for them. One would be that they were just reviled as beyond the pale of respectability. And they had no value, they had no standing. So it wouldn't be a priority for anybody to understand them. But also they had every incentive not to call attention to themselves, right? Secrecy protected them, you know, certainly from police, from investigation, from predators, from all kinds of things. So they would have gone out of their way. And this, you know, this is one of the main tools that Doc uses in the book to her advantages is these women are unseen. There are indirect sources about these women, but they're very flawed because they're almost all from men, right? There were public health doctors who were working hard to eradicate syphilis. Did they look at the patrons of sex workers? No, they only looked at the sex workers, right? There were religious reformers who found these women evil or contemptible or fallen or whatever version of that that they thought. And then sort of, most interestingly, there are, there are literally commercial guides to the sex workers of New York, these gentlemen's guides to nightlife, where there'd just be page after page after page of listings of brothels and descriptions of the charms of what they called the inmates. So none of. So we know something about these people, but nothing from their point of view. There, There are some memoirs that come from the West. There are many more memoirs that come from Europe because this was an accepted part of what the. How the, the nobility operated. But on the east coast of New York, of the. In New York, on the east coast of the U.S. philadelphia, Boston, Washington, we have no primary sources. So, Doc, I think I could make a case that there could have been women like her. She's a little bit of a fantasy for sure, but plausible. Definitely plausible. Yeah.
- [09:07]
A
Well, and Hastings is a madam, but she's also got some medical training. So can you talk about what the medical field looked like for women during this era? You know, what options were available to them if, if they wanted to pursue this work? And, and how did this kind of evolve over this time period?
- [09:27]
B
Right, so just to be clear, the doc runs the house. She runs this brothel in order to fund her free clinic. She's a medical practitioner uncredentialed. And there were, this was a big period of transition in the field. There were many different kinds of practitioners. And women's health, you know, you think it's bad now. It's plenty bad now. Way worse even then there were. There were legions of traditional healers and midwives who were trained by their mentors. And Doc, Doc's mother is a, Is a, Was a midwife, but she died young. And especially for rural women and poor, which was a. And the rural population was a bigger percentage of the population than it is now. And for poor women, these traditional healers would have been who. Who would have seen to the needs of. Of women's health. The, the historical novel Frozen river does a great job of portraying this a little bit earlier based on, on actual diaries of a midwife in Maine in the. In the 18th century. Midwife's Tale. It's great if people are interested in that. So it's a wonderful rendition of that. So, so this is very organic, just a system of training that evolves. Somebody would, would ask to be trained or be identified as having some talent, and that's how that would go. At the same time, there began to be eclectic colleges of medicine for women and eclectic medicine. Probably the closest thing now we would say would be homeopathy. It's herbal. There were a couple different reasons why these arose. One is that medicine itself was pretty brutal at that time. Right. They're using syphilis, using mercury to treat syphilis. Some practitioners were still Bleeding people, leeches. And so there was a. There was an ideological reason to just do herbs, but also the reasons of propriety around women practitioners. They didn't put their hands on anybody. There was no nakedness, right? There was no physical interaction between the practitioner and the patient. So herbal medicine was one way that women became doctors. There was also schools of nursing. There was a huge growth in nursing inspired by Florence Nightingale in the Civil War, but mostly that looked like hygiene and just care for people rather than actual practice of medicine. Now, the first women had been admitted to what we consider traditional or regular medical schools about 20 years before this. Elizabeth Blackwell famously earned a degree in 1849, but 20 years later, you could still pretty much count them one by one on your fingers. Elizabeth Blackwell in particular was not interested in treating poor women or certainly not interested in treating sex workers because she was trying to make the field safe for. For women. And by that, I'm, you know, I mean, completely divorced from sexuality. Right? Like, any hint of sexuality was going to torpedo her enterprise. So. And, and, you know, even for the, The. The hospitals that would treat sex workers, they often required, like, testimony on the part of some prominent man in the community that this person was worthy of care. I mean, it was just. It was really kind of astonishing how. How badly people were treated when they needed help. And, you know, this medicine was not very advanced by our standards. Germ theory was not accepted. It was. It was often very brutal. And these. The male doctors who dominated, say, the women's hospitals of the major cities, experimented on women freely and had experimented on slaves for sure, in the South. So lots of different fronts and sources of conflict within the profession. And this was the beginning of the period where it began to professionalize. So by the turn of the century, you start to have real licensure in medicine. But at this point, it was kind of the Wild West. Yeah.
- [13:23]
A
Well, one of the things that I particularly loved about this book is that it kind of touches on all of the things that, you know about the Gilded Age, right? You've got. You've got these women kind of discovering themselves. It's the era of the new women. She's emerging in this period. You have political corruption, and then you also have the. The showcasing of journalism. So this story really showcases journalism. So can you talk about how powerful was the. The media during this era?
- [13:54]
B
Yeah, well, New York City was a bit of a special case at this time, and there were many solid daily newspapers, you know, the Herald, the Tribune, the sun, the Times, the Evening Post. And this was A period that actually has a lot in common with our. Our press now, which is that it was before the ideology of objectivity took over. You know, the. The wire, when the wire services came in, that spawned this. This idea that that information was sort of neutral and they could sell information to all these different papers of political leanings. But at that time, you know, each. Everybody had their. Their sort of niche paper, kind of the way the Internet and cable television and all that has splintered the audience now. But the, you know, the papers were very influential, if they cared to be. And I should also say there was a. There were. There were a lot of sort of tabloid equivalents or People magazine equivalents or, you know, the. The National Police Gazette was very famous, which figures a little bit in the story, right? These were, you know, the true crime outlets of their day. And. And lots, probably lots more people read them than admitted they read them. So. So the press was very influential, if it cared to be. But mostly when it came to Tammany hall and this. This political machine that was in. That came to power just as the book is set. I mean, it had been in power. It came to its fullest power, I should say, with the tweed ring in 1868, there was very little countervailing power to Tammany Hall. They had basically bought the courts, they had bought the legislature, they bought the police, and they also literally bought much of the press. They just would pay off journalists to look the other way and not cover the immense pervasive corruption that was going on. And a lot of people understood that. They were really frustrated by the inability of institutions to stop Tammany. There was no purchased. There was no way to get, you know, leverage against them. Even when it's a majority of people who can see that. I mean, we, a lot of us maybe feel that now there's tremendous opposition to the prevailing power, but very little leverage to. To hold them accountable. Probably the most sustained attacks, certainly the most famous attacks against Tammany came from a cartoonist, Thomas Naston Harpers. And everybody who's taken high school history in the last hundred years has probably seen the reprints of the Tweed comics in their textbooks. But then a real milestone in the history of investigative journalism took place about three years after the events of this book, 1871, somebody inside Tammany hall got really mad, got pissed off at Tweed, and he had receipts, he had papers, and he took them to the New York Times. And that. That set of revelations enabled the first indictments of Tammany for corruption. It was around The New York, the construction of the New York courthouse. And that also kicked off the Times's legacy of investigative work and the whole kind of field of investigative journalism as a countervailing power to corrupt politicians. So yeah, I love journalism, love history journalism.
- [16:59]
A
And, and how does this story kind of expose the hypocrisy of gender norms during the late 19th century?
- [17:05]
B
Well, you know, I guess the thing that I always come back to is that women's exclusion from work, except for menial work, leaving them so few other choices is really the root of everything about gender and the ways it played out that just foreclosing of being able to support oneself and then, and then, I mean, I mean the assumption is that a woman will marry and that her, her economic needs will be taken care of by her husband. But that's a, that's a very risky proposition for a woman, right? You don't know if your husband's going to be able to provide. You don't know if he's going to be kind. You're totally dependent on him. It's always a crapshoot. So women are left carrying all the, all the responsibility, all the work of reproduction, right? Women have, have all the work around sex and reproduction and all the shame about sex and reproduction and also suffer. Incredible. You know, like now sexual assault is one in four women like full blown sexual assault. You know, I'd say 100% of women suffer some form of predation or harassment. But one in four, it was. We don't have any kind of statistics about what it was in the mid 19th century, but we can assume it was probably higher. And that's just kind of the brutal icing on the cake. So women can't support themselves. They carry all the shame and responsibility of the messiness of sex and reproduction. And then one of the big transitions that's happening at this time is we have the creation of a class of commercial workers, especially in New York. So men are coming from small towns, they are living independently for the first time. There's this class of clerks and salesmen and people who are in the burgeoning manufacturing industries living away from home for the first time, right? So they, they need someone to make their meals. They need somebody to make the home where they're going to stay. So there's this enormous boarding house industry that, that rises up to fulfill that need. And then they need entertainment. They need something to do in the evening. So there are, there's this wonderful institution in New York called Concert Saloons right there. It's like a Bar, but also theater. And any number of different kinds of acts, from minstrel acts to music to skits to all kinds of things, would be happening. And the, the people who are serving the drinks and the food are called waiter girls, some large proportion of them being prostitutes, but not all of them. They're paid by the drink that they sell. So you can imagine what the culture in these institutions was like. And so here's this class of young men away from home for the first time with disposable income and, and hundreds of thousands of young women who have no way to make a living. So this creates a class of, of sex workers, right? Sometimes sex workers, full time sex workers, sex workers at every level. So, so this commercial, this creation of this class of commercial men creates the demand and this class of sex workers. And then you also have, you know, an exacerbation, I would say, of the bifurcation of women into two types, right. You have respectable women who are suitable to marry, and then you have all these other women. And it's a commercial thing that happens. So, you know, being, being a wife wasn't always a big picnic either. It's incredibly constrained and restricted and, and you're so dependent. So all of this hypocrisy around gender, I would say, arises because of men pursuing their own wealth and pleasure. Right. Their men's prerogatives get reified into this, this way of seeing gender. Definitely.
- [21:07]
A
Well, and as I mentioned in the introduction, you are a professionally trained historian, but this is a historical fiction. So I'm wondering, as a professional historian, how does the research and writing process kind of differ when you are preparing historical fiction versus trying to, you know, just write a nonfiction book?
- [21:28]
B
Yeah, yeah, Interesting question. So in addition to researching as a historian, does, you know, we try to understand what the sources we have are and how well and in whose interest those sources represent the past? Right. So that's always going on. I also read to feed my imagination, right. I want to know how it looked. I want to know what it was like to stand in that world and how people understood their choices. So sometimes I have very specific questions, like, you know, what's the standard of care for syphilis? What show did Lydia Thompson and the Blonde Belles of Burlesque do after Ixion?
- [22:04]
A
Right.
- [22:05]
B
If, if you're a poor woman needing medical care, where would you go? So very specific questions. And then, of course, I'm also reading for story, for things that are going to help me create the story. So in this case, it was a half sentence. In a book that gave me Tammany. Like, I didn't go into the research thinking that I was going to work on Tammany, but there was a very pathbreaking book on the history of the sex trade written by the historian Marilyn Woodhill. I think it's called. Their Sisters Keepers came out, I don't know, 30 years ago or something. And there was a half sentence in that book that I will actually quote to you. It's part of a sentence. It says the 1870s, when the city's political machine gained control of the trade, thus ending a brief but unique era when prostitution was managed predominantly by females. So I thought, oh, so the 1860s is kind of the culmination of the time where women are actually running this. This industry, and they would have accrued the most power through it. And then. So I. Once I. I understood you talking about Tammany, and I started reading about Tammany. I tried to find out from secondary sources, because this was still the lockdown, what this change looked like when Tammany took it over, I assumed it would be more trafficking, more pimping, more brutal treatment of women. But. And had I been writing nonfiction, had I been writing history, I would have gone into the archives and tried to find documentation about what that looked like. But I felt like at that point, I felt like I knew enough to set the book in 1868 and understand what was going to come later. So I guess I would say my M.O. as an academic historian writing historical fiction is if there is documentation about something, I'm going to respect it. I'm not going to mess with it. I included mention of a potter's field in the book that didn't actually exist for, like, three or four years after the book was set. And it pained me, and a friend of mine was like, it's okay. Do that. It's all right. So, you know, I take advantage in tiny little ways, but in the. Certainly in the large things, I absolutely respect the historical record. And then once I feel like I really have an understanding of what's happening or where there's a lack of sources, I feel free to make it up. Yeah.
- [24:43]
A
And then I think this is kind of a broad, large question, and I apologize because it's. You know, as soon as I wrote it, I was like, oh, this. This is probably unfair for her. As I was reading this, I just felt like, oh, this is such a great. This is such a great gateway. I think, as for people who read historical fiction to have a greater understanding, and it's A great gateway to understand the Gilded Age. Gilded Age historical fiction story about greed, corruption and double standards kind of help readers better contextualize the past.
- [25:20]
B
Yeah, I, when the first time I read that question, I was like, yeah, that's a really big. But, you know, as I thought about it, I actually do have an answer to it. And, you know, it's, it's a, it's a zoomed out kind of answer. But this was the, the beginnings of what we understand as mass society, right? Like manufacturing is, is becoming large scale. The, you know, New York was built two blocks a year going north up the grid. In the years after the Civil War, half a million Irish immigrants had landed in, in a city of half a million people, right? There was an explosion of growth and concentration of resources and the society and the culture that grew up in that had a lot of pluses and a lot of minuses, right? It's like a, for better or worse creation of urban mass culture. So people are leaving small towns, whether in, in Ireland or Italy later or, you know, Eastern Europe or, or Vermont or Pennsylvania. And those towns had a lot of restriction, right? They were, they were cramped and there was a lot of small mindedness, but they also had a lot of accountability for sexual behavior. If you, you know, if, if you were a young couple, you were fooling around and somebody got pregnant, you were going to get married, right? But, but the anonymity of the big city frees people to explore their sexuality in a, in a less encumbered, less observed way. But also, you know, then women are left holding the responsibility for whatever comes out of that. So, you know, it was an incredibly unequal and unjust set of circumstances that women were entering into this freer life for the women who could take advantage of it, like Doc and the harlots who work for the double standard spring house, who had the skills and the abilities to take those few opportunities that they were given and kind of run with them. It could be a really good life. Most people didn't have those opportunities. And so I guess I would say the story, you know, it marks those gains and losses. And it also is a milestone in the creation of a society that we are still living in now where we have a culture that enables and rewards predatory men, right? Every day the story is in the news. Every day the same story is in the news. And I didn't, you know, I wasn't paying attention to Epstein when I conceived the book, but holy cow, it turns out to be timely. So, yeah, the inequality coupled with freedom set Us up.
- [28:19]
A
Yep. Yeah. Well done. Well, well said. Well said. And I apologize because it was a big question. And it's good.
- [28:25]
B
It's good. I'm glad you made me grapple with that.
- [28:30]
A
And what do you hope readers take away from your book?
- [28:34]
B
I was hoping that readers would see through patriarchy a little bit better. It's the water we swim in and the degree to which you can see where it came from. You know, we're never going to be able to pin that fully down. Although very valiant historians are trying. So see patriarchy a little better, see the costs. So all of humanity from the exclusion of half of humanity from most of human endeavor. Right. Women are always excluded from the full scope of human endeavor. They're reduced to their reproductive function. They're blamed for carrying that function of reproduction. And it's really, it's the greatest, I believe it's the greatest squandering of human potential that in history. I mean, slavery is also equally terrible, I would say, but. But it's been more evident that slavery was this massive injustice. Not to say that we have done any. Done nearly enough to. To make up for it, but it's such a squandering of human potential. And so. And the other thing I would say is I hope readers take away an appreciation for the kinds of things that women have been allowed to be good at. Right. Compassion, healing, community. Right. Women. You know, these are things that women have been relegated to. But an elite sex worker makes a profession out of that. Right. Like these. These unmoored men need companionship. They need caretaking. Right. Sometimes these relationships are very tender and often led to marriage. I wish I knew what percentage of those relationships led to marriage, but, you know, it was not uncommon. So I would say if we could bring some value to the things that women have been allowed to do, some more value to pay people well for, say, teaching or, you know, caregiving, that would be great.
- [30:39]
A
And where should people go when they finish your book and they want to learn more about you and the work that you do?
- [30:45]
B
Well, I have a website that is my name, nancybernheart.com I'm on most of the socials. I would say Instagram. My author page on Instagram is probably the most active. Yeah, I'm easy to find.
- [30:59]
A
And we'll put all that in the show notes for the episode. So we've tried to keep the story fairly spoiler free other than to say it's a fantastic Gilded Age story. There's some very strong women in there, so definitely be sure to pick it up. But is there anything that we haven't covered or touched on that you want to make sure future readers know before they pick it up?
- [31:24]
B
Well, I would say the book does deal with sexual assault. Right. And I, I'm very careful. It never happens in scene. It always happens secondhand and in the context of someone who has suffered it as an injury. Right. So there's nothing sensationalistic about it. Always a. It's always a medical problem or a psychological problem that, that people bring a lot of. Of expertise to. And, and I would just say that the, you know, we talk a lot about trauma now, healing from sexual assault. And thank goodness, right? It's. There are a lot of healing modalities that didn't exist 50 years ago. We have functional MRIs and we have eye movement desensitization therapies, and we have lots of different somatic therapies and talk therapies, and that's all great. And so part of the way I came to this topic is I'm a yoga teacher and I work with assault survivors. And all the things that we know, all the things that are contemporary now, there were some version of them in 1868. There was some understanding. You don't need an MRI machine to know that memory doesn't work right after a trauma. You don't need, you know, a sophisticated understanding of the nervous system to know that people get triggered. Right. So. And there was a lot of work done with Civil War veterans. And so I was at pains to. To be not anachronistic. Doc becomes by default. She becomes a pioneer in healing from sexual assault because she treats so many people who have suffered it. And that part of the book, I think, is to me, really dear and fascinating that without the standardization and standards of care that we have, people have been healing from this throughout history. And women have often been these caretakers and these deliverers of care for each other. And I hope that survivors can read the book comfortably and find something in it for themselves.
- [33:41]
A
So to the listeners out there, be sure to pick up a copy of the Double Standard Sporting House. It is an immersive piece of historical fiction that will send you down the more than one rabbit research hole. So again, thank you, Nancy, for spending your time with me.
- [33:57]
B
Thank you so much.
- [33:59]
A
If you are interested in historical fiction from the Gilded Age and want to dive into a story about strong women pushing Boundari, then look for the Double Standard Sporting House wherever you get your books. And just a friendly reminder, you can always find the books I discuss with guests on my storefront through bookshop.org be sure to head on over to the website at www.civicsandcoffee.com for more information. Thanks, peeps. I'll see you next time. Thanks for sitting down with me as I explored this chapter of American history. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and share with your friends. I look forward to our next cup of coffee together.