Nancy Bernhard is the author of the new novel The Double Standard Sporting House. She also has written the book U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960. Also a journalism historian and a yoga teacher, she lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Q: You’ve said that your grandmother told you her Aunt Beadie was a madam in the 1920s, although that was a fabrication. Can you say more about that, and about how it led to your writing The Double Standard Sporting House and creating your character Doc?
A: Beadie was a free spirit who lived outside the lines of sexual convention and was shamed for it by being called a sex worker. But I began to wonder how girls end up in the sex trade. The answer is mostly through no fault of their own, either because it’s their only way to survive, or because they are raped. And yet they are shamed—their stories are written out of history, just eradicated.
A character began to take shape in my mind, a gifted healer, who ends up on the wrong side of respectability, and finds she has far more freedom to practice medicine and accrue enough wealth to help many women and girls.
Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: During the lockdown of 2020-2021, I read a lot of books about the history of the 19th century sex trade including trafficking; New York City politics, especially Tammany Hall; and the history of women’s reproductive healthcare.
What surprised me most was how many women worked in the sex trade in 1868 New York. Given that they were excluded from most professions and could hardly earn a living wage in the jobs they were allowed to do, we estimate that at least 10 percent of the women in the city that year did sex work.
Of the women alive in the city at that time, 30 percent probably took money for sex at some point in their lives. Contrast that to 1 percent now, when we have many other ways to earn a living.
Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and history as you wrote the book?
A: The setting of an elite brothel funding a medical clinic while captive to a political syndicate requires some explanation! A lot of work went into establishing Doc’s world for the reader.
As an historian, I had to learn how to render the complex setting and history through the story and the lives of the characters rather than through explanation or long background passages. It came a long way through revision, and I’m sure it could be better, but it’s pretty immersive.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: As I did the research, I kept a document with evocative expressions of the sexual double standard through the centuries. In the present day, we see it mostly as women being blamed and shamed for sexual behavior that we condone or forgive in men.
A sporting house is a period term for a brothel, and the title just occurred to me one day. I found it funny and provocative that Doc would give her house this name.
I gradually came to see the double standard as even deeper, as men trying to control reproduction for their economic and sexual privilege, even though women carry the burden of it, and are shamed for it.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A novel about rock-and-roll mythology and women in 1968.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Doc’s pioneering work in healing for survivors of sexual assault found inspiration in my work as a trauma-sensitive yoga teacher. We have a lot of research-based, pharmacological, and technological strategies for healing now, but women have been doing this work together forever. Storytelling is fundamental to healing.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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