Publishers Weekly
08/07/2023
In this illuminating narrative, Syrett (American Child Bride), a gender studies professor at the University of Kansas, profiles Ann Trow Summers Lohman (1812–1878), a female physician and abortion provider who practiced in New York City under the pseudonym Madame Restell. When Lohman established her career in the late 1830s, abortion and other women’s reproductive healthcare were largely legal and overseen by female midwives, but legal restrictions, moral condemnations, and opposition from all-male medical institutions grew over the half century during which she worked. In spite of increasing backlash, Madame Restell was a highly successful and sought-after practitioner. She advertised her services in major papers and often wrote long letters to the press defending her practice against legal challenges and protest. She was arrested numerous times, and in 1839 served a year in a dismal prison on Blackwell’s Island. In 1870, antivice activist Anthony Comstock tricked Lohman by pretending to be a customer, leading to another arrest. Based on his evidence, she was indicted for advertising and selling contraceptives and abortifacients. Knowing that she was facing a certain prison sentence, Lohman died by suicide. Drawing extensively on newspaper reports and trial records, Syrett reveals an entire underground industry that flourished in 19th-century American cities, and tracks the rise of opposition to women’s reproductive care over time. It’s an eye-opening account. Illus. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Praise for The Trials of Madame Restell:
"Syrett’s meticulously detailed account . . . offer[s] a portrait of a formidable woman navigating an era that, in several important respects, bears an unnerving resemblance to our own."
—The New Yorker
"A thorough and discerning political history of abortion in 19th-century New York City."
—Los Angeles Review of Books
"Compelling. . . . Thorough and well-researched."
—The Washington Post
"[Syrett] has written a thoroughly researched and scholarly account, blessedly free of academic jargon."
—The New York Review of Books
"Syrett took great care to write with elegant, economical prose. . . . This fascinating story of Madame Restell, the women she served, and the foes who sought to crush her deserves wide readership."
—Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
"The Trials of Madame Restell is a respectful, thorough portrait of a brave woman who defied her era’s norms to give women reproductive options."
—Foreword Reviews
"A richly detailed biography of a defiant woman."
—Kirkus Reviews
"In this illuminating narrative . . . Syrett reveals an entire underground industry that flourished in 19th-century American cities, and tracks the rise of opposition to women’s reproductive care over time. It’s an eye-opening account."
—Publishers Weekly
“In an era when men of law and medicine were aggressively eliminating women’s sexual and medical rights, Madame Restell was one of the few women who dared to openly defy them. She earned international notoriety and a small fortune providing birth control, abortions, and a refuge for pregnant women who had nowhere else place to turn. But Nicholas Syrett’s account of Madame Restell’s extraordinary career and tragic ending could be ripped from today’s headlines. Anyone who wants to understand the current conflagrations over abortion needs to read The Trials of Madame Restell.”
—Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
“Nicholas Syrett digs deep to present for the first time a fully three-dimensional Madame Restell, the legendary nineteenth-century New Yorker whose name became a national synonym for abortion—'Restellism'—for three decades and beyond. Syrett probes behind the hype of scandal-driven newspapers to portray a committed female physician providing contraception and abortion services to probably hundreds of women each year. And how did the authorities treat the Madame? Read on, to learn about this surprising chapter of America’s abortion history.”
—Patricia Cline Cohen, author of The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York
“The Trials of Madame Restell takes readers on a fascinating and timely journey through four decades of Restell’s pioneering medical practice and constant legal predicaments in a rapidly changing New York City. Syrett’s historical sleuthing through legal records, archives, and newspaper accounts paints a complex portrait of Restell and the society that vilified her, and brings antebellum and Gilded Age New York to life.”
—Tom Meyers, co-host of The Bowery Boys Podcast
“This extraordinary and compelling story of the trials of Madame Restell will thoroughly engage you, totally enrage you, and hopefully persuade you to join her courageous legacy and fight for women to have control over their bodies and lives.”
—V (formerly Eve Ensler), author of The Vagina Monologues and Reckoning
“Nicholas Syrett’s The Trials of Madame Restell is as illuminating as it is haunting. [In this] careful historical reconstruction of abortion, midwifery, and women’s reproductive healthcare in the nineteenth century told through the life of one New York woman, Syrett makes clear that the right to choose has been used by men as a tool to control women for centuries. Madame Restell is an unforgettable character: feminist, progressive, social justice warrior, and shrewd businesswoman. Her very life embodies a fight over women’s rights that has gone on for far too long. I read this book aghast, breathless, enraged—every sentence a whisper of our world today.”
—Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises and Women We Buried, Women We Burned
“Famous, infamous, and undaunted, Madame Restell believed fiercely in the right of nineteenth-century women to control their own bodies. A savvy entrepreneur, a wife, and a mother, Restell was also an unceasing target of the press, the police, and the courts. In this compelling book, Nicholas Syrett gives us an all-too-timely tale of the untimely demise of an unconventional woman.”
—Martha Hodes, author of My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering
"Conjuring the fracturing social world of mid-nineteenth-century New York—decades that changed how Americans lived, loved and worked—Nicholas Syrett’s extraordinary account of the many assaults on Madame Restell, the city’s most notorious abortionist, reminds us of the horrifying costs in our ongoing struggles over women’s bodies and reproductive rights. It’s a battle that is not yet over."
—Ann Fabian, author of The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead
"‘Are we not bound by every obligation, human and divine . . . to guard, to protect our health, nay our life’ is how Madame Restell advocated for contraception and abortion publicly—in the year 1839! We honor this inspirational provider ancestor when we learn her story, uplift the good she did, and build on her legacy of fierce resistance."
—Viva Ruiz, founder of the Thank God for Abortion initiative
Kirkus Reviews
2023-08-09
A survey of the early days of anti-abortion activism.
Syrett, a scholar of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, draws on considerable archival sources to recount the life of British-born Ann Trow Summers Lohman (1812-1878), aka Madame Restell, who became infamous as a women’s health provider. The author examines the social and cultural forces that made her a wealthy celebrity and repeatedly attempted to quash her. Lawmakers, doctors, and vice crusaders sought to limit women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom, and a “nativist outcry” emerged from Americans fearful that allowing abortion for upper- and middle-class married women, thereby limiting the size of their families, would result in a nation overrun with the offspring of fecund immigrants. Abortion foes were also concerned that women who sought to end a pregnancy were rejecting their sacred destiny to be a mother. Furthermore, the American Medical Association was determined to keep women’s bodies firmly under its control. Early in her career, one of Restell’s most energetic detractors was George Washington Dixon, a zealous reporter who published vicious attacks and rejoiced in her arrest in 1841. Public interest in her trial—where her “youth, beauty, black eyes, raven hair, and singular physiognomy” attracted admiring attention—and the 1842 appeal that overturned her conviction, afforded her “enormous amounts of publicity,” which the savvy businesswoman used to her advantage. Throughout her career, she vied with competitors, notably two known as Mrs. Bird and Madame Costello, and she fought accusations of “manslaughter in the second degree for the abortion of a quick child”; of abduction, and of murdering infants. Syrett portrays her as empathetic toward her clients—if less so toward her daughter and brother; strong-willed as she fought against misogyny; and wily in her business dealings. This book is a solid complement to Jennifer Wright’s Madame Restell.
A richly detailed biography of a defiant woman.
