#MeToo
19th century
A01=Robert Shaplen
Abolition
activism
adultery
affair
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
American
Author_Robert Shaplen
automatic-update
Beecher-Tilton affair
Brooklyn Heights
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJK
Category=HBLL
Category=HBTB
Category=JPHF
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
first wave feminism
Free Love and Heavenly Sinners
Henry Ward Beecher
hypocrisy
Jane Mayer
Judith Thurman
Language_English
PA=Available
political scandal
preacher
Price_€10 to €20
progressive thinkers
PS=Active
religion
s suffrage
Scandal
sex
sex scandal
softlaunch
Stacy Schiff
suffragists
Susan B. Anthony
The Metaphysical Club
the New Yorker
Tilton-Beecher affair
Victoria Woodhull
women' Elizabeth Tilton
Product details
- ISBN 9781946022912
- Weight: 214g
- Dimensions: 127 x 215mm
- Publication Date: 30 May 2024
- Publisher: McNally Jackson Books
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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On the night of July 3, 1870, Elizabeth Tilton confessed to her husband that she’d had an affair with their pastor, Henry Ward Beecher. This secret would soon transfix America, for Beecher was the most famous preacher of the day, founder of the most fashionable church in Brooklyn Heights, a presidential hopeful, an influential supporter of Abolition, and a leader of the campaign for women’s suffrage. When Beecher tried to silence the Tiltons, it was a whisper network of suffragists, notably Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who spread news of the affair, and it was the radical Victoria Woodhull - an outspoken proponent of “free love” - who seized on it, as political dynamite, to blow up the myth of monogamy among the political elite. Her public accusations led to even more public trials, which shocked the country and divided the most progressive thinkers of the era.
In 1953, the journalist Robert Shaplen revisited the Tilton-Beecher affair in a series of articles for the New Yorker, relying on 3,000 pages of contemporary accounts - court transcripts, love-letters, newspaper reports and illustrations, even political cartoons - to reanimate a scandal that shook the American reform movement and to expose a strand of America’s cultural DNA that remains recognisable today.
Robert Shaplen(1917–1988) began reporting in the Pacific theater during World War Two and became one of America’s most influential experts on East Asia in the postwar era. He was Far East correspondent for the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, and remained a New Yorker staff writer for the rest of his life. He published ten books, including one novel and one story collection. Free Love (originally titled Free Love and Heavenly Sinners) was his only foray into nineteenth-century American history. Louis Menand is an award-winning essayist, critic, author, professor, and historian, best known for his Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club, an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America.
