What’s the difference between writing history and writing historical fiction? As an historian turned novelist, I bring the same love of research and discovery to each project. I respect facts and timelines in my fiction, but when evidence ends, imagination steps in and I invent freely.
My novel The Double Standard Sporting House is set in an elite brothel in 1868 New York. At that time there were more than 500 brothels in the city, from dirt cheap and risky to wildly expensive and elegant, but we have very little evidence about the women working in any of them. The few contemporary studies reek of moral hypocrisy and the sexual double standard.
The women of premium brothels had intimate access to the most powerful men in the city, members of the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine at the height of its power. I chose this setting because I wanted to set the power of intimacy, compassion, and community against that based in competition, violence, and exploitation. My heroine is a healer who runs the brothel to fund her clinic for women, and to practice medicine as she sees fit.
My first question when researching 19th century prostitutes was: who were they? Many thousands scraping by as housemaids or needleworkers did it to supplement meager wages. 30% of women at that time did occasional sex work just to get by! In contrast, 1-2% of women do sex work today when we have access to many more kinds of employment.
Educated or middle-class girls most often found themselves in prostitution because they were seduced and abandoned, or raped. Cast out or ashamed, unable to return to their families or homes, it was often their only option, and it could be very lucrative. Apart from going on stage or trading stocks, owning a brothel was the only way for a single woman to gain property or earn a fortune.
I chose 1868 because of one half-line in historian Marilyn Wood Hill’s book Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830-1870, describing “a brief but unique era when prostitution was managed predominantly by females.” That era ended when the Tammany Hall political machine gained control of the sex trade through trafficking and exploitation, which seeded my plot and antagonists.
I searched for evidence of these female entrepreneurs, but deep sources always came from the wrong place or time. Abbott Kahler’s delightful Sin in the Second City about a Chicago brothel in the early 20th century inspired some fun details. I thought I’d found a fascinating memoir by a madam called Nell Kimball who ran a house in 19th century St. Louis, but it turned out to be a fabrication—a complete fraud—by prolific author Stephen Longstreet.
Having read about 100 books on 19th century prostitution, women’s health, and Tammany Hall, I told as layered and authentic a story as I was able. You might say such thorough research only provides the backdrop to story and character, which do indeed come first in a novel. But a story and characters often resonate because they’re rooted in good history.
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