Bringing Down the Colonel by Patricia Miller

Here’s the surprising tale of how she sued and roused a generation of women to throw him out of office. “Polite society deemed Madeline Pollard a ‘ruined woman’ when her long-time lover, Kentucky Congressman William Breckinridge, refused to marry her as promised. Using newspaper articles, personal journals, previously unpublished autobiographies, and letters, Bringing Down the Colonel tells the story of one of the earliest women to publicly fight back. And in the age of Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein, we’ve witnessed fraught public reckonings with a type of sexual exploitation unnervingly similar to that experienced by Pollard. Nearly 125 years after the Breckinridge-Pollard scandal, America is still obsessed with women’s sexual morality. Patricia Miller is an award-winning author and journalist whose fascination with the untold stories of women led her on a 10-year journey to unearth the story of the BreckinridgePollard scandal.

With premarital sex considered irredeemably ruinous for a woman, Pollard was asserting the unthinkable: that the sexual morality of men and women should be judged equally. But Pollard struck back, suing Breckinridge for breach of promise in a shockingly public trial. Bringing Down The Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the Powerless Woman Who Took on Washington tells the incredible, true story of how a penniless girl from Kentucky brought down one the most powerful men in Washington, Colonel William Campbell Preston Breckinridge, scion of a Bluegrass political dynasty. After the death of his wife, Breckinridge asked for Pollard’s hand-and then broke off the engagement to marry another woman. Pollard and the married Colonel Breckinridge began their decade-long affair when she was just a teenager. After an affair with a prominent politician left her “ruined,” Pollard brought the man-and the hypocrisy of America’s control of women’s sexuality-to trial. In Bringing Down the Colonel, journalist Patricia Miller tells the story of Madeline Pollard, an unlikely nineteenth-century women’s rights crusader.

Bringing Down the Colonel by Patricia Miller