THE SEWING GIRL'S TALE

An engrossing true crime narrative that reconstructs the 1793 rape of Lanah Sawyer - the first published rape trial in American history and its long, shattering aftermath, revealing how much has changed over two centuries—and how much has not. (for readers of Jill Lepore, Erik Larsen, and Stacy Schiff who love a well-told historical narrative that resonates with today's issues.)

THE SEWING GIRL'S TALE is a riveting historical drama that tells the story of the first published rape trial in American history, as well as 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 ongoing conflict attracted the nation's top lawyers, including Alexander Hamilton, and shaped the development of American law. The crime and its consequences became a kind of parable about the power of seduction and the limits of justice. Eventually, Lanah Sawyer did succeed in holding her assailant accountable—but at a terrible cost to herself.
Based on rigorous historical detective work, this book takes us from a chance encounter in the street into the sanctuaries of the city's elite, the shadows of its brothels, and the despair of its debtors' prison. THE SEWING GIRL'S TALE shows that if our laws and our culture were changed by a persistent young woman and the power of words two hundred years ago, they can be changed again.
John Wood Sweet is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and former director of the Program in Sexuality Studies. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for Arts and Humanities at UNC, and the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, among others. His first book, Bodies Politic: Colonial, Race, and the Emergence of the American North, was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize. He was named a Top Young Historian by the History News Network and has served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. He lives in Chapel Hill with his husband, son, and daughter.