DuJour Spring 2022

ST Y LE

BEAUT Y

LIFE

CU LT U RE

T R AV EL

SC ANDAL

Suffragette CITY

SPRING 2022

52

DUJOUR.COM

A new book chronicles the life of publisher and women’s rights movement pioneer Miriam Leslie Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age (Abrams) by Betsy Prioleau is the first major biography of the glamorous and scandalous Miriam Leslie, titan of publishing and an unsung hero of women’s suffrage.

Among the fabled tycoons of the Gilded Age—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt—is a forgotten figure: Leslie. For 20 years she ran the country’s largest publishing company, Frank Leslie Publishing, founded by her husband, which chronicled postbellum America in dozens of weeklies and monthlies. A pioneer in an allmale industry, she made a fortune and became a national celebrity and tastemaker in the process. But her name was also a byword for scandal: She f louted feminine convention, took lovers, married four times and harbored unsavory secrets that she concealed through a skein of lies and multiple personas. Both before and after her lifetime, glimpses of the truth emerged, including an illegitimate birth and a checkered youth.

Diamonds & Deadlines reveals the unknown, sensational life of the brilliant and brazen “empress of journalism” who dropped a bombshell at her death: She left her entire multimillion-dollar estate to women’s suffrage—a never-equaled amount that guaranteed passage of the 19th Amendment. In this dazzling biography, cultural historian Prioleau draws from diaries, genealogies and published works to provide an intimate look at the life of one of the Gilded Age’s most complex, powerful women and an unexpected feminist icon. Ultimately, Diamonds & Deadlines restores Leslie to her rightful place in history, as a monumental businesswoman who presaged the feminist future and reflected, in bold relief, the Gilded Age, one of the most momentous, seismic and vivid epochs in American history.

M

rs. Frank Leslie was a Gilded Age superstar, an “Empress of Journalism” who ran the largest publishing company in America for twenty years and made a fortune. Her past was a closely guarded secret.

Miriam Follin was nearly seventeen, hungry in New York, and thrown on her own resources. Her choices were stark. Little wonder she came to believe that “life [was] cruel and experience [was] pitiless,” or that she lamented the plight of “the unprotected girl” in America and sought “loyal and manly protection.” Opportunities for women in the early [1850s] in Manhattan were few and thankless.

Seamstresses, f lower-makers, map-colorers, straw-braiders, and book folders endured “never-ending daily toil” under harsh bosses for as little as seventy-five cents a week. Volunteer societies, the House of Industry and Home for the Friendless, aided destitute women by reading them scripture and teaching these thankless trades.

ABOVE:

Miriam Leslie, having taken the title of the Baroness de Bazus

Sex workers, on the other hand, earned an average of five dollars a night, and enjoyed a modicum of autonomy, especially if they freelanced part-time, which many did. An estimated fifty thousand women practiced prostitution in the city mid-century—20 percent of the female population. Successful demimondaines with sobriquets like “Princess Anna” and “Aspasia” promenaded down Broadway dressed in tight-corseted gowns of frilled ribbons and flounced satin petticoats in the latest French fashions.

There’s an off-chance Miriam resisted the call. Investigative reporters, however, entertained no doubts: She was, they charged, a conspicuous “Lais” (prostitute) who spent a “fiery youth” on the town and engaged in “wanton” doings. Everywhere “stories [were] afloat about her.”

When she looked in the mirror, she must have seen her qualifications. She wasn’t conventionally pretty; she had a hooked nose, square masculine jaw, wiredrawn mouth, and protrusive eyes. But she had filled out and boasted a figure that was the mid-nineteenth-century ideal: full, voluptuous breasts, a wasp waist, and tiny hands and feet.

Plus masses of thick, dark fusilli curls. And whether she admitted it or not, she possessed a dusky, exotic “unfamiliar type of beauty.”