The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age

There is so much potential in Myra MacPherson's The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age. Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Claflin make fascinating protagonists who led amazing lives. As the book notes, Victoria and Tennie were "two sisters whose radical views on sex, love, politics, and business threatened the white male power structure of the nineteenth century and shocked the world." Or, as the saying goes, well behaved women rarely make history.

In the opening chapters, my hopes were high that Scarlet Sisters would be similar to the Hetty Green biography I read last year. Unfortunately, fairly quickly Scarlet Sisters bogged down in nitty-gritty (largely political) details such that the potential was largely unrealized. Too often I felt that the larger story was sacrificed to what I felt was MacPherson's personal agenda (writing Scarlet Sisters as a counter to the current "war against women"). This is unfortunate because I assume almost anyone reading this book is firmly in her corner already, and would have appreciated a good story more than dozens of detailed pages on the competing factions of the women's suffrage movement, the hypocrisy of the church (we're looking at you, Mr. Beecher) or the possible motivations of the overzealous Anthony Comstock.

In the end, I struggled to finish Scarlet Sisters, which is a shame, as it would have been a good forerunner to Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern.