The Sewing Girl's Tale, John Wood Sweet

 

The Sewing Girl's Tale: A story of crime and consequences in revolutionary America by John Wood Sweet.  This is a true crime story written by a professor of history at the University of North Carolina who also specializes in sexual studies.  This story started around the first recorded rape trial in the United States.

Started: 8/5/2022
Completed: 8/11/2022
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

This is non-fiction, so I'm not sure that *SPOILER* is the correct title, but if you don't want to know the outcome, please don't read further.

The fact that we only know the protagonist from her time in the court room is both emblematic of how women's stories are lost and symptomatic of a paternalistic society.  Lana was raped.  The story of her rape, its outcome, the trials, the mobs, and the aftermath are all about the men in Lana's life, but not about Lana herself.  It is amazing how much Sweet has discovered and shocking how little of it involves Lana herself.

It is easy to forget that in revolutionary times, New York was what we would call a small town now (20-40K inhabitants, depending on the time frame).  That means that plenty of people we think of as notables (such as Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton) were well known and even related to people in this story.  If you were overwhelmed by the city and didn't want to go "into the country" you would go to Philadelphia for a break (an even smaller city) and "only" a day away.  It is also easy to forget that Broadway was mostly homes for the middle to lower class at this time and had no sidewalks.  It was common place for people to die under the wheels of a cart or at the mercy of a "crazy" horse.  With no air conditioning and the enormous stench of night soil (feces) as well as all that horse manure, people would go out in the evenings for a walk along the river (which offered a fresh breeze in those times).

It is also hard to remember that sexual mores were undergoing change and that, in the long run, only those who had the most isolated existence would begin to meet what was considered properly chaste.  Women and girls who had to work, however, were out among the people and thus subject to men's inappropriate address almost constantly.  I cannot imagine a world in which people simply could not survive without marriage and where death of a spouse had to result in an immediate search for a replacement.  This is just the way things were at the time and doubly so for women who were underpaid (as they still are) and could not reasonably support a family without a husband and, in many cases, without children working for the family as well.  Finally, the age of consent was 10.  Good Lord.