The Sewing Girl's Tale provides a vividly contextualized account of a 1793 New York City rape and its aftermath. John Wood Sweet's title recalls Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning A Midwife's Tale, and he depicts the same era of the Revolution and early republic. But whereas Ulrich focused on a middle-aged woman on the Maine frontier, Sweet provides a microhistory of a skilled New York City “sewing girl.” In contrast to Ulrich, Sweet has no diary on which to base his account. He can, however, mine a sixty-two page pamphlet that reported the trial of Henry Bedlow “for committing a rape on Sawyer.” Sweet's research goes far beyond the trial report. His painstaking inquiry into numerous New York City sources enables him to probe the experience and character of both Bedlow's and Sawyer's families, their dwellings and neighborhoods, as well as the lives of the two principals—both before and after Bedlow's assault on Sawyer. He also provides a detailed description of Sawyer's clothing, which is relevant to proving the assault, as well as the houses and rooms in which his characters lived. He augments the story with period images of protagonists and New York City. This meticulous and extensive attention to individuals and their situations is reminiscent of the scholarship of Robert A. Gross, with whom Sweet studied as an undergraduate. His analysis of the crime itself and the trial, as well as his account of bawdy house culture, supplies, in effect, a prehistory of the illicit urban sex world revealed in Patricia Cline Cohen's The Murder of Helen Jewett (1990).As with Cohen's study of the 1830s, the structural inequalities and injustices of gender and class underlie Sweet's microhistory. He shows that—at least superficially—Lanah Sawyer, a respectable seventeen-year-old sewing girl and Bedlow, a twenty-six-year-old gentleman, could meet socially. The novels of the era, notably Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, imagined a world of romantic engagements. Here, the character of the rake serves as a model for Henry Bedlow. As Sweet's investigation reveals—even though “Harry” Bedlow concealed his true identity from Sawyer, some New Yorkers knew him to be a rake, one whose free spending and readiness to renege on loans also led him to ignore court orders. Sweet speculates that Sawyer imagined a romance with Bedlow and that her evident trust in the charming young gentleman led to what we now call “acquaintance rape.”The author's account of New York law pertaining to rape, which derived from the English jurists Matthew Hale and William Blackstone, is not entirely new; but it is the richest, most thoroughly thought-out consideration I have seen. The crime of rape as conceived by Hale and Blackstone scarcely recognized the possibility of acquaintance rape or that a woman under assault might not be capable of screaming loudly for help to nearby listeners. The jurisprudential world Sweet describes was so male-centered that it did not accept the reality that a woman might not wish to go public immediately with the trauma of her violation. Instead, partly because rape was a hanging crime, all-male courts resisted accepting a woman's word. They routinely tipped the scales in favor of men, imagining scenarios where a woman stood to gain from the rape accusation. Whereas Patricia Cline Cohen explained that the testimony of prostitutes was deemed false prima facia when their testimony condemned a gentleman in Jewett's murder trial; in Henry Bedlow's trial, the testimony of a bawdy house keeper and her associates was treated as reliable because it exonerated the defendant. With both the law and social prejudice supplying a decidedly upper hand, Bedlow's team of prominent attorneys won his acquittal.The Sewing Girl's Tale does not end with Bedlow's trial. A reviewer should not reveal the surprising twists and turns of the story after the rape trial that reward readers. To be sure, the sequelae of the case further reinforce the author's themes—the multi-dimensional psychological trauma of rape, the male-centered character of the law, the stark ways that social class operated in the early republic, and, what seems arcane to us—the character of the period's property law. But as microhistories do especially well, the after-story of Lanah Sawyer and Henry Bedlow demonstrates the importance of contingencies in the many unpredictable paths of experience.One aspect of the larger rape story that Sweet does not treat is male victims. To mention this fact is no criticism of this study. Sweet's book brilliantly investigates and informs readers concerning the Sawyer-Bedlow case. Consequently, the rape of men and boys is extraneous. Nor could the author compare Bedlow's rape trial with reports of male-on-male cases because no such rape trials were reported in this era. Yet unless we suppose that male-on-male rape did not occur, this omission is significant. It furnishes yet another demonstration of elite men's dominance in defining law and jurisprudence. In Anglo-America the rape of one man by another man was not accepted as belonging to the norms of the culture of masculinity; whereas, as Sweet demonstrates, destroying a woman's chastity was understood as an attack on the property and honor—the masculinity—of a husband or a father.The Sewing Girl's Tale is remarkable. Although Sweet cannot truly enter the minds of his actors, his imaginary reconstruction of their possible thoughts, particularly the varied emotions of Lanah Sawyer, are entirely plausible. They give this story an unusually intense, emotional impact. Sweet has read deeply in the relevant scholarship and he has assimilated the sophisticated methods of the best microhistory. His readers are the beneficiaries of this rich examination of the early republic's social order.