The Murderess of Utica: Abortion, Madness, and the History of Difficult Women

In 1872, one of America’s first female MDs went on trial for murder in Utica, NY, only to be acquitted by reason of temporary insanity. Guilty or not, Josephine McCarty was notorious long before the crime that was her last public act: since 1864, she had run an apparently successful practice in illegal abortions in Albany. In 1862, she was imprisoned as a rebel spy. Her earliest notoriety came in 1859, when her tenure at Philadelphia’s Blockley Hospital as a newly graduated medical student ended in disgrace amidst accusations of theft and adultery. Josephine’s story touches on topics that drive historians’ interest in the nineteenth century and fire the public imagination today—war, abortion, madness, murder—yet her name appears in no history books. She represents what we might call a “difficult woman”—a woman whose life record challenges established narratives about women’s history. For a historical establishment based on patriarchal values and still squeamish about women’s bodies, Josephine appears dangerously independent and successful; to feminist historians she raises troubling questions about the kind of woman who succeeds in breaking through the barriers of gender oppression. It is precisely this quality of difficulty that makes Josephine, and women like her, as essential to our history as Elizabeth Blackwell and Susan B. Anthony. This presentation, based on newspaper and archival sources from the New York State Library and digital collections, will outline McCarty’s life and argue for the importance of difficult women both for academic and popular histories of American women.