This week I had the great pleasure of chatting with Karen Abbott, author of the exhaustively researched and elegantly written book, Sin in the Second City*: Madames, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul. We chatted about the infamous Everleigh sisters and how they operated their palatial and decadent bordello for over a decade, the other brothels on the street which were rampant with beatings and disease, sex & the Victorian era - brothels were necessary evils because men needed a place to release their sexual urges and it would inevitably protect women from “unpure” sex and rape, brothels being a catalyst for change in the sexual culture at the turn of the twentieth century, the Everleigh sisters’ rivals (other madams, politicians and evangelical reformers) and their constant attempts to rid Chicago of the club, the politics of the day, the Marshall Field shooting, the art of rebirth and reinvention, white slavery narratives (porn for puritans) and the brilliant propaganda, the subversive politics of the Levee district, the downfall of the brothels and the sisters, could the sisters operate today?, and much, much more?

Missed the show? No worries! Click here to listen to the podcast.

*available in bookstores July 10. If there is one book you should read this summer, it should be this!

Next week I’ll be chatting with Virginia Vitzthum, author of I Love You, Let’s Meet.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 5:23 pm and is filed under WR Recap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.