In pursuit of votes for women, Cordelia Rutherford has broken the law by smashing windows in Oxford Street. Now she faces a naked lashing and then a sentence of public exposure and humiliation, which will dishonor her good name. But then she is given the choice of a more private form of correction. Since both her father and the courts believe that her behavior is the result of her still being unmarried at 25, she will be freed on warrant and handed over to a broker, a Mr Ivory, for a regime of continuous naked humiliation and chastisement while he finds her a suitably strict husband. To add to her discomfort, Mr Ivory is black, and has the right to carry out his commission by any means necessary.
Cordelia is set up with five potential suitors, who are tasked with both wooing and punishing her at the same time to prove they will make suitably strict husbands, until either she either consents to marry one of them or else rejects them all and is returned to jail and public humiliation.
She is put through a degrading series of sexual and sadistic ordeals, involving being displayed naked for advertising purposes, having sex with slave girls, a terrifying trial of her domestic abilities, extreme exposure in a music hall, a spanking and shafting machine, a girlhound stadium race, sex in a hollow bed, trotting naked through Hyde Park, being hunted by a suitor with a pain gun and electric torments.
Will Cordelia be broken or hold to her cause? And can she ever find a suitable husband in such a male dominated and conservative society?
