Madeleine: an Autobiography of a 19th Century Prostitute (Annotated) (Illustrated)
Book Details
Author(s)Madeleine Blair
PublisherLitFiend LLC
ISBN / ASINB013COT9Y8
ISBN-13978B013COT9Y7
Sales Rank368,598
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
The New York Times wanted it censored.
The Society for the Prevention of Vice complained to the district attorney that Madeleine constituted “objectionable reading material†under New York’s Penal code.
The publisher was arrested.
Find out why…
“Madeleine’s autobiography is a rare and valuable historical – and indeed, literary – document… As the story of a prostitute, Madeleine’s autobiography is a compelling representational project.†Lindsey McMaster, in Working Girls in the West: Representations of Wage-Earning Women
“Madeleine worked unabashedly as a prostitute and described her experiences at a time when neo-regulationist and abolitionist movements were at their heights in Western industrializing nations. In response to these movements, she constructed herself not as the whore of Babylon depicted by evangelical reformers, nor as the victim of unscrupulous pimps and procurers depicted by muckraking journalists and imperial feminists, but as an ordinary woman who, with the cooperation of the police, dealt with extraordinary circumstances.†– Lesley Erickson, Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law, and the Making of a Settler Society
“Another literary woman briefly on the Butte frontier challenges gender stereotypes: Madeleine Blair, whose autobiography confessing, repudiating, and yet defending her life as a working prostitute was also a succès de scandale. After the 1910 publication of Madeleine: An Autobiography, literary arbiters including the New York Times called for its censorship because of obscenity and its attack on the belief that “white slavery†explained female prostitution. A celebrated trial was held in 1919, with Judge Ben B. Lindsey defending the book’s morality and merits.†– Rick Newby, in Writing Montana: Literature Under the Big Sky
“Madeleine, who viewed marriage for money as simply another form of whoring, enjoyed crafting her own destiny… [After publication of the book] the Society for the Prevention of Vice complained to the district attorney that Madeleine constituted “objectionable reading material†under New York’s Penal code. Clinton Tyler Brainard, president and treasurer of Harper & Brothers, was arrested. It wasn’t that the book was graphic in sexual details, the prosecution conceded, but that its author was critical of Christian reformers and showed absolutely no remorse for her life of sin. Finding herself unwed and pregnant in her mid-teens, she had chosen independence instead of a morally approved course like incarceration in a Magdalene home for fallen women or suicide.†– Lael Morgan in Wanton West: Madams, Murder, and the Wild Women of Montana’s Frontier
The Society for the Prevention of Vice complained to the district attorney that Madeleine constituted “objectionable reading material†under New York’s Penal code.
The publisher was arrested.
Find out why…
“Madeleine’s autobiography is a rare and valuable historical – and indeed, literary – document… As the story of a prostitute, Madeleine’s autobiography is a compelling representational project.†Lindsey McMaster, in Working Girls in the West: Representations of Wage-Earning Women
“Madeleine worked unabashedly as a prostitute and described her experiences at a time when neo-regulationist and abolitionist movements were at their heights in Western industrializing nations. In response to these movements, she constructed herself not as the whore of Babylon depicted by evangelical reformers, nor as the victim of unscrupulous pimps and procurers depicted by muckraking journalists and imperial feminists, but as an ordinary woman who, with the cooperation of the police, dealt with extraordinary circumstances.†– Lesley Erickson, Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law, and the Making of a Settler Society
“Another literary woman briefly on the Butte frontier challenges gender stereotypes: Madeleine Blair, whose autobiography confessing, repudiating, and yet defending her life as a working prostitute was also a succès de scandale. After the 1910 publication of Madeleine: An Autobiography, literary arbiters including the New York Times called for its censorship because of obscenity and its attack on the belief that “white slavery†explained female prostitution. A celebrated trial was held in 1919, with Judge Ben B. Lindsey defending the book’s morality and merits.†– Rick Newby, in Writing Montana: Literature Under the Big Sky
“Madeleine, who viewed marriage for money as simply another form of whoring, enjoyed crafting her own destiny… [After publication of the book] the Society for the Prevention of Vice complained to the district attorney that Madeleine constituted “objectionable reading material†under New York’s Penal code. Clinton Tyler Brainard, president and treasurer of Harper & Brothers, was arrested. It wasn’t that the book was graphic in sexual details, the prosecution conceded, but that its author was critical of Christian reformers and showed absolutely no remorse for her life of sin. Finding herself unwed and pregnant in her mid-teens, she had chosen independence instead of a morally approved course like incarceration in a Magdalene home for fallen women or suicide.†– Lael Morgan in Wanton West: Madams, Murder, and the Wild Women of Montana’s Frontier
