Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [430]
Within a year of its formation, the New York Female Moral Reform Society had hired ministers, missionaries, and agents and had organized five auxiliaries in New York and another twenty-eight outside the city. By 1838 there were 361 auxiliaries and an estimated twenty thousand members, principally in New York State and greater New England. In 1839 the city group reorganized as a national operation, the American Female Moral Reform Society, and within two years it boasted 555 auxiliaries and a combined membership of approximately fifty thousand.
Male clergymen attacked this female initiative, as they had the work of the Female Missionary Society nearly two decades earlier, as being beyond women’s proper sphere. But the Female Moral Reform Society strenuously resisted clerical injunctions. As an early issue of the Advocate asserted, “This work must be begun with ladies. They are the injured, and they must rise and assert their rights.” Rather than meekly returning to the home, militant women elbowed male philanthropists aside and made a place for themselves in the quest for the Millennium.
“IS IT NOT MORE LIKELY THE WORK OF A WOMAN?”
At three A.M. on Sunday, April 10, 1836, brothel keeper Rosina Townsend was awakened by smoke billowing out of Helen Jewett’s room. She screamed for the watchmen, who discovered Jewett’s body—hacked up (“the bone was cleft to the extent of three inches”) and partly consumed by flames. The rear door was ajar. Just outside lay a hatchet and a blue cloth cloak belonging to one Richard P. Robinson. Townsend explained that Robinson had arrived the previous evening to spend the night with Jewett and had been there at eleven P.M., when she had served the couple champagne. The watch hastened to Robinson’s lodging house. There they found pantaloons smeared with what appeared to be lime from the whitewashed fence behind the brothel. Charged with murder, Robinson was imprisoned at Bellevue.
The slaying of Helen Jewett became an instant sensation. “For the last ten days,” James Gordon Bennett wrote in his Herald on April 20, “this tragedy and the accused have occupied every tongue—been the leading topic of every conversation—is discussed in every drawing room and gin shop throughout the extent of New York. . . . No point of interest—no event—no contingency ever took place in New York, which has so completely divided public opinion, and created a general debate.”
Premeditated murders were rare—only seven had been reported in all of 1835—but the uproar over the Robinson-Jewett affair stemmed from more than shock. The protagonists were perceived, correctly, as emblematic players on the city’s gender stage, whose relationship afforded the citizenry yet another opportunity to debate New York’s rapidly changing sexual and class dynamics.
Helen Jewett, daughter of a poor Maine shoemaker, was keenly intelligent, extremely beautiful, and the possessor of social graces acquired in service to a prominent Augusta family. Since 1830, then aged seventeen, she had been a girl “on the town,” first in Portland, then in Boston, finally in New York City. From 1833 on she lived in a series of elegant brothels in the lower Fifth Ward, ending up at 41 Thomas Street in 1835.
Rosina Townsend ran an elegant establishment. Her girls met potential clients in fashionable venues like the third tier at the Park Theater or were screened and deemed acceptable by Madame Townsend herself. Many of the visitors paid a kind of court to the courtesans, in earnest emulation of bourgeois mating rituals. Helen, glamorous