Gold Digger: The Remarkable Baby Doe Tabor by Rebecca Rosenberg; Another Gold Standard Historical Women's Fiction By Rosenberg

Gold Digger: The Remarkable Baby Doe Tabor by Rebecca Rosenberg; Another Gold Standard Historical Women's Fiction By Rosenberg

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

This book is available on Voracious Readers Only 

Spoilers: Rebecca Rosenberg has made a career of writing Historical Fiction novels about fascinating and captivating women whose names might have skipped under modern radars but who left lasting legacies in their time and in ours. Her previous work, The Champagne Widows series, captured Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin and Jeanne Alexandrine Louise Melin Pommery, two Frenchwomen whose business sense, marketing style, and resilience changed the wine industry forever. 

This time Rosenberg takes her writing talents to the United States and gives us probably her most captivating, controversial, and outstanding protagonist yet in Gold Digger: The Remarkable Baby Doe Tabor. Elizabeth McCourt “Baby Doe” Tabor (1854-1935) was an interesting figure in Colorado history. A socialite, entrepreneur, and miner, Baby Doe managed to inspire controversy because of her willingness to work alongside the male miners and her scandalous second marriage to businessman and eventual Senator, Horace Tabor. 

Gold Digger covers a lot of ground in Baby Doe’s life from her first marriage to Harvey Doe, their move from Wisconsin to Colorado, the opening and backbreaking work at the mines particularly the Does’s Central City gold mine and Tabor’s Leadville Matchless silver mine, the controversies surrounding her divorce from Doe and marriage to Tabor, the rise of Leadville and Denver as big cities,the birth of her two daughters, Lily and Silver Dollar, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and the Panic of 1893 which wiped out the Tabor’s fortunes. It’s a tough life going from rags to riches back to rags again especially in the mining towns which became thriving metropolises but still had a lot of toes in the Old West Frontier Town “only the strong survive kill or be killed” mentality. 

Baby Doe is written as someone with a lot of strength, spirit, and independence. This is particularly noticeable when she works at the mine. She dresses in trousers and shirts and works with a pickaxe alongside the men (this incident is where the nickname, Baby Doe was coined).

 Despite many local women and Harvey’s objections, she continues to work. She is not someone who is afraid to get messy and do the hard supposedly unladylike work. These actions show her as resilient and more capable than many of the men around her, particularly her feckless first husband and emotional second husband.

That independent spirit is also revealed in Baby Doe’s stormy love life. When she learns that Harvey is spending time with prostitutes, she isn't afraid to chuck him out and file for divorce.

At times, Baby Doe acts very impulsively without thinking of the long term consequences. Her carelessness manifests itself during her affair with Harvey Tabor since it begins while he is married to his first wife, Augusta. Baby Doe is controversial enough as a divorcee but having an extramarital affair is enough to make her the subject of scorn and render her unacceptable to the growing Denver high society. 

Their affair culminates in Tabor's divorce and his and Baby Doe’s marriage but it does cause some long term ramifications during Tabor's run for Senate. Their financial difficulties are also augmented by Tabor’s former wife and estranged son who refuse to give them much needed aid because of the hurt that they still feel over Tabor and Baby Doe's actions.

Baby Doe’s adaptable nature is present during her second marriage. Once the hard-edged woman in men's clothes that worked in the mines, she transforms into a society matron. Though there are many who are still scandalized by the Tabor's affair and Augusta and her inner circle are quite combative, Baby Doe manages to acquire a good reputation. In the Gilded Age, nothing removes a stain on one's character faster than money and the Tabor’s use their silver mined wealth to their advantage. Baby Doe's fascination with beautiful clothes and the latest fashion make her a style icon. They also make Denver a cultural center by providing funds to open an opera house and host arts events. When she was poor, Baby Doe lived hard and tough. When she was rich, Baby Doe lived ostentatiously and provocatively. Either way, she was someone who left quite an unforgettable impression on those who knew her.

Rosenberg’s next book, Silver Echoes, is a sequel to Gold Digger. Presumably it is about Baby Doe’s daughter, Silver Dollar, who like her mother before her was pretty wild, had a controversial love life, and left quite an impression. If this book is any indication, both mother and daughter Tabor still have a lot to say and memorable stylish ways of saying them.

 

Women's History Month Classics Corner: The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton; Edith Wharton's Savage and Sharp Exposure of Gilded Age New York

Women’s History Month Classics Corner: The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton; Edith Wharton's Savage and Sharp Exposure of Gilded Age New York

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews




Spoilers: Sometimes a writer has to live within the world they write about to really understand it. They give the Readers an Inside Outsider's Perspective because they know that world and how the people within it think and operate. No one understood that concept more than Edith Wharton (1862-1937). The world that she lived in and wrote about was late 19th-early 20th century Upperclass New York society, the Gilded Age.

Similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald, a later author who also wrote about elite New Yorkers, Wharton viewed the behaviors of the people around her with a detachment, cynicism, and irony that showed outsiders that all was not pleasant inside these palatial homes, designer dresses, expensive jewelry, and marriages of wealth and convenience. This was a place that Wharton knew all too well.


Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones, the last of three children, to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, a well-to-do New York City couple. (Reportedly her father's family was so well known for their affluence, that they actually inspired the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses.”) Her family traveled a great deal so Wharton studied many languages and read voraciously. (Though her mother forbade her from reading novels until she was an adult.)

Wharton's relationship with her parents was fractured. Her father was frequently away from the house and Edith almost never saw him. Her mother was critical especially when she started writing. An anecdote displaying her mother's cold nature is told: Edith presented her first novel to her mother when she was eleven. When she read a description in which the main character had to tidy up a drawing room before a guest's arrival, Mom simply said “Drawing rooms are always tidy” and returned the book to her. Dismayed, Edith wrote poetry until she was 15 and had her first work published, a translation of a German poem. Instead of bursting with pride, Edith's mother wanted her daughter's name removed considering a career as an author unsuitable for a girl of Edith's standards.


While Wharton was climbing towards a literary career, she had her debutante season. She married Edward “Teddy” Robbins Wharton, a Boston socialite in 1885. While he was from the same class, the marriage was extremely unhappy. Teddy was bipolar and was prone to rages, jealous tirades, and spending and behaving recklessly. When Teddy was at his worst in 1908, Wharton began an affair with Morton Fullerton, a journalist who was her intellectual equal. Teddy worsened until his disorder was declared incurable and Wharton divorced him in 1913.

Wharton traveled extensively and after her divorce settled in France. When WWI broke out, she became involved in relief efforts and was ultimately awarded the Legion D'Honneur.

Wharton was a prolific writer writing 85 short stories, 11 non-fiction books mostly on her travels, several poems, and 18 novels (Her first novel published when she was 40.) In 1921, she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her book The Age of Innocence, becoming the first women to do so. Two years later, Willa Cather would replicate that feat with her book One of Ours.

Many of Wharton's novels feature rich characters in fancy homes and outsiders trying to find their way inside that rich life with the swells trying to keep them out. The Custom of the Country features a woman scheming her way into advantageous marriages and leaving a few bodies in her wake. Another novel, The Buccaneers concerns a group of American wealthy women who marry English aristocrats so the guys can get their fortune and the girls can get titles. (Think of it as Downton Abbey: The Early Years). Her Pulitzer winning novel The Age of Innocence explores an American upperclassman's scandalous romance with a countess who has been exiled from New York society because of her divorce. Then there's my favorite of Wharton's novels, her first, The House of Mirth. All of them feature characters who scheme, plot, bicker, and would gladly sell their mothers, children, and souls for a chance at the high life.

The House of Mirth is about a character like that: Lily Bart, a young woman who dreams of a life in high society but her attempts ultimately bring about her decline and self-destruction. It's interesting that I am reading The House of Mirth at the same time that I am reading Middlemarch and contrasting how different the protagonists are over money and their status as women. Dorothea Brooke maybe from a wealthy family but she is rebelling from it towards a life of meaning and service. Lily Bart longs to retreat into the life that she was reared for. Lily longs to be what Dorothea fought against: a decorative set piece for a rich man to marry. The House of Mirth is almost Middlemarch if Rosamond Vincy were the main character, albeit a more interesting multi-faceted Rosamond Vincy but still she and Lily Bart would have a lot in common.

Lily is the type of woman who was brought up for only two purposes: be beautiful and marry wealth. She has been aware of this fact ever since she was a child and saw her father lose his wealth partly because of her mother's frivolous spending. She hardly ever saw her father because he worked to get their fortune back and her mother was cold and unemotional (shades of Wharton's own upbringing). After her parent's deaths, she ended up in the care of a wealthy aunt, Julia Peniston who financially supports Lily but the two don't care to be around each other.

Lily is constantly aware that her life is one where she is held under scrutiny and her every movement is judged. Even when she sees a male friend alone in his hotel room, she has to invent a lie to an acquaintance rather than let any suspicion get out. This behavior leaves her to wonder “Why must a girl pay so dearly for her latest escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without screening it behind a screen of artifice?”

Lily is aware that her upbringing leaves her no opportunities except to be a rich man's wife and at the age of 29, she is running out of time. She is anxious over how others perceive her so much that it becomes a central focus of her life. With good reason too as her every step is monitored by people whose malicious gossip can destroy faster than any conventional weapon.

One near engagement with a boring rich man, Percy Gryce, ends after he becomes aware of Lily's penchant for gambling by playing bridge and her presumed flirtations with men. He instead marries a dull homebody socialite with no past and not much of a personality.

Lily's gambling puts her so far in debt that a crooked financier, Gus Trenor, offers to pay off her debt- for a horizontal price. While she refuses, plenty of people have seen them together in public enough for rumors to spread and reach the ears of Trevor's wife, Judy who is Lily's best friend. Lily not only loses a potential husband but a close friendship as well.

A common theme in The House of Mirth is the double standards between the have and have-nots. Someone like Lily who is struggling to be accepted could have a ruined reputation if it even appears that she had stepped one toe out of line. However, the wealthy elite can behave however they want in their inner circle with minimal repercussions. Carry Fisher, a divorcee, lives as freely as she chooses and while is the source of much derision, she is able to laugh it off and live life according to her terms. Surprisingly, Carry is also one of the few genuinely kind honest characters in the book by drawing in new people that are on the fringes of society like the nouveau riche Wellington Brys and Simon Rosedale, a Jewish businessman trying to climb the ladder of wealth. Carry is also one of the few people that still gives Lily a warm reception after she is ostracized because of scandal.

Another person who is Teflon to gossip is Bertha Dorset, a bitchy socialite whom Lily tries to befriend but ends up becoming her nemesis. Bertha is the Queen Bee of New York's social set, the In Crowd Cheerleader/Female Bully all grown up. She has multiple affairs on her clueless husband, George and is skillful at covering them up. When Lily is unable to distract George long enough during a disastrous cruise to the Mediterranean, Bertha deflects the situation by accusing Lily of having an affair with her husband so no one will know Bertha was having an affair with her own lover, Ned Silverton.

Bertha's acknowledgement of Lily's ostracism leads to various ripples that cause Lily's final exile from the society she longed to be a part of. Even her aunt disinherits her in her will leaving Lily destitute working as a social secretary and later for a milliner.

At no point is Lily portrayed as a shallow superficial one-dimensional character. True she has her hang ups about clothes, fancy homes, and being part of the high society set. But she is fully aware that is all she is meant to be. Her background gives her very few alternatives to seek happiness beyond marrying wealth. She isn't like Dorothea Brooke who had the intelligence and drive but was born in the wrong time to use them. All Lily has is to be the Trophy Wife of a rich man and when that is taken from her, she has nothing to fall back on.

Lily questions her status quite often and wishes that she could be free to marry for love. Nowhere is this more evident than in her relationship with Lawrence Seldon, a lawyer who though has many wealthy friends is not himself rich. He pursues Lily for a time clearly in love with her, but Lily regrettably breaks him off because she needs to marry money.

She can't marry for love without financial security because she doesn't know how to do it. After Lawrence is convinced the rumors about her with other men are true and he temporarily leaves her, she is filled with genuine regret that she ended what could have been a good relationship.

Lily also shows a great deal of integrity. When a former servant and Rosedale use letters that expose a former affair between Lawrence and surprise surprise Bertha (another reason why Lily is on Bertha's “People to See Lives to Ruin” List) as potential blackmail, Lily refuses to do so.

She is too honest for the society that she wants to join and eventually abandons her. This abandonment ultimately leads to the end where Lily is left alone with only her regrets and a bottle of chloral hydrate.

The House of Mirth allowed Edith Wharton to expose the world in which she was raised for the cold, superficial, unfeeling world that it was. She revealed the people on the fringes were swallowed whole by the callous and malicious people on the inside. If they couldn't join, they would be trampled underneath and Lily Bart was.

Weekly Reader: The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the GIlded Age by Myra McPherson; An Entertaining Biography of Two Memorable, But Naughty Sisters

Weekly Reader: The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age by Myra McPherson: An Entertaining Biography of Two Memorable But Naughty Sisters

By Julie Sara Porter,

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: If Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is right that “well-behaved women seldom make history,” then Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin certainly made it. Myra McPherson’s winning biography tells and excellent and entertaining book about two sisters who lived life according to their own terms and proved to be very memorable colorful women who yes indeed made history.

Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin made a lot of firsts in their lives. They were the first woman to start a Wall Street brokerage. Woodhull was the first woman to run for President in the United States and was the first woman to address a United States Congressional committee. Claflin ran for Congress and became an honorary colonel for an all-black regiment. They also were the subjects of much scandal in their lives. They were Spiritualists and strong advocates for Free Love, Freedom of Speech, and Women’s Suffrage. They were also frequent targets because of their active love lives and their willingness to talk about it.

The Claflin Sisters came from scandal naturally. Their father, Buck was a snake oil salesman who put the sisters on stage to conduct séances and communicate with the dead for paying customers. (Despite their shady early connections with Spiritualism, the sisters particularly Claflin remained ardent Spiritualists for the rest of their lives. They always claimed that talking to the spirits helped get them through their difficult childhood with their idle abusive father). They also had several siblings mostly sisters who were involved in unhappy marriages and lived off of Victoria and Tennessee’s earnings. Despite the bad upbringing the sisters spent a great deal of time telling people lies about their father.
They said that he was “once a successful merchant and possessor of a large fortune who lost money in speculation.”  McPherson writes that the Claflin Sisters deceived people about their background in an attempt to gain respectability, a respectability that was often challenged by their avaricious and obnoxious family.

Like the rest of their family, the Claflin Sisters were not ones to live by rules and societal conventions. This was particularly noticeable in their sexual relationships with men. Tennessee Claflin was the lover of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who helped the duo finance their brokerage. Victoria Claflin had an early marriage to Canning Woodhull, an alcoholic doctor but she was a believer in Free Love so also had an affair with Col. James Blood, a Civil War hero. Though they were the targets of suspicion, ridicule, and damaging gossip the sisters publically acknowledged their lifestyle. Woodhull proudly declared, “Yes, I am a Free Lover,” in a public trial. The two hid no secrets about their romantic relationships in public and in their periodical, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.  While many would argue about the Sisters’ private lives, they were certainly true to themselves and their beliefs.

Because of their very open lifestyle, the Sisters made many enemies. Even though they were ardent suffragists, many of the leaders in Women’s suffrage did not care for them. The conservative Lucy Stone head of the American Women’s Suffrage Association was appalled by their behavior.  Susan B. Anthony, leader of the more liberal National Women’s Suffrage Association, initially befriended the sisters impressed by their brokerage. She later became a mortal enemy when they threatened to reveal the private lives of many of the suffragists. Later Anthony told someone “Both sisters are regarded as lewd and indecent. I would advise against any contact.”

However they also had supporters. Elizabeth Cady Stanton supported the duo’s Free Love lifestyle even at the point of arguing with her best friend, Anthony. McPherson said that Stanton’s friendship with the Sisters and Anthony’s dislike of them was one of the issues that caused friction in the suffrage giants’ friendship. They also had a steady friend in escaped slave/author, Frederick Douglass. In fact when Victoria Woodhull ran for President in 1873, she selected Douglass as her running mate, a selection that he did not support, opting for re-electing Ulysses S. Grant instead. However, there were no hard feelings and when Woodhull and Douglass reunited, Douglass said he treated her “politely and respectfully-and (Woodhull) departed not displeased with her call.”

The friendship and enemies that the Sisters make becomes a Who’s Who of the Gilded Age and explored their relationship with the world around them. McPherson isn’t afraid to put the dark sides of the sisters and their friends and enemies, reflecting how people lived and strove to change the world around them.

Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was the sister’s worst enemy. The pastor who was also the brother of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author, Harriet Beecher Stowe and anti-suffrage advocate, Catherine Beecher spoke out against the sisters on his pulpit. He frequently spoke against women’s suffrage and Free Love holding the Sisters as examples of the decadence and debauchery in the 19^th century.

However Beecher’s private life was hardly that of the saint that he projected to his parishioners. He had an affair with Elizabeth “Lib” Tilton, the wife of his parishioner Theodore Tilton. Beecher and Tilton maintained a secret love affair for years that was eventually exposed by Woodhull and Claflin in their paper. Woodhull and Claflin also exposed “The Masked French Ball” a gathering attended by financier, L.C. Challis in which men paraded and forced themselves onto young women. (While Woodhull and Claflin attended the Ball and saw the encounters themselves, they covered up their involvement by telling the story from an imaginary insiders’ perspective.) They also spoke about legalizing prostitution and defended women who had been forced into such a life and instead felt that the men not the prostitutes should be held accountable for their actions.

In exposing men, like Challis and Beecher, who criticized and attacked others for their private lives, but lived sordid lives themselves, the two revealed their attack on hypocrisy. They also showed that they were more than capable of defending themselves against powerful men by proving themselves to be just as cunning as they are, but more open about themselves. They wrote in their paper: “(Beecher) helped to maintain for these many years that very social slavery under which he was chafing, and which he was secretly revolting both in thought and practice….he has, in a word, consented and still consented to being a hypocrite.”

 Challis and Beecher later sued the Sisters for libel leading to a lengthy trial in which Woodhull and Claflin were held up as “whores” but also as symbols of Freedom of Speech and the Press. They were vilified by Beecher and his powerful allies. The scandal plus dwindling finances (partly caused by the Financial Bank Panic of 1873 and also because they lost their allies) cased the Sisters to suffer economic strain.

The most disappointing aspects to the book take place after the two renounced their earlier stances and settled into marriages into English aristocracy. They insisted that they were never advocates for Free Love and their words were taken out of context. While their actions betrayed their earlier philosophies about living their lives independently and free from conventions, these later actions showed their chameleon-like nature to suit their lives as they saw fit.

Despite their conventional marriages, the two still maintained their support for women’s suffrage and supported the more dramatic protests from the English suffragists like Emmeline Pankhurst such as hunger strikes, riots, and publicity stunts. Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Woodhull died in 1920 and 1927 respectively outliving most of their enemies and contemporaries and were one of the few early suffragists to see women get the vote in Great Britain and United States.

McPherson wrote” (Woodhull and Claflin) belonged to the ages, which must now puzzle over and debate their worth, which continues to change with passing generations and shifting attitudes about women.” Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin were outrageous, scandalous, and free spirited, but they were always memorable and always colorful. Surely they were not well-behaved but surely, in their own fashion, they made history.