On March 27, 1844 the New York Herald published the “Memoir of Zulma Marache.” It was a first-person account of one woman’s experience with seduction, betrayal, and abortion. It was, and remains, a rarity: the only known autobiographical account of seduction and abortion to appear in a newspaper before the Civil War.
Readers usually encountered stories of women’s seduction in fiction or in tragic newspaper tales that often included abortion as a subplot. Whether fact or fiction, such stories frequently objectified, moralized, and condemned women for what dominant culture deemed their sexual and reproductive “sins.” Such stories, further, rarely depicted the women involved as embodied or self-directed individuals who had lived lives before and would continue to liveafter the events that brought them to readers’ attention.
Beyond Seduction and Abortion: the Life and “Memoir”of Zulma Marache offers an alternative, more complex view of one woman’s experience. It recovers the life and voice of Zulma Marache, a French immigrant who sought justice for herself after betrayal and who lived a life far beyond the narratives her culture prescribed or that today’s narratives of abortion’s past have imagined.
There are any number of ways to enter into digital book. I think the best way is to start at the beginning and learn About This Project: in terms of its evolution, scholarly roots as a literary recovery project, its philosophy, and aims. I believe that reading in order will be the most rewarding experience for readers. They can:
Readers usually encountered stories of women’s seduction in fiction or in tragic newspaper tales that often included abortion as a subplot. Whether fact or fiction, such stories frequently objectified, moralized, and condemned women for what dominant culture deemed their sexual and reproductive “sins.” Such stories, further, rarely depicted the women involved as embodied or self-directed individuals who had lived lives before and would continue to liveafter the events that brought them to readers’ attention.
Beyond Seduction and Abortion: the Life and “Memoir”of Zulma Marache offers an alternative, more complex view of one woman’s experience. It recovers the life and voice of Zulma Marache, a French immigrant who sought justice for herself after betrayal and who lived a life far beyond the narratives her culture prescribed or that today’s narratives of abortion’s past have imagined.
There are any number of ways to enter into digital book. I think the best way is to start at the beginning and learn About This Project: in terms of its evolution, scholarly roots as a literary recovery project, its philosophy, and aims. I believe that reading in order will be the most rewarding experience for readers. They can:
- Learn about Zulma Marache Basney’s life and family, including the legal and cultural circumstances informing her lawsuit against her fiancé for breach of promise, her testimony in the March 1844 abortion case, the People v. Catharine Costello, alias Maxwell, et al., and the life that she built as a wife and mother in the years after she disappeared from the headlines.
- Access a timeline of events that follows Marache from 1842 to 1844, the years between her seduction and the sentencing of the three parties accused of procuring her abortion.
- Read the Critical Edition of the “Memoir.” It begins with a Critical Introduction that provides readers with the literary, legal, and journalistic contexts of “Memoir” while attempting to answer questions about the text’s genre, authorship, origins and authenticity. The Editor’s Note foregrounds decisions I made as I prepared the “Memoir” for readers. The Text of the “Memoir” is precisely that, with the addition of contextual and clarifying footnotes.
- Explore the Educators’ Resource Guide for ideas of how to incorporate the “Memoir” and these pages into undergraduate and undergraduate classrooms, and the Bibliography as a starting point for further research.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in Beyond Seduction and Abortion: the Life and "Memoir" of Zulma Marache, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.