On January 17th, 1872, a woman named Josephine McCarty boarded a streetcar in Utica, New York, and shot her former lover Milton Thomson, injuring him but killing a bystander in the process. Five months later, a jury acquitted her of all charges.

Was Josephine McCarty insane, as her defense team claimed? Was she a wicked woman, as practiced in manipulating the “unwritten laws” of American society as she was in manipulating innocent men? Or was it more complicated than that?

A Woman At the Bottom of It All explores these questions by exploring the life of the murderess, who before she shot Thomson was a spy for the Confederacy, a doctor for women seeking discreet illegal abortions, a mother to six children, a wife to an obsessively ambitious weapons inventor, and a student at the United States’s first degree-granting medical school for women. Her story is the story of women in U.S. History as it has never before been told.