The History of Women and their Sexual Choices

Jennifer Wright, Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist

This may shock and astound some people, but in the 19th Century, people actually had sex. This has been redacted from most pop histories, which present the era as either a bastion of restraint, or a desert of sexual repression. But just know that, if you think that, you believe a fable that later people sold you. Before the Gilded Age, people frequently had sex, and then as now, they didn’t want to get pregnant.

It’s hard to avoid the phrase “then as now” when reviewing this biography of Madame Restell, old New York’s most famous abortionist. This partly reflects pop historian Jennifer Wright’s intentions, as she deliberately compares the Tammany Hall era with our own. But it also bespeaks how much of history’s seedier side later historians bowdlerized. Wright doesn’t just restore Madame Restell to American history, she shows readers how much of history we’ve had withheld from us.

First, her name wasn’t Madame Restell. Ann Lohman, née Sommers, née Trow, reinvented herself as a sophisticated French physician, when she was actually a working-class immigrant from northern England. Like millions, she entered America through Ellis Island, looking for work, only to find an America overcrowded with similar immigrants. Despite being a skilled laborer, she couldn’t readily find work. She did find, however, that Manhattanites often had sex recklessly, and wanted to purge the evidence.

Some women in 1830s New York went into sex work because it paid well. Others took factory or domestic service jobs, but found bosses who saw their employees as essentially their personal harem. And some already simply had as many children as they could afford to raise. Again, the phrase “then as now” seems germane. Ann Sommers apparently apprenticed herself to a Manhattan compounding pharmacist, and soon started selling contraceptives. That word “apparently” looms large.

Jennifer Wright has written multiple pop histories about important people (mostly women) or events in American history. This is apparently her first book to spotlight just one individual. She works heavily from primary sources, which mostly means newspapers, from the heyday of American newspaper publishing. And that, in turn, means wringing the most salient facts from lurid 19th-Century scandal rags. During Madame Restell’s time, journalists weren’t overly burdened with professional ethics or commitment to accuracy.

Jennifer Wright

Wright therefore must frequently extract the details of Madame Restell’s life from what her detractors didn’t say. (Restell herself apparently didn’t keep a diary, and therefore isn’t her own primary source.) Many of Restell’s accusers claim her wanton abortion practices were potentially deadly to women, for instance, yet they consistently failed to find one dead woman from Restell’s roster. This apparently means that, unlike many of her peers, Restell had no blood on her hands.

We know, from reliable testimony, that Madame Restell performed surgical abortions. No record exists, however, of where she learned the skills, much less how she learned them with such accuracy that she left few dead or maimed patients, something her peers couldn’t say likewise. We also don’t know where Restell learned her other skills. In addition to selling pharmaceutical contraceptives and performing abortions, she apparently also served as a midwife, adoption agent, and marriage counselor.

Restell gained notoriety, both for her effectiveness, and her personal boldness. Wright finds evidence of Restell’s notoriety in newspapers as far afield as Texas and Wisconsin. Apparently her reputation stretched nationwide during an era when news was limited to the speed of print. Restell was so effective, reliable, and safe—during a time when credentialled doctors were frequently quacks—that she became certifiably rich, plowing her money back into ventures like banking and land development.

This isn’t just one notorious woman’s biography. Madame Restell arose from a specific historical era, and Wright recreates that era for us. Restell’s business arose against a background of conflicting forces: urban industrialization caused gender roles to change rapidly. The women’s movement commenced, but because first-wave feminists were largely Quakers, they had little interest in sexual liberation. The slave economy, followed by the Civil War, created ripples that weren’t always obvious until many years later.

Wright’s biography recreates Restell’s life and times, including times that, in schoolbook American history, has often been shamelessly sanitized. Wright restores the era’s nuance, when social upheaval made abortion something women both despised and needed. But like the best literature, Wright’s history is equally about us, and how today’s social upheaval resembles the Tammany Hall era. She encourages us to learn from Madame Restell, and warns us what might happen if we fail to learn.