HETEROSEXUAL MEN! HOW MANY WIVES CAN YOU AFFORD? (AT ONE TIME!)

In some cultures the number of wives a man can have is about how many he can afford to support.

These days some men avoid marriage because they cannot afford a wife at all.

Sure, most women are working and some have careers and make more money than the men they have intimate relationships with, but while there is progress, it's still a man's world.  

So men, HOW MANY WIVES CAN YOU AFFORD?  
(Zero is an answer.)

LOLA MONTEZ GOES TO CALIFORNIA

In 1853, Lola Montez took a Pacific Mail Steamship from Panama to San Francisco. The Gold Rush that began a few years earlier had transformed the frontier and it was mostly rough hewn speculators who lived in the burgeoning city. Her arrival came as a complete surprise, unlike her arrival to New York City, but as theatre and entertainment were very new to the city and extremely welcome, she got booked. Though she was not esteemed as an actress, everyone wanted to see the Spider Dance.  The Tarantula dance had begun in Southern Italy, but her take on it, stomping on imaginary spiders until she became a spider herself, was considered erotic. Young men packed her performances.  San Francisco was forgiving of any moral issues in her past. Because she did charity events, she was thought to have a good heart. However, for the first time Lola Montez suffered being parodied and satirized and lampooned.  Another dancer performed as Mula Lolo of Bohemia.  A comedic biographical song was sung about her.

She went to Sacramento, then Marysville, and then Grass Valley, which was, despite its name, then the largest city in Nevada County, California, and a site known for quartz mining, the quartz having flecks of gold.  No longer a shanty town, it was bustling and prosperous and schools, churches, and gambling houses had been built.  "Spanish" women lived there ; likely prostitutes.

As her dancing became yesterday's news, according to author James F. Farley, Lola gave a private dance to a small circle of fans that might have been most revealing.

But then she married Patrick Purdy Hull, in 1853 at a Catholic Mission.  This was her second Catholic marriage, despite all those protests against Catholicism in Europe.  She had now married on three continents.  After a month she sought a divorce.  She suggested that Hull suffered from an "affliction"  but then she knew her first husband was alive after all. Did he give her syphilis or did she give him it?  Though she had many lovers, she never had children, yet, like Marilyn Monroe did, she was especially kind and generous to children.  (Hull died in 1858 after a stoke he never recovered from.)

By then Lola Montez was 35ish.  In Grass Valley she purchased a cottage with a garden and perhaps found contentment for the first time in her life.  She seemed to retire, to calm, as she humbly did the gardening herself.  She went hunting and riding, read and wrote her memoir, but it's speculated that what was really happening was that her health was in decline. She authored three books that were published in 1858 which were an autobiography, 125 love stories of classic couples, and a witty  beauty book which included advice to gentleman on how to deal with the ladies at a time when she was bitter about men.

In 1855 she closed up the cottage and went back to San Francisco to plan a comeback - a world tour.  She needed to earn.  It was a time of financial crashes and bank closures.  She got depressed.  She looked worn out.  She got into Spiritualism - contacting spirits to ask them questions.  Her world tour included small venues near the gold fields but she made it to Australia and back to New York.  Perhaps realizing she would die, she made a will favoring the children of her manager.

In her forties, Lola Montez got back into Protestantism while also a spiritualist.  As she got sicker she got more pious.  She visited the Magdalen Society asylum for former prostitutes and seems to have repented her life of sin.  But she said it was her mother who ruined her first.  She died on January 17, 1861 with a Minister at bedside reading the Bible.  Her tombstone says "Mrs. Eliza Gilbert."  Word of her death was spread by Pony Express.

Rumors of Romance always followed Lola.  As did rumors of children she might have had, perpetrated by people who claimed her as a mother - and King Ludwig I as a father.  (Three said so!)  After they divorced, Lola and Patrick Hull were also supposed to have had a little girl born about 1856.  And the tabloid press in England, as suggested by a man who had been her valet and servant,claimed she'd had a child with George Heald.  No evidence exists that any of this was true.

Book Review by Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot C 2019

LOLA MONTEZ : VOLATILE TEMPTRESS and MISTRESS OF KING LUDWIG I of BAVARIA WHO CHANGED HISTORY

youthful image from Wikipedia - Public Domain -
 artist Joseph Heigel painted before 1840

Eliza Rosanna Gilbert -  Lola Montez

born possibly 1818 -1821- death 1861

Also called  Senora Maria Dolores de Porris y Montez 
and a few other names.

A femme fatale of the Victorian age who gained world wide infamy,  the woman most likely born illegitimate to a fifteen year old mother in 1818 as Eliza Rosanna Watson - or Gilbert - in Ireland, was a victim of fake news and gossip like certain celebrities today, even as she caused much real ruckus herself. It seems her nature to have been a spitfire and willing to use notoriety to work her way up to the attentions of a King.  Affairs with Franz Liszt the composer, Andre Dumas Sr., who had left a lot of women with fatherless children, and many others, are probably facts but of short duration. Perhaps "mercurial" or "whimsical" would best describe a woman with a hot temper who would eventually die - most likely - of complications of syphilis.  "Word had it she had taken so many lovers that a centipede couldn't count them on its legs." (page 14)

She was, like many of the women elected Mistress of the Month here at Mistress Manifesto Blogspot, using what she had - beauty - at a time when someone coming from her origins had little opportunity to be more than a wife. Her clear blue eyes were said to shift shades of color and her white skin and black hair were quite the contrast. Considered a great beauty, in some paintings she is, in some images she isn't. Certainly her beauty and youth must have been what captivated her first husband, Lt. Thomas James, whom she married in July 1837 as a sixteen year old (?)who went to live with him in Dublin, then to India. Theirs was a Catholic union that may have never been quite dissolved and could have been a marriage arranged for her by others.

Of this marriage she would come to be quoted thus: "Runaway matches, like runaway horses, are almost sure to end in a smash up."

The author of the book below, James F. Varley, doesn't say how beautiful or desperate her mother may have been, but by 1840 Lola was shipped home to England and said to be locked up in a room.  She had a full on affair with Lt. Charles Lennox of several months duration on the way home.  In 1841, off ship, they went off to London boardinghouse to continue.  But the affair ended.

 Primary reference for posts 
on Lola Montez is this book by James F. Varley.

Later in this month I'll get to her California Adventures, for Lola is considered to be part of the history of California and the Wild Wild West in San Francisco and Grass Valley, once a prosperous boom town, but for this first post, I'll focus on what happened in Europe before she decided to travel to the new country. 

Wanting and needing to become financially independent, and inspired by a famous dancer at the time who did "Latin" dances, Lola decided to give dance a try, studying in London with a Spaniard and then going off to Spain, where she called herself Dona Lola Montez, and claimed Maria de Los Dolores was her real name.  She would change names many times in her life in attempts to reinvent herself. She put on a Spanish accent.  She claimed to be a widow.  But by 1848 she was back in England with a story of being widowed in Spain and selling mantillas. Possibly then she was kept by the Earl of Malmesbury. Too bad for her, an audience member outed her as just plain Betty James, the runaway wife of an army man.

She went to Berlin. There she attended a review held by King Frederick William to honor Nicholas I of Russia.  Did her horse bolt right into the parade because of gun fire or did she ride him there to gain attention?  Well, instead of being arrested, she was invited to visit Saint Petersburg. 

Then there was Warsaw, where she met Liszt.  (He already had a mistress for nine years, Comtesse d'Agoult, but Lola had a passionate week with him.)

Then off to Paris, where she was accused of doing a strip tease of sorts by throwing her garters and other clothing items to men. Her affair with Alexandre Dumas Sr, took place there.

She was still considered an amorist rather than a cold hearted man eater at this point. In Paris she even got herself engaged.  But her fiancee soon died in a duel that wasn't even about her.  She mourned.  She testified.  She brawled with another girl in a theater. She moved on.

In 1846, Lola traveled to the Grand Duchy of Baden and met Henry LXXII of Reuss.  They were lovers but she got thrown out for the offense of having walked across his flower bed! Never mind. Soon King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the married father of nine children, then 60 years old to her 29 years, would become her greatest conquest.  It was a conquest that changed history.

Lola was outspoken and let her opinions be known. She was aware of her power over the King. King Ludwig I's goal in life was to make Munich the center of architecture and art and spent lavishly to build and decorate.  But was he really "mad"?  Lola's presence and the King's unwillingness to give her up challenged the social order and his regime. So controversial was she that protests erupted. She was anti Jesuit/Catholic and sided with the Protestants. It wasn't just his family who wanted her out. Other aristocrats wanted the infamous affair to end. 

By 1848 there were student protests and Ludwig closed down the university for a year.  She was involved with a young Protestant noble.  Soon she was denying rumors of orgies while working on the King to give her a title.  |

"He made the Irish poseur Countess of Landsfeld, Baroness of Rosenthal, and a cannoness of the Order of Saint Therese, of which Ludwig's humiliated Queen was the head." page 40  He also demanded she be respected for her new position and that she receive a lifetime income and a new palace be built for her.
The protests against her became violent. Rocks were thrown at the King.  Lola left town thinking King Ludwig would catch up to her snf when he didn't she tried to come back.  Then she went to Switzerland and awaited him.  He didn't show. 

Lola left Munich because he sent her to Frankfurt where 500,000 florints awaited her at the Rothschilds bank.

Ludwig was forced to cancel her citizenship and all those titles.  

To Londen Lola Montez went, there calling herself Marie, Countess de Landsfeld.  She misjudged that the English didn't know what had happened with Ludwig or that they would accept her. She married a new heir - 21 year old George Stafford Heald, who was a decade younger than she.  Bigamy charges followed.  Divorce was highly unusual.  Had her first husband died in India?  As things got complicated the newly married couple left the country and then fled to France. They lived there quarreling for a couple years - domestic violence. He fled to England alone.  She changed her name to La Comptess de Landsfeld Heald.

Though she got money from Heald and had some of what Ludwig gave her, she spent too much.  So in 1851, she decided to write her memoirs, and they were published in Le Pays, serially.  Like other mistress memoirs, the stories may have been an attempt at extortion.

Affairs and rumors of affairs continued.  Finally she took a steamship to America.  Was she revitalized or broken?  When she arrived in New York in December 1851 crowds were there to greet her.  A book had already been written about her.  Broadway embraced her but the reviews of her dancing skills were not good.  Still, she was learning to market herself and manipulate the press... better than she had before.

More to come!

Missy

C 2019 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All rights reserved.

WALT HAS TWO FAMILIES - and HE'S NOT A BIGAMIST...

BECAUSE HE'S NOT LEGALLY MARRIED TO TWO WOMEN AT THE SAME TIME... so I wonder when it will become legal here in the United States to be married to more than one person at a time!  Because same sex marriage was only the beginning of a revolution in ideas about what makes marriage.  Missy

Excerpt and Notes from THE WILD TRUTH by Carine McCandless

"My father continued to tell Marcia all about my mom; Marcia says when he left her for two weeks out of every month, she was made to understand that he was staying with his second family.  He was proud of having produced so many offspring and saw no reason to hide his other children from her.  In fact he envisioned us all eventually living together under one roof, and by way of convincing Marcia, pointed out that my mother made a fantastic pot roast - Marcia's least successful culinary endeavor - but he said that Marcia's spaghetti sauce was much better.  Marcia remembers she quipped "I didn't know you were a Mormon Fundamentalist, Walt."


Walt kept a special phone line in his home office with Marcia reserved for calls to and from Billie.

MONOGAMY MAY HAVE EVOLVED TO PREVENT INFANTACIDE by ANDREW WINNINGS

SCIENCE MAG ORG - MONOGAMY MAY HAVE EVOLVED   Link to the Andrew Winnings' article From Science.org here ! "But why did social monogamy arise at all among mammals, including primates, given the many reproductive advantages to males having access to as many females as possible? Scientists have proposed three major hypotheses: Monogamy provides more effective parental care for infants, as in birds; it prevents females from mating with rival males, especially in species where females are widely spaced and cannot all be easily monopolized by one male; or it protects against the risk of infanticide, which is very high among some primate species, including chimpanzees and gorillas, and is often explained by the desire of a rival male to quickly return a mother to a fertile state so that he can sire his own offspring. Some researchers think that a combination of all three factors, and perhaps still others, provide the best explanation for monogamy."

THE LAW : PHILLIPINES MAKES CONCUBINAGE PUNISHABLE WITH PRISON (FOR THE MAN)

What is the current law about a husband who lives with another woman?  The subject makes the advice columns.  Here's an article from the Manila Times.

HUSBAND WHO LIVES WITH MISTRESS LIABLE FOR CONCUBINAGE by by PERSIDA ACOSTA link to article.

EXCERPT : "As provided for under Article 334 of the Revised Penal Code, “Any husband who shall keep a mistress in the conjugal dwelling, or shall have sexual intercourse, under scandalous circumstances, with a woman who is not his wife, or shall cohabit with her in any other place, shall be punished by prision ... The concubine shall suffer the penalty of destierro.”

You may likewise consider filing a complaint for violation of the provisions of Republic Act (R.A.) No. 9262, otherwise known as the “Anti-Violence Against Women and Their Children Act of 2004.” This law penalizes the commission of abusive acts against a woman and her child. Since your husband is neglecting his responsibilities and he refuses to provide support for you and your children, as you have mentioned in your letter, you have a cause of action against him. As provided for under Section 5, id, “The crime of violence against women and their children is committed through any of the following acts: (i) Causing mental or emotional anguish, public ridicule or humiliation to the woman or her child, including, but not limited to, repeated verbal and emotional abuse, and denial of financial support or custody of minor children or access to the woman’s child/children.” Your husband may suffer the penalty of prision mayor if found to be guilty of the aforementioned crime (Section 6 (f), id).

As to your question relative to bigamy, please be informed that you cannot file a complaint for bigamy against your husband..."

GOOGLE BIGAMY TIMELINE LINK HERE!

Click on the link above to read all about BIGAMY in the Western World! Now a bigamist has married more than one woman - sometimes very many - without ever getting a divorce... It's not legal in the Western World. In some countries, such as Kenya, it is rarely prosecuted.

There is a difference, is there not, with having many wives who do know about each other and having many who do not?!

DECEMBER 7 1539 MARTIN LUTHER APPROVES OF BIGAMY

Martin Luther, the man who is credited with the religion Lutheranism, and Philipp Melachthon, decided that Philip of Hesse should marry a second wife rather than divorce his first one, thus approving of bigamy.