Bringing Down the Colonel

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

De: Patricia Miller

Narrado por: Christina Delaine

“I’ll take my share of the blame. I only ask that he take his.”

In Bringing Down the Colonel, journalist Patricia Miller tells the story of Madeline Pollard, an unlikely 19th-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 Using newspaper articles, personal journals, previously unpublished autobiographies, and letters, Bringing Down the Colonel tells the story of one of the earliest women to publicly fight back.

©2018 Patricia Miller (P)2018 Macmillan Audio

Fascinating history

This book provides a bridge explaining the evolution of gender politics from the mid 29th century to today. I’m old enough to recall the 1950s and can see how this led to where we are today. Great read . I really enjoyed the narrators imitation of the accents and tone of the time. Very well done.

Stay with it. It is amazing.

Book begins a little slowly, sounding rather like a dissertation.
But stay with it. It is absolutely fascinating and recounts a very important era in our country’s history. You may not recognize the name Madeline Pollard but you will recognize many of the other women named in this book.

Great DC and Women's History book

carefully researched, the story is amazing and timely. It was our community book club selection.

Women in America before 1900

What a story. The history of times that are hard to see as part of the making of America in the 19th century.