The Scarlet Sisters Quotes

“When Pat Schroeder, a Harvard Law graduate, ran for office in 1972, the headlines read "Housewife" or "Mother" runs for Congress. When facing one indignant male colleague after another who demanded how she could be both a member of Congress and a mother, she said, "Because I have a brain and a uterus and both work.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“When facing one indignant male colleague after another who demanded how she could be both a member of Congress and a mother, she said, “Because I have a brain and a uterus and both work.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Marriage is the grave of love.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Henry Ward Beecher used the parade and the IWA’s eight-hour-day battle to hector the working poor from the pulpit. Fewer hours would tend “to make men feel that work is not a good thing… hard knocks, and a good many of them” were the only way to “carve out independent fortunes.” Beecher admitted that underpaid workers could not make enough in an eight-hour day to advance from their lowly state at their present pay, but he neglected to denounce the owners who paid them so poorly. Working longer hours was his Christian solution.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“retraced the familiar milestones with a sarcastic edge: “They dabbled in spiritualism, took up finance, and with the supposed aid of Commodore Vanderbilt founded a brokerage house in Broad Street, sponsored eugenics and equal rights, and generally impressed themselves on the public. Then they both went to England and married men with large fortunes.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“One editorial summed up a general feeling: pupils were going to mourn the loss of this “natural” education that “made the world a wonderful place” and a return to schools bound by rules and “copy-book maxims.” Still, parents were warned that they could be prosecuted if they did not remove their children from Victoria and Zula’s school and return them to a school holding the required Certificate of Efficiency.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Zula and Victoria tried a “back to the land” collective, encouraging local women to grow vegetables. It was not a success. Backward education committees refused to back their next move: a progressive school that would start with prekindergarten. In addition to basics, they would emphasize painting, music, carpentry, sewing, cooking, basket making, and physical education. They would also provide swings and seesaws, unheard of in rural schools. When the school board refused to participate, Victoria and Zula started the school with their own money. By 1908 it was attracting children from three miles away. However, the two-year experiment crashed in 1909 after a board of educators refused to give the school a “Certificate of Efficiency”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Sir Francis received his baronetcy for his charitable work, the major example being Alexandra House, which was named for Her Royal Highness, the Princess of Wales. Here young women of limited means could study art, literature, and music, “protected from harm” in a lavish home that housed one hundred and fifty and had cost millions to build. Sir Francis began the construction of Alexandra House in 1884. Tennie soon became an influential champion. With all the pomp of royalty, Alexandra House was officially dedicated in the spring of 1887 by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, who would become King Edward VII on the death of his mother, Queen Victoria. The handsome building occupied the entire block opposite Albert Hall and contained a concert hall, a ninety-foot-long dining room, a drawing room, a counsel room, a library, a gymnasium, and an “American elevator.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Cook was vigorously prepossessing—“tall, long bearded, strikingly handsome”—and exhibited an intriguing combination of “old worldliness” and a “briskness of manner and absence of ceremony.” Despite his colossal wealth, he liked to twit upper-class snobs by carrying brown paper parcels through the streets and walking to and from the railroad station. In a discussion, he could appear reticent, but he would then end it firmly, quietly, and politely: “That subject will not bear further discussion.” It was certain that neither Francis nor Tennie had ever met anyone like the other, and both were entranced.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Francis Cook, considered in 1869 one of the three richest men in England. Tennie”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“On March 26, 1871, French workers cheered as the socialist red flag waved atop the Tuileries Palace. The Commune lasted less than three months against the army of the Third French Republic. Communard cannons were set amid barricades made from cobblestones and mattresses, some on the steep hills of Montmartre. The last barricades were smashed during the “Bloody Week” massacre beginning May 18. Immediate executions, death in prisons, and exile followed. “An orgy of killing took place. Many innocent were killed,” mistaken for Communards, including chimney sweeps “on the assumption that their hands had been blackened by gunpowder.” In two prisons, some 2,300 were said to be shot in two days. As reprisals continued, even anti-Communard newspapers implored “Let us kill no more!” Some 25,000 Communards were allegedly killed, another 6,000 were executed or died in prison, and 7,500 were exiled.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Monarchist leaders of the Republic fled Paris, and workers and socialists elected the Paris Commune as an independent government. The Communards called for labor reforms, separation of church and state, and free education for all, with emphasis on girls’ schools, since women had been so deprived of education.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“The New York press mercilessly mocked Tilton’s screed. The World headlined its tirade “The Queen of Quacks” and Tilton’s words “hideous rubbish.” Harper’s Weekly hooted: “If apples are wormy this year, and grapes mildew, and duck’s eggs addle… it may all be ascribed to the unhallowed influence of Mr. Tilton’s Life of Victoria Woodhull.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Woodhull then continued “at race-horse speed, and as if she feared that something would again interpose.” Here reports break down. Either she was asked or she posed the rhetorical question “Are you a free lover?” “Yes, I am a free lover!” she shouted. “I have an inalienable constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please!” Hisses grew louder, but Woodhull continued: “and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere; and I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but as a community to see that I am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing less.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“A man with long hair and green spectacles had a “decidedly free love look,” and “several young ladies of very bad behavior” were “evidently professional.” They coexisted with many “respectable looking people.” A redheaded girl grabbed a seat, threw off a soggy shawl, and grumped, “I hope, by gosh, I haven’t come here for nothing in all this rain.” She would not be disappointed.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“The health system was also skewed for profit. She presciently noted, “It is the direct interest of the physician that sickness shall prevail, since the people pay the doctors for treatment, not for health.” If patients had a “contract by the year for treatment,” it would be in the “direct interest of the physician to preserve them in the best possible health,” as a healthy patient would be alive to continue paying the annual fee.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Fashionable women, on the other hand, went to “enameling studios,” where the face and bust were coated with dangerous enamel, a semi-paste composed of arsenic or white lead. For $10 to $15, a woman could get a coating that lasted a few days. A shellacking that lasted six months cost between $400 and $600—more than most laborers’ annual salary—to retain the dangerous ethereal whiteness. It was not explained how, or if, they’d wash their face after application.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Every era breeds some rebellion with the past, and Queen Victoria was crowned in 1838 amid a backlash against an “age of debauchery,” when upper-class males routinely kept mistresses. In the Victorian era, the image of the happy family, chaste couples amid the “respectability” of polite society, was acclaimed. And by 1870, reformers were once again fighting crime, obscenity, debauchery, and prostitution as the post–Civil War period mocked much of the Victorian myth. Yet hypocrisy hadn’t faded. Despite fashion that paraded plumped-up breasts, women were supposed to be horrified at naked statues in art museums, legs were never to be seen, and the lower half of the body was called the “nether regions.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“There were “prostitutes” whom the sisters did despise, but not those mentioned in The Gentleman’s Companion: they were scathing about the underlying hypocrisy of high-society women who sold themselves for profitable marriages. “What a commentary upon the divinity of marriage are the watering places during the summer seasons!” scoffed Victoria. “The mercenary ‘mammas’ trot out their daughters on exhibition, as though they were so many stud of horses, to be hawked to the highest bidder. It’s the man who can pay the most money who is sought; it makes no difference how he got it, nor what are his antecedents… To him who bids highest… the article is knocked down… this is the ruling spirit, not at watering places only but in so-called best society everywhere. Marriages of love become rarer year after year, while those of convenience are proportionately on the increase… and we prate of the holy marriage covenant!”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island, was a nineteenth-century hellhole that housed prisoners, debtors, and the insane.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Woodhull called for a one-term presidency, monetary and tax reform, an eight-hour workday, welfare for the poor, national education for children, and a repeal of the death penalty. The platform also included a red flag: “All laws shall be repealed which are made use of by Government to interfere with the rights of adult individuals to pursue happiness as they may choose.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Anthony remarked with some surprise that the press “had nothing very dreadful to say against you.” The older woman knew full well what newspapers could do. She had endured years of humiliation, described as “an ungainly hermaphrodite… with an ugly face and shrill voice.” Eggs were thrown at her when she tried to speak, and she was hung in effigy three times. Recently she had been called a leader “of the delirium of unreason known as the Woman’s Cause.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“The concept of magnetic healing began in the 1770s, when the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer—whose name was the origin of the word mesmerized—articulated a “form of psychic healing that included both magnetic healing and hypnotism.” He believed that a force or magnetic fluid linked all beings. “This was not so different from Hindu prana or Chinese chi. His method of laying on of hands and giving suggestions to patients led to the development of therapeutic hypnotism.” Mesmer presciently believed that mental attitudes often accompanied physical illnesses and that it was vital for physicians and patients to be in sympathy with one another. He used the French word rapport—not then common in the United States—to connote “harmony” or “connection.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Spiritualism became a religion, with Spiritualist churches springing up across the country as freethinkers revolted against harsh authoritarian Christian orthodoxy.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Above all, Spiritualism was a breakthrough for intelligent women who loathed their role as silent partners deemed by society as unfit to speak in public. Spiritualism gave such women a platform, because as mediums, it was acceptable for them to speak, as they were not expressing their own thoughts, but acting as conduits for messages from the dead.”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

“Everyone in New York complained of gridlock, and accidents occurred regularly—200 horses died daily in traffic accidents—as”
― Myra MacPherson, The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age