A Heroine for Reproductive Rights
By Nancy Bernhard
Every day we see sexual predators in power go to extraordinary lengths to control and abuse women’s bodies. Watching creeps like Donald Trump, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh torch abortion rights and women’s reproductive healthcare is infuriating and absurd, especially since this is ground we’ve won before. Roe v. Wade was in force for nearly 50 years, from when I was 11 until I was 60. Stories that capture the injustice and aggravation of being denied our autonomy—again—will help fuel this fight. How can women battle resurgent misogyny, and win?
In my historical novel The Double Standard Sporting House, the main character Nell “Doc” Hastings is barred from practicing medicine because she’s a woman, and then punished for having greater skill than mediocre men. Exclusion followed by insult is a fair summary of being a woman in patriarchy.
Cast out of ‘respectable’ society as damaged goods, Doc finds surprising freedom and autonomy in the demimonde. Prostitution was far more widespread in the 19th century than in the 21st. In 1868 New York when women had very few ways to earn money, 30% did sex work at some point in their lives, compared to 1-2% now. The only industry controlled by women, prostitution was also just about the only way for single women to accrue wealth. Reduced to their sexual and reproductive functions, these women made the best of it. Owning the house allows Doc to run her free clinic, where she can serve the most vulnerable women without men telling her what to do.
The Double Standard is a premium house, and becomes a favorite with the wildly corrupt Tammany Hall political syndicate at its moment of greatest power. Its harlots are highly skilled at reading and pleasing men, and exert influence when they can. Some clients are amiable and self-aware, can laugh at themselves, and enjoy dropping the pretenses and hypocrisies required of them outside the house’s walls. Others are not so agreeable.
The girls strategize how to handle abusive men, the kind who believe every interaction has a winner and a loser, who have no core beliefs except their own dominance, and will exploit any cruelty to prop it up. Sex for these men is an act of taking. To soothe and placate them, the Double girls stroke their egos. Any evidence of failure must be contradicted with denials and lies, along with continuous praise and reassurance. Our current president is pathetically transparent in this regard.
The novel’s main action pits the coercive and violent power of predators against feminine-coded power in patience, compassion, and community. Feminine power is invisible to abusive men, which is its great advantage. Since the sex trade relies on discretion, prostitutes keep many secrets. But in a pinch, the threat of revelation can be a most unexpected and potent weapon, and in this case defeats men bent on exploiting and harming girls. The slow-motion reckoning with Jeffrey Epstein’s network may yet have this effect.
The core of the story, and ours, is men’s abuse of women’s bodies and their criminal usurpation of women’s agency. Many rape survivors work at the house and come to the clinic for care, so Doc evolves strategies for healing from sexual assault, and over time, stakes out a new field of knowledge. This is a fiction (though a plausible one), a feminist fantasy in the form of a healer who begins to see through patriarchy, tabulates its costs to women, and builds a strong community to resist it. She is meant to inspire recognition and hope in those of us in perpetual astonishment at the erosion of our rights, the appalling character of our political leaders, and the pervasiveness of rape culture.
Stories are vital, and we need humor to manage the absurdity. Maybe no one in 1868 would have dared name a brothel “The Double Standard Sporting House,” but in the present day we can lampoon the clowns who deny our humanity.
As Emma Thompson said in a recent viral clip, “I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down. I just didn’t expect them to be such losers.”
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Nancy Bernhard is a journalism historian and yoga teacher, fascinated by how survivors of political and sexual violence heal through storytelling and movement. She lives with her family in Somerville, Massachusetts.
THE DOUBLE STANDARD SPORTING HOUSE
For fans of Ariel Lawhon’s The Frozen River, debut historical fiction about a brothel nurse in nineteenth-century New York City who fights brutality in the sex trade and pioneers treatments for survivors of sexual violence.
A high-class brothel that entertains New York’s most powerful men, the Double Standard Sporting House funds a free clinic for women. When the Tammany Hall criminal syndicate takes over the city in 1868 and starts kidnapping girls, the house’s owner Nell “Doc” Hastings cannot stay quiet—especially after sixteen-year-old Vivie arrives at the clinic bruised and bleeding.
Resolving to seek justice for Vivie and girls like her, Doc builds an unlikely alliance with religious reformers, a rare honest ward cop, and an alluring newspaper publisher she can’t seem to keep away from. Even with their help, Doc will have to use her sharpest tools—secrets, guile, and a surgical blade—to prevent a dark turn in the sex trade.
Full of intrigue, friendship, and love, this timely story of a heroine erased from history by the sexual double standard reminds us that women help and heal one another, even when shameless criminals come to power.
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Category: On Writing
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