The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century Americas Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime

(Hardback)

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The biography of one of the most famous abortionists of the nineteenth centuryand a story that has unmistakable parallels to the current war on reproductive rights

For fifty years in the mid-nineteenth century, Madame Restell, the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control medication, attended women during their pregnancies, delivered their children, and performed abortions in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. It was the abortions that made her famous. Restellism became the term her detractors used to indict her.

Restell began practicing when abortion was largely unregulated in most of the United States, including New York. But as a sense of disquiet arose about single women flocking to the city for work, greater sexual freedoms, changing views of the roles of motherhood and childhood, and fewer children being born to white, married, middle-class women, Restell came to stand for everything that threatened the status quo. From 1829 onward, restrictions on abortion began to put Restell in legal jeopardy. For much of this period she prevaileduntil she didnt.

A story that is all too relevant to the current attempts to criminalize abortion in our own age, The Trials of Madame Restell paints an unforgettable picture of the changing society of nineteenth-century New York and brings Restell to the attention of a whole new generation of women whose fundamental rights are under siege.

Reviews

Praise for The Trials of Madame Restell:
In an era when men of law and medicine were aggressively eliminating womens 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 Syretts account of Madame Restells extraordinary career and tragic ending could be ripped from todays headlines. Anyone who wants to understand the current conflagrations over abortion needs to read The Trials of Madame Restell.
Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prizewinning 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 abortionRestellismfor 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 Americas 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 Restells pioneering medical practice and constant legal predicaments in a rapidly changing New York City. Syretts 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

Author Bio

Nicholas L. Syrett is an associate dean and professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Kansas. The author of The Company He Keeps, American Child Bride, An Open Secret, and The Trials of Madame Restell (The New Press), he lives in Kansas.