A Dirty Year: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in Gilded Age New York by Bill Greer
English | April 7th, 2020 | ISBN: 1641602511 | 292 pages | True PDF | 40.61 MB
As 1872 opened, the New York Times headlined four stories that symptomized the decay in public morals that the editors so frequently decried: financier Jim Fisk was gunned down in a love triangle; suffragist and free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull was running for president; anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock battled smut dealers poisoning children's minds; and abortionists were thriving. Throughout the year these stories intertwined in unimaginable ways, pulling in others, both famous and infamous—suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Brooklyn's beloved preacher Henry Ward Beecher; the nation's richest tycoon, Cornelius Vanderbilt; and William Howe, preeminent counsel to the criminal element.