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Bibliography


By Nicole C. Livengood, March 2026


This bibliography points curious readers toward primary and secondary scholarly sources relating to Zulma Marache and seduction, abortion, and female physicians in the mid-nineteenth century.  It is not exhaustive, and consists of the sources I’ve found most relevant or influential in shaping my understanding of Marache’s life and “Memoir.”  Like Beyond Seduction and Abortion itself, it is a starting point and not the final word.  

Zulma Marache Primary Sources

Select Scholarly Sources

  • Brancky, Anne, et al. Introduction to Special Cluster, Disclosure Narratives; or, What Can Disclosure Do? in Modern Language Studies, vol. 50, no. 1, 2020, pp. 12–­ 23. 
  • Carlson, A. Cherree. The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law. U of Illinois P, 2009.
  •  Coombs, Mary. “Agency and Partnership: A Study of Breach of Promise Plaintiffs.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, vol. 2, no. 1, 1989, pp. 1–­ 24. 
  • Haag, Pamela. Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism. Cornell UP, 1999.
  • Jessee, Margaret Jay. Female Physicians in American Literature: Abortion in American Literature and Culture. Taylor and Francis, 2022.
  • Lettmaier, Saskia. Broken Engagements: The Action for Breach of Promise of Marriage and the Feminine Ideal, 1800–­ 1940. Oxford UP, 2010. 
  • Livengood, Nicole C. “‘Thus Did Restell Seal That Unfortunate Lady’s Lips with a Lie’: George Washington Dixon’s Polyanthos and the Seductive Abortion Narrative.” American Journalism, vol. 33, no. 3, 2016, pp. 289–316.
  • ---. “‘Her Voice was Heard’: The Antebellum Abortion Archive and the  ‘Memoir of Zulma Marache.’”Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 40, nos. 1-2, 2023, pp. 29-58.
  • ---. “Serial Intersections in the New York Herald and Mysteries of Paris.American Periodicals, vol. 34, no. 1, 2024, pp. 45-64.
  • Luker, Kristin. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood . U of California P, 1984.
  • Mai, Brooke Lansing. “‘The Helpless French Girl’: Seduction Narratives in a Nineteenth-Century Abortion Trial.” Gender and History, vol. 26, no. 3, 2024, pp. 313-326.
  • Medoro, Dana. Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion. U of Massachusetts P, 2022.
  • Mohr, James. Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy. Oxford, UP: 1978. 
  • Riddle, John M. Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Harvard UP, 1997.
  •  Reagan, Leslie J. When Abortion was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and the Law in the United States, 1867-1973. U of California P, 1997. 
  • Stormer, Nathan. Articulating Life’s Memory: U.S. Medical Rhetoric About Abortion in the 19th Century. Lexington, 2002. 
  • ---. Sign of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s-1960s. Rhetoric Society of America, 2015. 
  • Syrett, Nicholas L. The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime. New Press, 2023. 
  • Tavera, Stephanie Peebles. (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failures of American Censorship. Edinburgh UP, 2022.
  • Weingarten, Karen. Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940. Rutgers UP, 2014.
 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.
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