Assume you’re a “true woman” of the Gilded Age and fate has handed you a raw deal. You had been carefully trained in the virtues of submission, self-sacrifice, timidity, and passive acquiescence to your lot. You were a pale hothouse flower, too frail for the rough usages of the world. Hence the fainting couch and laudanum.
Miriam Leslie, though, was not the fainting type. She was raised in a rough school and developed hide and life smarts at an early age. Illegitimate and likely biracial, she lived a pillar to post existence in a disheveled household with an absentee, bankrupt father. At fourteen she took matters in her hands and petitioned the court to make an uncle her legal guardian in the absence of “some proper person” to look after her.
She steeled herself with a big sense of self and cultivated bulldog tenacity, resilience, chutzpa, and cunning. She needed all the armor she could muster for the crises and obstacles ahead. She walked the mean streets of Manhattan at eighteen, and over a lifetime endured spousal abuse, two business failures, workplace prejudice, two business failures, Society snubs, courtroom battles, cutthroat competitors, and theft of her publishing company. Poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox complained that she could be “cold as an iceberg.” Miriam admitted she was a “match for Satan.” But in the Gilded Age you couldn’t be a creampuff and “angel in the house” and survive. Not with enemies at the door and a crush of serial setbacks hardships, and disasters. It came with a cost, but Mrs. Leslie came out roaring, a victor on a cruel, uneven playing field
Learn more about Miriam’s life and New York City in the Gilded Age in Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age
Available Now
(This text content is a transcript of the images above)
The post Survival Guide for Women in the Gilded Age appeared first on Betsy Prioleau.
]]>America’s first celebrities, comparable to film and rock stars today, were the social uber-rich. These cliquish patricians were the envy, style setters, and aspiration of the masses. Pity the new monied who strove to join the inner circle. Miriam Leslie was one, determined to breach high society, the Astor-ocracy.
By the mid-seventies when New York was seeing an invasion of “goldfish,” wealthy industrial barons and their families, the old-line Caroline Schermmerhorn Astor decided things had gone too far. She and her majordomo Ward McAllister, created an elite social citadel of the well born favored few. It was a masterpiece of power by exclusion: twenty-five “men of breeding,” the Patriarchs, to vet members and Mrs. Astor’s annual ball for the four hundred “right people.” Strivers and fat cat arrivistes clambered for invitations. Not to be included was social death. But, as McAllister sniffed: “the whole secret of the success of these . . . balls lay in making them select.”
More elegant equipages, costumes, entertainments, and real estate didn’t work, as Miriam discovered. She spent fortunes on a Saratoga estate and fetes, a Worth couturier wardrobe, and adopted an English accent. But she was doomed on all counts. She worked in the glare of the business world, was a three-time divorcee, unpedigreed, and who knows what else.
Miriam, however, didn’t sob in her pillow. She savaged the “crested nobility” in print, squared her shoulders, and one-upped the Four Hundred with a fiancé who was a Spanish marquis and a title of her own, Baroness de Bazus. If it was bogus, who knew? She could snub back the “haughty ladies” and swank with the best of them.
Learn more about Miriam’s life and New York City in the Gilded Age in Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age
Available Now
(This text content is a transcript of the images above)
The post Social Mountaineering in the Gilded Age appeared first on Betsy Prioleau.
]]>What could a woman do in the Gilded Age if she wanted to discard a tiresome husband—a drunk, abuser, womanizer, or bore? Not much. Divorce was unmentionable in polite society, a disgrace, a “scandal and severe humiliation” for women. A divorcee was a pariah, cut cold by the “best people” and excluded from the first circles.
Not only was she a social outcast, divorce was nearly impossible to procure. It wasn’t enough that a husband brandished guns in the house or visited the maid upstairs each night, a woman had to produce clear proof of adultery by New York State law. This was before the tell-tale cyberworld and digital footprints.
Another woman might have been daunted. But Miriam Squire wanted to marry Frank Leslie and her husband, E. G., had been a fifth wheel too long. The CIA couldn’t have orchestrated the sting better. She hired two colleagues from the Frank Leslie Publishing Company, illustrators matt Morgan and Dewitt Clinton Hitchcock, to invite E. G. to a “grand dinner.” They led him to an elegant brownstone on Twenty-Seventh Street, where they were greeted by a stout exquisitely upholstered matron. Soon two “lady boarders” appeared in a maroon and gilt parlor in decolleté gowns who entertained the men with champagne and naughty songs.
E. G. had landed in one of the most notorious “houses of convenience” in New York. After an elaborate supper and bottles of wine and spirits, the two women led E. G. upstairs where the illustrators joined them thirty minutes later. The drawings said it all: the false husband nude in a chair with the two “lady boarders” sprawled at his feet.
Miriam even evaded a trial. Her lawyer gave E. G. a choice. Either the pictures were published in Leslie’s Day’s Doings (a tabloid) or he agreed to a quick divorce. He was legally forbidden to marry again, while his wife could remarry whenever she wished. Not a move the average Gilded Age lady could pull off but Miriam wasn’t average; she was an arch-operator—privately and professionally.
(This text content is a transcript of the images above)
Learn more about Miriam’s life and New York City in the Gilded Age in Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age
Available now
The post How to Dispose of a Husband in the Gilded Age appeared first on Betsy Prioleau.
]]>Looking great wasn’t easy in the Gilded Age. If you were Mrs. Frank Leslie, the fashion czar and style icon of her day, you had a grueling second shift—torturous costumes and fittings, mountainous wardrobe requirements, and fresh styles every season. Plus, there was the fine line to walk. To exhibit “class,” a lady had to be stylish and expensively attired, but within bounds—nothing too showy, too flamboyant.
The matter was serious. A Gilded Age woman was defined and ranked by her dress. The demands were huge, dozens of ensembles a season, at least four costume changes a day, none of which could be worn twice. Worth was the preferred couturier with gowns that could run into the thousands. In full rig, a woman could barely walk or breathe.
Mrs. Leslie began her preparations for a typical salon evening with a brutal piece of combat armor, a swan-billed, embroidered corset with a dozen grommets, a curved busk (an early push-up bra), and elastic harness with a belaying pin that squeezed waists into a desired twenty-two inches.
Over this she hoisted a flounced petticoat that was draw-stringed in back. Next came a lace camisole and tight bodice clasped with hooks and eyes, then a heavy brocade skirt and train. Total weight: fifteen pounds, excluding diamond chains, earrings, and stacks of bracelets and a Spanish diamond comb.
Was she out of bounds? Overdressed, bedizened beyond the limits of good taste? Trussed up, immobile? All of the above but she was the arch-arbiter of fashion and must pay the price, cut a dash, flash her wealth and power, and out-glamor the competition.
Learn more about Miriam’s life and New York City in the Gilded Age in Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age
Available March 29, 2022
(This text content is a transcript of the images above)
The post Fifteen Pounds and What Do You Get? Life as a Gilded Age Fashionista appeared first on Betsy Prioleau.
]]>A woman in the Gilded Age—respectable or unrespectable—had to know how to land a man. He was her life support unless she were an heiress since women had no financial rights or viable means of earning a living wage. The experts in the business were “ladies of the evening,” the professionals who specialized in the arcana of seduction. The upper crust, the virtuosos, became wealthy, and earned a modicum of independence, but the competition was fierce. You had to know some very sophisticated ropes, as the young Miriam Follin learned, to get there. Fortunately, the greatest courtesan of the nineteenth century came to her aid—the mankilling sensation, Lola Montez.
In 1856 Lola adopted Miriam as her “sister” and gave her a crash tutorial on the art of seduction—the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime. She taught her the “secrets of a ladies’ toilet”—sophisticated makeup and the value of elegant dress and accessories. Next came “graceful and fascinating deportment.” But the most important lessons in erotic empowerment were psychological: captivating conversation, “sympathy,” animation and a flirtatious interplay of delight and difficulty, and the craft of fascination.
When Mrs. Leslie was at the height of her powers, a veteran of brilliant love affairs, enamored suitors, and duels for her favors, she advised Gilded age women. “Hold yourself back and your lover will pursue; remain queen of your position and he will make you queen of his.” She itemized the Art of Love in an essay. Besides work, love was one of Miriam’s specialties—a survival skill in a patriarchal world pitted against her and other women. She had Lola Montez to thank for it—and her own lovesmarts and inborn charisma.
Learn more about Miriam’s life and New York City in the Gilded Age in Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age
Available March 29, 2022
(This text content is a transcript of the images above)
The post Siren Training appeared first on Betsy Prioleau.
]]>The post Angel in the House, Jade in the Workplace appeared first on Betsy Prioleau.
]]>In Mrs. Leslie’s day, there were two kinds of women, period: the good and bad sort. A “true woman” was a domestic angel, dedicated to home, family, and good works and the hallowed private sphere. Fragile and ethereal with a smaller brain, she submitted to her husband’s authority and lived to serve, soothe, and inspire. She was a pure vessel, without “sexual feeling of any kind.”
The other type—the woman who bucked the cult of womanhood and stepped into public life as a Jezebel, virago, a “cesspool of the combined forces of [evil].” If she entered the brawl of the marketplace, as Miriam did as editor in chief of two fashion magazines, then head of the Frank Leslie Empire, she faced disgrace. The editor of the Household Magazine warned that “should women make speeches, edit papers, and hold office” they unsexed themselves and faced social exile. Never mind making free use of her sexuality. Female desire was an aberration and to fool around, dishonor the marriage bed, or divorce was to fall into the pit of infamy.
The wonder is that Miriam got away with it all. How she pulled it off was a masterpiece. She manufactured a persona that ran rings around the gender police and public censure. She assumed the role of the ultrafeminine Victorian lady, disdained gossip, and cloaked herself in mystery. Who could possibly have detected a “free luster” and high-powered tycoon under the “gracious garments of womanhood?”
Learn more about Miriam’s Life in Betsy Prioleau’s novel, Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age
Available March 29, 2022
(This text content is a transcript of the images above)
The post Angel in the House, Jade in the Workplace appeared first on Betsy Prioleau.
]]>The post Lying About Your Life appeared first on Betsy Prioleau.
]]>Mrs. Frank Leslie was a titan of her time– one of the most famous, celebrated women of the Gilded Age. For twenty years she ran the largest publishing empire in America in an all-male industry and made a fortune. The “Empress of Journalism,” she was the fashion arbiter of her generation, an author, a lecturer, social leader and born lady. “I was raised,” she said, “on a plantation,” nursed by a dear “old mammy” and brought up in “formal courtesy” by her genteel mother and cosmopolitan father, a prominent cotton broker. Then married at fourteen to the great publisher Frank Leslie.
But what was America in the postbellum years except an opportunity to reinvent yourself? To make it up as you go along, be who you like and nobody the wiser.
And her story is one for the books. Miriam Leslie, in fact, was born illegitimate—likely to an enslaved Black woman (the “mammy”?)—and grew up in poverty with a chaotic home life. Her father was a congenital drifter and bankrupt and her “mother” boarded men “no questions asked.” By eighteen, Miriam was working as a sex professional, already a veteran of a shotgun marriage, sugar daddy, and escapades on the stage with infamous courtesan, Lola Montez.
If there were exposés—and there were—who would believe them? After all, Mrs. Frank Leslie as a “trademark,” and established “public idol” who dressed and behaved like a duchess. Nobody did it better than Mrs. Leslie, the past master of masquerade.
Learn more about Miriam’s Life in Betsy Prioleau’s novel, Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age.
Available March 29, 2022.
(This text content is a transcript of the images above)
The post Lying About Your Life appeared first on Betsy Prioleau.
]]>At barely seventeen Miriam Florence Follin was thrown on her own resources in New York City. Her uncle had renounced his guardianship, her father disappeared into Mexico on another doomed financial mission, leaving her and her mother alone without support and the rent due. What were her options?
Opportunities for women in the early 1850s in Manhattan were few and thankless. Seamstresses, flower-makers, map-colorers, straw braiders, and book folders endured “never-ending daily toil” under harsh bosses for as little as seventy-five cents a week.
Sex workers, on the other hand, earned an average of five dollars a night and could free-lance part time. An estimated fifty-thousand women practiced prostitution in the city mid-century—ten to twenty percent of the female population.
Miriam changed her name to “Minnie” and entered the trade, via a number of possible routes. A Dr. Collyer hired women to pose in “tableaux vivants” after which the “model artists” could arrange rendezvous at the Bowery hotel, “no references required.” Assignation places abounded: “naughty third tiers” in theaters, restaurants with private rooms, and the “public balls” she attended. When she grew skilled enough (compliments of tutorials by the great courtesan Lola Montez) to rise in the ranks, she landed a congressman who bought her a townhouse and found a distinguished husband, E. G. Squire at trysting spot, Castle Garden.
By 1870, New York City prostitution was ubiquitous, and a successful madam could net as much as $200 a night and retire in luxury. There were about five hundred brothels and men could buy A Gentleman’s Companion Guide to these pleasure houses.
Miriam never lost her sympathy for “soiled doves” and translated and produced Alexander Dumas’ The Demimonde, a comedy about a triumphant lady of pleasure.
Learn more about Miriam’s life and New York City in the Gilded Age in Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age
Available March 29, 2022
(This text content is a transcript of the images above)
The post Soiled Doves and the Sexual Underworld appeared first on Betsy Prioleau.
]]>