Women, Law, and Lawlessness in 19th-Century New York
Tuesday, June 30, 6:30pm at the Jefferson Market Library, Willa Cather Room, 425 6th Avenue, NYC
Step into 19th-century New York City for an engaging conversation about women, power, crime, and survival. This panel, hosted by Kelly Scarborough, joins historical novelists Nancy Bernhard (The Double Standard Sporting House) and Catherine Siemann (Death Uptown and Downtown) to explore how women overcame the legal and social constraints of their era by skillful maneuvering and defiance. From a brothel owner and doctor fighting to protect sex workers to a lawyer protecting the rights of immigrants, the discussion will examine the blurred lines between law and lawlessness in nineteenth-century New York City, and how historical novelists bring these complex women and forgotten histories to life.
Join the Historical Novel Society-NYC on June 30, 6:30pm in the Jefferson Market Library’s Willa Cather Room, 425 6th Avenue, NYC. Doors open at 6pm! There will be light refreshments and book signings and sales.
About Our Panelists
Born in Brooklyn, Nancy Bernhard is an historian of American journalism (BA Dartmouth College, PhD University of Pennsylvania). She is the author of US Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-60 (Cambridge University Press), with a particular interest in how war correspondents have covered atrocities. She is also a longtime yoga student and teacher, who works with survivors of sexual assault. These two interests have converged in the study of how we have understood and treated trauma from both war and rape over the last two centuries. The heroine of her first novel, The Double Standard Sporting House, is an imagined pioneer in the medical treatment of survivors.
Catherine Siemann has a Ph.D. in Victorian literature from Columbia, a J.D. from NYU, and a collection of old family documents and photographs from 19th and early 20th century New York City to spark her imagination in writing historical mysteries. Death Uptown and Downtown, her novel-in-progress featuring Gilded Age woman lawyer Emma Lockwood, won the 2023 Killer Nashville Claymore Award for best unpublished historical, as well as a Leo B. Burstein/MWA-NY scholarship for mystery writing. Her short stories featuring Emma have been selected for several anthologies, including the forthcoming Empire State Crimes. Catherine lives in the East Village, a few blocks from where her great-grandfather had a grocery shop in the 1890s, and teaches at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She is on the board of the New York Tri-State Chapter of Sisters in Crime.
Kelly Scarborough (Moderator) worked for more than two decades as a law firm partner and white-collar prosecutor, but her real passion is reading and writing biographical historical fiction about fascinating women navigating love, politics, and power in European history. Her debut novel, Butterfly Games, is inspired by her visits to Swedish castles and archival research. Kelly lives in Madison, Connecticut and Bluffton, South Carolina.
