The Suffragette Scandal (The Brothers Sinister) (44 page)

Read The Suffragette Scandal (The Brothers Sinister) Online

Authors: Courtney Milan

Tags: #feminist romance, #historical romance, #suffragette, #victorian, #sexy historical romance, #heiress, #scoundrel, #victorian romance, #courtney milan

T
HIS BOOK STARTS WITH
the Cambridge/Oxford boat race of 1877. In reality, the boat race of 1877 was judged a dead heat (with Oxford probably a hair ahead of Cambridge). I changed that for purposes of this story: sorry, Oxford!

When I first started working on this book, I had this vague idea that Free (who I already knew was a suffragette) would get paired with some dude who was opposed to women’s rights, and they would have explosive chemistry
et cetera
blah blah blah. It turns out that I did not want to write that book: I couldn’t make myself believe that Frederica Marshall, suffragette, would fall for a man who fundamentally didn’t believe she was his equal. I also realized that book, if I wrote it, would be one where the theme turned out to be, “Aw, if women just put out long enough, men might decide they’re actual worthy human beings!”

And so instead of figuring out how to pair Free with someone who was trying to drag her down, I started to ask myself an interesting question: What was the most that someone like Free could hope to accomplish in her time?

And so I started exploring what women—extraordinary women—did in the late nineteenth century. The answer surprised me.

When I chose to make Free an investigative reporter, I modeled her after a real nineteenth century investigative reporter, Nellie Bly. At the age of 21, Bly (who was the daughter of working-class Americans) went to Mexico, where she lived for six months, reporting on the regime there. In 1887—at the age of 23—Bly faked insanity so that she could be admitted to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum in New York. She stayed there for ten days, and when she got out, she wrote the story of the women she met in the asylum—women who were, for the most part,
not
mad when they went in.

Like Bly, I sent Free undercover—in her case, to a government lock hospital in Britain. Like Bly, Free reported on the conditions she found. The government lock hospitals really did exist—and they did more than just lock up prostitutes, although that’s all they were ostensibly supposed to do. The Contagious Diseases Act—which established the lock hospitals—said that if anyone said a girl was a prostitute, she would have to submit to fortnightly examinations by a doctor. The purpose of the Act was to try and stop the spread of syphilis in the British Army and Navy.

That brings me to another nineteenth century woman—Josephine Butler. Butler was a devout Christian who abhorred sexual immorality. You might think that a woman like Butler would keep silent about something like the Contagious Diseases Act. But she was outraged by the double standard in the Acts—a standard that allowed the men who spread the disease to walk free while imprisoning only the women.

She was furious that the burden of the Act fell disproportionately on the poor. She found evidence that officers were specifically targeting milliners and flower girls—on the theory that all lower-class women were of low morals and thus inherently suspect.

Butler spoke out repeatedly—at gatherings and demonstrations, in newspapers and in books. She was labeled “indelicate” and when she was referred to in Parliament, men scoffingly said she was no “lady.” That didn’t stop her. Mobs that came to hunt her down did not stop her.

She insisted that the examinations the women were subject to constituted what she called “surgical rape,” and that holding them without a trial by their peers was a violation of their rights under Magna Charta and other sources of British Constitutional Law. She called for civil disobedience on the part of women in response to the acts; in 1870, in her book
The Constitution Violated
, she wrote: “If the breach in the constitution be effectually repaired, the people will of themselves return to a state of tranquility; if not, MAY DISCORD PREVAIL FOR EVER.”

This came from a married, upper-class, evangelical Christian.

And so if you’re wondering if women in 1877 could really
do
the things that Free did, or think the things that she did—the answer is yes, yes, yes. They did.

Amanda notes to herself at one point that she used to believe that poor women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, either. That was also—sadly—fairly representative for the time. The dark side of suffragette history is a horrible prejudice against people who didn’t fit their mostly white, middle-class mold. In England, that prejudice was predominantly class-based; in the U.S. (which we didn’t see at all in this book), there was some deep-seated, awful racism. I don’t think we can separate the harm of that prejudice from the good that those women did, and I tried to present that time in all its equally problematic and glorious history.

One last point: If you read Josephine Butler’s memoir, one of the things that comes through is how many vicious, deeply personal attacks she suffered. Her husband (who never asked her to quit) had a career that also suffered as a result of what she was doing.

I knew when I was writing the book that many of the things Free hoped to achieve are things that are still in doubt today. Today, 137 years later, we’ve had one female prime minister in Britain and precisely zero female presidents in the United States. And so one of the most important questions I felt I had to grapple with was this: Why bother? Why work for a goal that will not bear fruit in over a century? Why do people work to change things today?

I found the answer in Melissa McEwan’s Shakesville (
http://www.shakesville.com
). McEwan describes her work as follows:

Sometimes it feels like it’s all I ever write about; sometimes it feels like I can’t possibly write about it enough to do the issue justice; often, those feelings exist within me simultaneously.
All I ever do is try to empty the sea with this teaspoon; all I can do is keep trying to empty the sea with this teaspoon.

Her analogy inspired me to write Free’s defense of what she does:

“But we’re not trying to empty the Thames,” she told him. “Look at what we’re doing with the water we remove. It doesn’t go to waste. We’re using it to water our gardens, sprout by sprout. We’re growing bluebells and clovers where once there was a desert. All you see is the river, but
I
care about the roses.”

I’ve said in every Author’s Note since the beginning of this series that this is as much an alternate history as it is a historical romance. I like to imagine that between Violet’s accomplishments in
The Countess Conspiracy
and what Free was doing in this book, that some of the human rights violations that suffragettes experienced over the next decades—the imprisonment, the resulting hunger strikes, the force feedings—might have been averted.

I still hope that the things we do today will make a difference.

And I hope that explains this book’s dedication:

For everyone who has carried water

in thimbles and teaspoons throughout the centuries.

And for all those who continue to do so.

For as many centuries as it takes.

Finally, a note on the word “suffragette”: When I started writing this book, I did a preliminary check to see if the word was being used in period literature (namely, a date-restricted search through Google Books). The answer seemed to be yes—it was mentioned in a handful of plays that came up first—so I didn’t pursue the question any further. It turns out that the Oxford English Dictionary attributes the word to 1906, and the plays I checked aren’t as conclusive as my first glance suggested. But by the time I checked it seriously (which was not until someone questioned the usage shortly before publication), the word was so baked into the book (including a title change!) that there was no way to change it. So that was absolutely my bad.

That being said, the OED dates words from the first printed use, and does not document (or attempt to document) informal uses, which usually predate the OED—and often by some margin. It’s clear from the use first listed in the OED that the suffragettes had already been calling themselves suffragettes for some time before the press started doing so. How long that gap between the informal verbal use and the formal recorded use was is impossible to say at this point. In some instances, I’ve found words (in private, written correspondence) that are not attested in the OED until some 50 years later. So it’s
possible
that the word “suffragette” was used in 1877 in the limited circles that this book discusses. Is it likely? Enh… I’m not going to insist it is. Let’s stick with “possible.”

So I am taking something of a liberty in using the word—and I’m doing so in part because there was no way to change it at the point when I discovered the issue, and in part because there is no replacement word in our vocabulary that conveys the same meaning to a modern audience (“suffragist,” which is clearly period, is not specific to women). I hope that if this really bothers you, you can imagine Free coining the word herself. Since I already have her coining “chromosome” in
The Countess Conspiracy
, I don’t think this achievement is beyond her.

Acknowledgments

I’m a terrible person to work with—I never know when I’ll be done and want things turned around immediately—and I’m deeply grateful to have such fantastic people to help me out. As always, this book would not have been completed without the tireless help I received from Robin Harders and Keira Soleore, my editors, Krista Ball, whose eagle eye kept me in the clear, Martha Trachtenberg, my copy-editor, Maria Fairchild and Martin O’Hearn, my proofreaders, and Rawles Lumumba, my project manager, who did all of the above and more. Melissa Jolly, my assistant, has managed to keep me sane and focused.

There are too many friends who have helped me out with this book in some way or another for me to thank by name, but I’ll try it anyway: Tessa Dare, Carey Baldwin, Leigh LaValle, Brenna Aubrey, Elyssa Patrick, Carolyn Jewel, Sherry Thomas, all the Peeners, the entire Denver lunch bunch, but especially Thea Harrison, Pamela Clare, and Jenn LeBlanc, my husband, my family, and last but not least, both of my wonderful creatures, Pele and Silver. I’m also indebted to innumerable author loops and boards for offering strategic advice and the ability to blow off steam.

I also want to acknowledge Rachel Chrastil’s
The Siege of Strasbourg,
which was invaluable for giving me a sense of how horrible the siege actually was.

I’m also grateful to all the librarians who have read my books and recommended them for institutional purchases, to library patrons, to friends—basically, to anyone. Finally, if you’re reading this as a library borrow, you can thank my agent Kristin Nelson, and her staff, particularly Lori Bennett, for helping me make this book available to libraries everywhere.

Women the world over have inspired me by standing up and speaking out, even knowing the consequences that could come. Every time I thought of making Free back down, or dream smaller, I thought of you, and you inspired me to write her as more. I can only hope I managed to make her live up to your examples.

Finally, to you my readers—who have stuck with me through four full-length books and several novellas in this series—thank you so much. This series has been so much more because of you. It’s not quite over yet—there’s one novella left—but without you, I would never have gotten this far or written this much. Thank you.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cover design © Courtney Milan.

Cover photographs © Nata Sdobnikova | Dreamstime.com.

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