4. Nineteenth-century attitudes toward and understanding of sexuality and reproduction and the politics of birth control and abortion are hugely complex topics. Especially helpful in sorting through the murk were Timothy Gilfoyle’s City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920; Linda Gordon’s The Moral Property of Women; G. J. Barker-Benfield’s The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America; and George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. These are crucial works I went back to many times.
Legal aspects of birth control and abortion are based on modern historical research and nineteenth-century books, journal articles, and newspaper accounts. Especially useful were academic works by Andrea Tone, Leslie J. Reagan, James C. Mohr, and Timothy J. Gilfoyle. Andrea Tone’s “Black Market Birth Control: Contraceptive Entrepreneurship and Criminality in the Gilded Age” (The Journal of American History 87.2:435–59) provides an excellent introduction to the topic.
Here I must clarify something: those who would be considered socially progressive by modern standards were not infallible. In fact, some beliefs shared by otherwise rational and educated people are distinctly shocking. For example, Malthusian theory was quite popular in the late nineteenth century. In this view of things, society is threatened when population growth outpaces economic stability; thus increase in population has to be restricted, if not by disease, famine, or warfare, then by moral restraint and intervention. This boiled down to a simple formula: the white middle and upper classes needed to reproduce more, and the immigrant poor—mostly Irish, German, and Italian at this time—had to reproduce less. In some quarters the disabled and those seen as otherwise impure were added to the list of those who should be discouraged or prevented from reproducing.
This is a highly simplified characterization of the theory of eugenics, but something like it was adopted by many social progressives and liberals in the late nineteenth century, including Theodore Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, Woodrow Wilson, Bertrand Russell, Alexander Graham Bell, George Bernard Shaw, Harry Laughlin, H. G. Wells, and Margaret Sanger.
This is one of the hardest things for a historical novelist to pull off: to tell a story based on facts that will be distasteful and off-putting to modern readers. Whether I have pulled this off is not for me to decide.
Regarding matters of law: the investigation of crime, the structure of the police department, the coroner system, and the conducting of inquests and court cases is based on contemporaneous works on the New York Police Department such as A. E. Costello’s 1885 Our Police Protectors: History of the New York Police from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. More recent historical studies were also consulted, including popular nonfiction works on crimes of the period such as The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid War, by Paul Collins.
I researched poverty, the homeless (referred to in 1883 as the outdoor poor), and orphaned or abandoned children through newspaper articles, annual reports issued by charities both religious and secular, and contemporary academic research.
Volume five of The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, a monumental six-volume work by Isaac Newton Phelps-Stokes (1915), was a primary source, along with some of the more general publications, which include (in no particular order) the second edition of Kenneth T. Jackson’s Encyclopedia of New York City; New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age (1999) by Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman; Thomas Beer’s The Mauve Decade, Part II (1926); Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1879) by James McCabe; Donna Acacia’s From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930; and Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870–1900 by Julie Husband and Jim O’Loughlin.
A number of history blogs are run by people who are passionate about the city and who are generous with their knowledge and research. Ones I consult regularly include The Bowery Boys, Abandoned NYC, Daytonian in Manhattan, Ephemeral New York, Forgotten New York, Gothamist, and Untapped New York. I look forward to seeing what these websites come up with, day by day.
Further information about the novel is available online at thegildedhour.com. My author blog can be found at rosinalippi.com.
Sara Donati
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Sara Donati, The Gilded Hour
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