Assume you’re a “true woman” of the Gilded Age and fate has handed you a raw deal. You had been carefully trained in the virtues of submission, self-sacrifice, timidity, and passive acquiescence to your lot. You were a pale hothouse flower, too frail for the rough usages of the world. Hence the fainting couch and laudanum.
Miriam Leslie, though, was not the fainting type. She was raised in a rough school and developed hide and life smarts at an early age. Illegitimate and likely biracial, she lived a pillar to post existence in a disheveled household with an absentee, bankrupt father. At fourteen she took matters in her hands and petitioned the court to make an uncle her legal guardian in the absence of “some proper person” to look after her.
She steeled herself with a big sense of self and cultivated bulldog tenacity, resilience, chutzpa, and cunning. She needed all the armor she could muster for the crises and obstacles ahead. She walked the mean streets of Manhattan at eighteen, and over a lifetime endured spousal abuse, two business failures, workplace prejudice, two business failures, Society snubs, courtroom battles, cutthroat competitors, and theft of her publishing company. Poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox complained that she could be “cold as an iceberg.” Miriam admitted she was a “match for Satan.” But in the Gilded Age you couldn’t be a creampuff and “angel in the house” and survive. Not with enemies at the door and a crush of serial setbacks hardships, and disasters. It came with a cost, but Mrs. Leslie came out roaring, a victor on a cruel, uneven playing field
Learn more about Miriam’s life and New York City in the Gilded Age in Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age
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