Mary Boykin Chestnut
In 1861 Mary Boykin Chesnut, the wife of a leading Confederate politician, general and slave-owner, wrote in her diary:“[W]omen are punished when their masters and mistresses are brutes and not when they do wrong—and then we live surrounded by prostitutes... Who thinks any worse of a Negro or Mulatto woman for being a thing we can’t name? God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system & wrong & iniquity... like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives & their concubines, & the Mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—& every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think...
My disgust sometimes is boiling over... alas for the men! No worse than men everywhere, but the lower their mistresses, the more degraded they must be.”
Harriet Ann Jacobs
In her 1861 book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, former slave Harriet Ann Jacobs wrote:“I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister… The fair child grew up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny sky… How had those years dealt with her slave sister, the little playmate of her childhood? She, also, was very beautiful; but the flowers and sunshine of love were not for her. She drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are compelled to drink.”
A New York court, 1874
Even after the abolition of slavery the American legal system offered women scant protection. New York’s High Court, in 1874, rejected a rape prosecution of a man who forcibly assaulted his 14-year-old servant girl:“If a woman, aware that it will be done unless she does resist, does not resist to the extent of her ability on the occasion, must it not be that she is not entirely reluctant? If consent, though not express, enters into her conduct, there is no rape.”
Enid Bagnold
In 1912, aged 23, Enid Bagnold (later a novelist and the author of National Velvet), went to work for the magazine, Modern Society, edited by the 56-year-old Frank Harris. In her autobiography she wrote:“He was an extraordinary man. He had an appetite for great things and could transmit the sense of them. He was more like a great actor than a man of heart. He could simulate anything. While he felt admiration he could act it, and while he acted it, he felt it. And greatness being his big part, he hunted the centuries for it, spotting it in literature, in passion, in action...
“The great and terrible step was taken. What else could you expect from a girl so expectant? ‘Sex,’ said Frank Harris, ‘is the gateway to life.’ So I went through the gateway in an upper room in the Cafe Royal. That afternoon at the end of the session I walked back to Uncle Lexy’s at Warrington Crescent, reflecting on my rise... As I sat at dinner with Aunt Clara and Uncle Lexy I couldn’t believe that my skull wasn’t chanting aloud: ‘I’m not a virgin! I’m not a virgin.’”
Marilyn Monroe
In her autobiography, My Story, Marilyn Monroe describes her early life in late 1940s Hollywood:“The drugstores and cheap cafes were full of managers ready to put you over if you enrolled under their banner. Their banner was usually a bedsheet. I met them all. Phoniness and failure were all over them. Some were vicious and crooked. But they were as near to the movies as you could get. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes—an overcrowded brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for horses.”
In a later interview, when asked about whether rumours of the casting couch were true, she said:
“They can be. You can’t sleep your way into being a star, though. It takes much, much more. But it helps. A lot of actresses get their first chance that way. Most of the men are such horrors, they deserve all they can get out of them!”
Mimi Alford
In 1962, Mimi Alford, aged 19, began work as an intern in John F Kennedy’s White House:“Never, even in my most florid imaginings, did I think that my first experience of sex would be with an older man—let alone someone of my parents’ generation. Yet, on my fourth day as a summer intern in the White House press office, I lost my virginity to President John F Kennedy. The experience was so wholly unexpected and surreal that, as I was driven home in a limo afterwards, I wondered if it had all been a dream. That was the conventional view among girls my age in 1962—and I was as conventional as anyone I knew.
Could I have done anything to resist President Kennedy? I doubt it: once we were alone in his wife’s bedroom, he’d manoeuvered me so swiftly and unexpectedly, and with such authority and strength, that, short of screaming, I don’t think anything would have thwarted his intentions...
“After he’d finished, he smiled at me and suggested I use the bathroom. When I came out, he was waiting for me in the West Sitting Hall, which was now deserted. I was in shock. He, on the other hand, was matter-of-fact, and acted as if what had just occurred was the most natural thing in the world.
“He made a phone call, and then explained that a car would pick me up at the South Portico entrance. I wasn’t revolted or appalled, but I was certainly confused. Back in my room, after a shower to wash off the smell of his 4711 cologne, I thought: ‘So that’s sex?’ I didn’t know if it had been good, bad, or indifferent.”
