In San Francisco these days, residents are hurling rocks into the windows of Google buses—and yet this is a relatively benign moment in the city’s history. As Phillip Margulies shows in his new historical novel Belle Cora, the Bay Area is no stranger to class warfare and vigilante justice.
The real-life Belle Cora is an orphan who reinvents herself in New York City and South Africa before arriving in Gold Rush-era San Francisco. She establishes herself as one of the city’s most celebrated madams. But like Moll Flanders or Becky Sharp, she finds that material success is no defense against a society that frequently abuses and discards women.
Margulies says he was inspired by the history of San Francisco’s madams. (The amazing cover designs for Curt Gentry’s The Madams of San Francisco are almost inspiration enough.) In the early Gold Rush years, madams were wealthy and popular and above reproach. But they soon had to confront a wave of “good Christian women” arriving from the East with old-fashioned values. And they could never outrun trouble. One of Belle Cora’s lovers was hanged by the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance—literally a band of vigilantes—for shooting a U.S. Marshal who had insulted Belle.
Makes today’s affordable housing crisis seem a bit dull, doesn’t it?
