Renowned historian John Sweet offers a riveting Revolutionary Era drama that tells the story of the first rape trial on record in American history, and the fault lines of class privilege and gender bias that it exposed, showing how much has changed over two centuries and how much has not.
In September 1793, a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel on a moonless night—the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one else had done: she charged a gentleman with rape.
When Lanah raised her voice, she was dismissed as a mere “sewing-girl,” led astray by romantic delusions. But she refused to stay silent. Her accusation sparked a sensational courtroom drama and a relentless struggle for vindication that divided both Lanah's and her assailant's families and threatened both of their lives. The legal battle exposed the city's predatory sexual underworld, shaped the development of American law, and ignited a vigorous, even violent, debate about citizenship and the rule of law, class, and gendered double standards. For a new nation rocked by the radicalism of the French Revolution and by pioneering feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, the crime and its aftermath became a kind of parable—a dark reflection of the power of seduction and the limits of justice, of the rights of men and the wrongs of women. Eventually, Lanah Sawyer did succeed in holding her assailant accountable—but at a terrible cost to herself.
In The Sewing Girl's Tale, the unique record of this courageous young woman's testimony—in the first published report of a rape trial in American history—makes it possible to shed new light on her ordeal that will forever shape the stories we tell ourselves about sexual predation and romantic love. Ultimately, Lanah Sawyer's tale reminds us that if our law and our culture were changed by a persistent young woman and the power of words two hundred years ago, they can be changed again.
