Michael D. Pierson's "The Wild Woman of Cincinnati"

Michael D. Pierson is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and author of Lt. Spalding in Civil War Louisiana: A Union Officer’s Humor, Privilege, and Ambition.

Pierson applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Wild Woman of Cincinnati: Gender and Politics on the Eve of the Civil War, and reported the following:

Page 99 is pretty deep in the weeds about how we should answer one of the big questions that historians grapple with about the Civil War era: How different were the North and the South? Readers of page 99 would see details about part of my answer. By 1856 (when the Wild Woman goes on exhibit in Cincinnati), the two sections disagreed markedly about what roles women should play in their cultures.

So, does the Page 99 Test work? Yes, a little. It has a conclusion that will matter to historians. But the real fun of this book is getting to the conclusions. The story of the show, with its silent, imprisoned, supposedly feral woman at the center, is what has interested students and others that I’ve talked with about this incident over the past few years. Who was she? Was she an actor, a consenting participant in a hoax? Or was she desperately ill, traumatized by some past event and brutally exploited? How could a woman be put on exhibit for almost two months, available for anyone to stare at who had a quarter to hand to the ticket seller?

Conclusions matter, and they make the Wild Woman show historically significant. But hearing the showman tell us how he had hunted and captured the feral woman in violent combat, and how he brought her to Cincinnati, is vivid and ultimately alarming. The show’s end, too, is riveting. It was closed by a Cincinnati Judge who sent the police to shutter the exhibit and bring the Wild Woman into custody for psychiatric evaluation. Her day in court was horrific, and she ended up being committed to an Ohio asylum.

One last thing: we also miss the fun of piecing together all of this from a rather small and sometimes mystifying source base. I love weighing ambiguous or contradictory evidence, trying to distill its meanings. That’s all on other pages. So, we miss that in addition to the implausible twists and turns of the history of the show.

So, for me, I’d sum it up this way: Page 99 is all potatoes, served up with very little of the gravy that makes this history fascinating.

Learn more about The Wild Woman of Cincinnati at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue