The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America

Abstract

and Rosemarie Zagarri. Bilder beautifully synthesizes this rich scholarship and models the way to write about an idea using the frame of biography. She shows what one can do with a very limited corpus of letters, an active imagination, and an ability to interrogate related sources to uncover relevant context that helps us better understand a woman and the world she inhabited. Her valuable endnotes and extremely helpful bibliographic essay will aid the reader and reward the historians who follow in her footsteps. And perhaps that is part of the point of this work. Bilder’s epigraph for the book is a quotation from Eliza Harriot herself: “The exertions of a female should . . . be considered . . . as presenting an example to be imitated and improved upon by future candidates for literary fame.” She contends that through her lectures and academies, one woman proved the existence of female capacity as equal to male capacity. But the female mind was never static and could always grow, and learn, and be improved upon. Bilder sees Eliza Harriot as part of the framing generation of the creation of the Constitution. The fluid environment of the 1780s and 1790s, with its choices and contingencies, pose central questions of who gets representation and how and who gets to participate in government. Some might argue that this story is both anachronistic and more timely and urgent than ever as women continue the struggle to be seen as full rights-bearing citizens in the American democratic experiment.