lanah

Lanah Sawyer was born in New York City about 1776. In 1793, when she was seventeen and working as a seamstress, she charged the twenty-six-year-old gentleman Henry Bedlow (1767-1838) with rape. A grand jury indicted Bedlow and he was tried for rape, then a capital crime. After a trial of some fifteen hours, according to the published account of the trial, the all-male jury acquitted him after deliberating for fifteen minutes. Protests following the trial incited debate about upper-class privilege and gender bias in the American court system. The trial is cited by many authors as evidence of the sexual double standard that existed in Revolutionary America. After a subsequent civil trial, Bedlaw had to pay substantial damages to Sawyer's family.

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