Patricia Miller

“This rapacious sexual folkway was carried westward into Kentucky by the fortune-seeking descendants of the Cavaliers, including families like the Breckinridges who married into the Tidewater elite, and southward to the plantations of the Mississippi Delta, where the absolute authority southern planters held over enslaved women and the lack of even the modest civil protections afforded to indentured servants created a culture in which black female sexual victimization was rampant. Elite white women, while being held to exacting standards of female purity themselves, weren’t allowed to complain, or even acknowledge this predation. Popular”
― Patricia Miller, Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "powerless" Woman Who Took on Washington

“one local folk saying defined “a virgin as a girl who could run faster than her uncle.”
― Patricia Miller, Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "powerless" Woman Who Took on Washington