Bringing Down the Colonel

A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "Powerless" Woman Who Took On Washington

Patricia Miller

• Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9780374715625
• Subtopic: North American History

"[A] tantalizing and beautifully researched book . . . Anyone emboldened by the #MeToo movement to come forward owes a significant debt to Pollard." ?Karen Abbott,  The Washington Post
In  Bringing Down the Colonel, the journalist Patricia Miller tells the story of Madeline Pollard, an unlikely nineteenth-century women's rights crusader. After an affair with a prominent politician left her "ruined," Pollard brought the man—and the hypocrisy of America's control of women's sexuality—to trial. And, surprisingly, she won.
Pollard and the married Colonel Breckinridge began their decade-long affair when she was just a teenager. After the death of his wife, Breckinridge asked for Pollard's hand—and then broke off the engagement to marry  another woman. But Pollard struck back, suing Breckinridge for breach of promise in a shockingly public trial. With premarital sex considered irredeemably ruinous for a woman, Pollard was asserting the unthinkable: that the sexual morality of men and women should be judged equally.
Nearly 125 years after the Breckinridge-Pollard scandal, America is still obsessed with women's sexual morality. And in the age of Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein, we've witnessed fraught public reckonings with a type of sexual exploitation unnervingly similar to that experienced by Pollard. Using newspaper articles, personal journals, previously unpublished autobiographies, and letters,  Bringing Down the Colonel tells the story of one of the earliest women to publicly fight back.

"It's impossible to read [ Bringing Down the Colonel ] without it feeling familiar?the clear parallels to Trump, Weinstein, Kavanaugh, and other figures in the 'he said, she said' dramas of our own time." ? The Boston Globe

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• 1. Gold to Be Made
• 2. A Bright and Brainy Woman
• 3. A Bastard Catch’d
• 4. The Left-Hand Road
• 5. The Wanton Widow
• 6. Not So Easily Handled
• 7. What Shall We Do with Our Daughters?
• 8. For the Likes of Me
• 9. The Needle, the School Room, and the Store
• 10. A House of Mercy
• 11. A Good Woman
• 12. Miss Pollard’s Ruin in Lexington
• 13. Somebody’s Daughter
• 14. A Man of Passion
• 15. Hindered, Not Ruined
• 16. The Front Parlor and the Back Gate
• 17. The Cavalier and the Puritans
• 18. Refusing to Behave
• 19. Redemption
• Photographs
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Also by Patricia Miller
• Additional Praise for Bringing Down the Colonel
• A Note About the Author
• Newsletter Sign-up
• Contents
• Copyright