Sharon DeBartolo Carmack gives a voice to people of the past.
Sharon has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing and will graduate with an MA in History in May 2027. She is the best-selling author of twenty-nine books, including the biography In Search of Maria B. Hayden: The American Medium Who Brought Spiritualism to the U.K. and Telling Her Story: A Guide to Researching and Writing about Women of the Past. Her forthcoming book, The Madame Restell Cases: The Stories and Abortions of Five Women in Nineteenth-Century New York, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield/Bloomsbury in March 2027.
Forthcoming March 2027 from Rowman & Littlefield/Bloomsbury
The Madame Restell Cases:
The Stories and Abortions of Five Women in Nineteenth-Century New York
This book portrays five women’s difficult choices when they found themselves pregnant—either unwed or married with too many mouths to feed—and the woman who helped them remedy their situations. The book highlights these women who in the greater scheme of history were not significant but were nonetheless typical of women’s lives in nineteenth-century New York.
The five women whose stories are told in this book are Eliza Ann Munson who was single and seduced by her boyfriend, who encouraged her to have an abortion and then abandoned her; Ann Maria Purdy and Eliza Merritt who were married, pregnant, and did not want more babies; Maria Bodine who was an unmarried servant seduced and impregnated by her employer; and finally, Cordelia A. Grant, a young woman who became a wealthy man’s mistress and had five abortions. Except for the two married women, the other three had abortions at their male partners’ insistence.
The final chapter on Madame Restell challenges the historical cause of death of suicide, and using modern-day forensic evidence, suggests she was more likely murdered. It offers a possible suspect, and his means, motive, and the opportunity he had to kill her.
Meet Sharon
Sharon DeBartolo Carmack is an independent scholar whose research and writing focuses on everyday women who usually left little documentary evidence behind. She is the author of twenty-nine books, holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing, and is part of the English adjunct faculty for Southern New Hampshire University. After thirty-five years, she retired as a Certified Genealogist and is now pursuing an MA in History. Her work has appeared in almost every major genealogical journal, as well as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Portland Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art, Steinbeck Review, and Literary Hub, to name a few.
Books by Sharon
