Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [324]
Of rich and poor the difference what?—
In working or in working not
Why then on Sunday we’re as great
As those who own some vast estate.
“THE LIFE OF A CITIZEN IN THE HANDS OF A WOMAN”
Although white working-class women in New York led widely divergent lives—hotcorn girls and the wives of Episcopalian master craftsmen had very little in common—the changes sweeping the city during the 1790s and early 1800s left them collectively worse off than ever. Lowered property requirements for the suffrage, for example, boosted the political visibility of working-class men, but they also magnified the powerlessness and dependency of their still-voteless wives. The erosion of household production and the growth of wage-work likewise tended to privilege the labor that brought home the bacon over the unpaid labor that cooked it—along with raising the children, mending clothes, cleaning, and nursing the sick.
As jobs for men in the trades became less secure and wages declined, many working-class women found themselves obliged to shoulder additional responsibilities to supplement the incomes of their husbands: taking in piecework as milliners or seamstresses (black women took in laundry), hiring out as domestic servants in middle- and upper-class households, or renting rooms to boarders. A lucky few may have been able to earn an independent living—by 1800, eighty-eight of the 150 boardinghouses listed in the city directory were run by women—but the income generated by this kind of work was as a rule far too meager for that. For women whose husbands had died or run off, and who proved unable (or unwilling) to support themselves as domestic drudges, prostitution was frequently the only alternative to public assistance.
Indeed, the heightened vulnerability of working-class women to sexual exploitation—above all by upper-class men—became a familiar and explosive topic during the 1790s. Seduction dramas in which unscrupulous aristocratic cads took advantage of simple but pure working girls were hugely popular on the New York stage. Arguably the most widely read book of the era was Susannah Haswell Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple, first published in London in 1791. Set in Revolutionary New York, her tale concerned an innocent fifteen-year-old schoolgirl seduced by a dashing British naval officer named Montraville, who then abandons her to take up with a wealthy local belle. Charlotte dies giving birth to his child, scorned by all except the laboring people, who haven’t lost sight of her innate decency and virtue.1
In 1793 life provided an ugly imitation of art, when a seventeen-year-old girl named Lanah Sawyer alleged that a certain Henry Bedlow had lured her into Mother Carey’s bawdy house on Ann Street, where he then raped her. Rape in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New York was a crime of the poor: well-to-do women rarely if ever brought formal accusations of rape before the courts, and the men charged with rape were almost invariably mechanics and laborers. Sawyer, a sewing girl whose father was a little-known sea captain, fit the pattern perfectly. “Harry” Bedlow didn’t. His family was wealthy, and he had a reputation around town as a rake and libertine.
Bedlow’s trial before an all-male jury raised questions of power, privilege, gender, and class in a republican society. To the prosecution, Sawyer was a “poor and unknown” girl victimized by an arrogant rogue “of rich family and connections.” Bedlow’s attorneys, Richard Harison, Robert Troup, and Brockholst Livingston, admitted that a seduction had occurred. But they denied the charge of rape, arguing that Sawyer’s plebeian standards of “discretion and prudence”—why had she been out in the streets without an escort? why had she failed to reject Bedlow’s advances at the very outset?—were obviously looser than