Coat Hangers/Wickest Women in New York

 

               The Wickedest Woman in New York

 

Drawings of Ann Trow Sommers Lohman, later known as Madame Restell, intrigue me. She looks like an ordinary upper middle-class woman of the late 1880s. It isn’t hard to imagine why many women, who could not face bearing a child, considered her their savior. Others termed her the “wickedest woman in New York” for her long career in providing abortions to those that knocked on her door.

I will use her professional name, Madame Restell.

Restell was born in Painswick, England in 1812. The village, which had been settled from the Iron Age, had appeared in the Domesday Book and had participated on the side of Parliament in the Civil War.

Nothing in her childhood would have predicted her future. Her father was a laborer. She received little education. Her first job was as a maid for the local butcher.

She married Henry Sommers, a tailor, in 1828. Their daughter, Caroline, was born in 1830. Like many people during that time, they sought increased opportunity in the United States. In August 1831 they sailed for New York settling on William Street in Manhattan.

The better life was not to be. Sommers died.

Some sources say it was a bilious fever, a general term to describe nausea, fever and heavy diarrhea. Others say it was yellow fever with its similar symptoms plus headache and a yellowing of the skin caused by liver and kidney damage. Yellow fever is caused by the bite of an infected mosquito which is more often found in tropical and subtropical climates than in places like New York.

The name of the disease that killed him isn’t important. Restell was left with a small child. She wasn’t totally alone: her brother, Joseph, had moved to New York and had a job as a salesman in a pharmacy.

For a time, she used her sewing skills for piecemeal work. Although not lucrative, it allowed her to stay home with Caroline.

Charles Lohman came into her life, although I could not find how they met. Maybe she wandered into the Chatham Street bookstore, maybe someone introduced them. He was 27, well-educated and part of a group that hung around the bookstore where radical thinkers debated philosophical issues. Different sources describe him as a German immigrant, others as a Russian.

Meeting him changed the course of her life.

The Start of Restell’s Abortion Service

Whether it was Restell, brother Joseph or husband Lohman who decided to sell/profit from birth control issues, is also unknown. They began marketing a product claiming “preventive powders” and “Female Monthly Pills” under the brand name Madame Restell. Ann would use that name for her abortion work.

The products were launched 18 March 1839. The truth was stretched until it broke when the trio claimed Madame Restell was the granddaughter of a celebrated midwife and female doctor.

So successful were they that Restellism became a euphemism for abortion. Just like the pharmaceutical companies of today, they advertised heavily.

Some papers such as Polyanthos, a monthly literary magazine published in Boston, refused their ads, as did the National Police Gazette, an early men’s lifestyle magazine with sports articles and photos of attractive women. Other publications followed suit, but enough periodicals accepted Restell’s advertisements to make the business lucrative.

If the medicines were designed to abort fetuses, sometimes they failed. Physical abortions produced better results, although these could lead to massive infections and even death if performed badly.

The most common technique was a wire shoved up the vagina to pierce the fetus’s amniotic sac. A miscarriage would follow—but not always. In some cases, the woman would have to see a regular doctor to finish the procedure. Under the best of conditions, the procedure was painful.

I could not find what made Restell decide to do physical abortions. When she started, her business, abortion was not illegal. She quickly built the service into a successful enterprise. She even franchised her business with six outlets in New York and other states.

Perhaps some of the growth was because The Sun and Herald accepted her ads. Throughout the years her advertising budget was substantial.

Because we are missing any documentation indicating the Lohmans’ intentions, we will never know if this was a profit-driven enterprise or an altruistic desire to help women in trouble or a bit of both. I would like to think a bit of both because she had a sliding price scale depending on the circumstances of the patient: $20 ($562 in 2018 dollars) for poor women, $100 ($2,814 in 2018 dollars) for rich ones.

Madame Restell’s business frightened people who saw not just abortion but contraception as a danger to the social order. Samuel Jenks Smith, editor of the New York Sunday Morning News, wrote on 7 July 1839 that abortion and contraception “strikes at the root of all social order—is subversive of all family peace and quiet—will generate jealousies and hate—will demoralize the whole mass of society and make the institution of marriage a mere farce.”

Legal Challenges

Restell was to face many challenges. Ann Maria Purdy accused Restell of giving her tuberculosis during an abortion. On her death bed in March 1841, Purdy told her husband that in 1939 Madame Restell had sold her tansy and spirits of turpentine. She didn’t take it and chose a surgical abortion.

According to Purdy, Restell argued about the price and then let a male physician perform the abortion after Purdy gave her every cent she had. She was not even allowed to keep money for the cab fare home, her story went.

A Doctor Marvin claimed the abortion that Purdy received 15 months before caused her health to fail, leading to her to develop tuberculosis. Purdy died 18 April 1841.

Restell was arrested and awaited trial in jail in the Halls of Justice, also known as The Tombs. The State Supreme Court overturned her conviction on a technicality because she had not been allowed to cross-examine her accuser. Although a retrial was ordered, because the witness was dead, the case was dropped.

Mary Rogers, a “noted beauty,” was found dead in the Hudson River in July 1841. In November 1842, Frederica Loss, who allegedly worked for Restell, swore Rogers’ death was caused by an abortion. Although police refused to believe Loss, newspapers linked her to Madame Restell, who was sometimes called “the monster in human shape” or the “wickedest woman alive” because of her abortion work. The murder was never solved.

In 1843 Dr. Gunning S. Bedford claimed that a patient of his needed surgery because her vaginal opening had scar tissue because of an abortion allegedly done by Restell. He termed it a “vaginal hysterectomy.” These charges were false. It was later revealed that the scars had been caused by the woman herself as she tried to induce her own abortion with a piece of whalebone.

The Business Grows and More Problems

Always a good business woman, Restell claimed she would compensate anyone who proved her methods were dangerous, not quite a Good Housekeeping magazine guarantee. The Lohmans claimed that Madame Restell studied midwifery in Europe, which was never verifiable. Chances are beyond remote that she did.

Office hours were from nine in the morning to 10 at night. Madame Restell was happy to mail remedies under her brand name. If the pills and powders failed, she would abort the woman in her office, if the woman would come to the office.

She opened a boarding house for women who didn’t want abortions, but wanted to give birth in secret. As for the babies, she would arrange adoptions for an additional fee.

On her deathbed from an abortion, Eliza Munson implicated Madame Restell in 1844. Upon further examination, however, it had been determined that Munson’s death had been the result of an abortion by Restell’s rival, Margaret Dawson (alias Mrs. Bird). Dawson was sentenced to six months and fined $250 ($7,893 in 2018 dollars).

November 1845 was a bad month for Restell. The National Police Gazette published a story about Mary Rogers’ death three years before. That Rogers was an exceptionally beautiful girl probably created more national attention.

The New York City police force at the time was made up of:

• A night watchman
• 21 city marshals
•  21 constables
• 51 police officers

 Certainty it was not enough to police a city of 320,000 people. Nevertheless, police staked out Madame Restell’s premises and questioned every woman who entered. 

After Abortion Became Illegal

New York had made abortion illegal in 1845. Because it was considered an obscene subject, newspaper coverage dwindled to nothing.

Restell continue her work as if the law did not apply to her. Her business was prospered. Her regular clientele included repeat customers, including those from the most prominent families in New York.

To balance the negatives in her life, Restell was happy to become an American citizen in April 1845.

The year 1846 wasn’t much better overall for Madame Restell. A stockbroker, Augusta Edwards, was paying the board of Mary Applegate, whom he had impregnated. She allegedly gave birth at Madame Restell’s. The rumors said that Madame Restell grabbed the baby with the intention of destroying it. Another rumor said that Madame Restell put the baby up for adoption at the request of Applegate’s father. Neither was proven.

If rumors were not enough, Frederica Medinger, a German immigrant, claimed to be abducted by the couple in August 1846, as part of a bribery attempt which failed.

George Washington Dixon of Polyanthos stirred up a crowd of 200-plus people who gathered at the corner of Greenwich and Liberty where Restell worked. They demanded to see how many babies were buried inside. Some 40-plus policemen kept the crowd somewhat under control. This was not the first time Dixon had attacked Restell. In a 16 February 1841 piece in Polyanthos he warned seaman that their wives could be unfaithful and abort the results. His concern seemed more directed at virtue than the life of the baby or mother.

At the same time, Dixon was anti-birth control because it would allow for sexual activity.

Prison Did Not Stop Restell

Restell spent time in prison at Blackwell’s Island in 1847.

Those that wanted her to suffer were disappointed. She had a feather bed and was fed on linen-covered trays from the prison-keeper’s table. To keep boredom away, she ran the women’s prison hospital. In total she only spent five months at Blackwell, having been credited with the seven months she’d spent at Eldridge Street Jail while awaiting trial. Even if the time was short, and the conditions better than most prisons, she vowed never to go back to Blackwell.

Immediately upon release she went back to work at a new address on Chambers Street. Restell’s husband, Charles Lohman, using the name Dr. A. M. Mauriceau, published The

Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion, much of it pushing his own medicine. Husband and wife were arrested in September 1847. Lohman faced an obscenity charge, because in his writing birth control was mentioned (https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:3810612$1i).

If the law was anti-abortion, Restell’s clients were not. She claimed to have letters from thousands of grateful women, although none are extent today. Some of the women whom she helped had kind words that made their way into the public discourse.

Maria Bodine had been impregnated by Joseph Cook, a farmer. When Cook refused to pay, Madame Restell offered her board and even slept with her when she was in pain. Bodine was six months pregnant. Bodine was even given travel money by Restell when she was ready to leave.

Things improved for Restell in the 1850s. The wedding of her daughter Caroline to Isaac

L. Purdy was performed at her home by New York Mayor Jacob A. Westervelt. Other prominent people frequented her home during the decade when corruption in New York was at a high point.

Moving into the 1860s, she must have felt secure against the backdrop of major corruption in the city. She built a huge Fifth Avenue mansion on the corner of 52^nd Street. An impressive carriage pulled by four horses transported her around the city. Later, Anthony Comstock, cheerleader of the Comstock Laws, would call her house a “gilded palace of death.”

The mansion’s site had been destined for the Catholic Church. Archbishop John Hughes must have been unhappy to discover the loss of the property to the Lohmans.

Such a prestigious address only boosted her reputation. Restell, herself, was said to have claimed that if she gave out the names of her clients she would be immune from prosecution.

Her fortune turned to misfortune in the 1870’s, partially because public opinion was horrified by reports of backroom abortions. Jacob Rosenzweig, known as the “Fiend of Second Avenue,” had been accused of stuffing his dead patients into a trunk and leaving them at a railroad depot. It did not matter that Madame Restell’s work was relatively safe.

The Evil of the Age, an exposé of abortion, was published in the Times in 1871. It was fodder for those wanting to eradicate all abortions.

Once the state legislature made performing an abortion subject to imprisonment of 20 years in April 1872, the work became riskier. Also, the manufacture, sale and use of abortion drugs carried a sentence of up to two years at hard labor.

In January of 1877, Charles Lohman, who had been Madame Restell’s partner in life and business since 1836, died of natural causes.

The same year, Anthony Comstock, self-righteous as always, burst into Restell’s home with reporters and deputies. When her house was searched, they found evidence of abortion and birth control devices and medications.

She did not spend a long time in jail. Later it was written in the press that Restell had bribed officials for her release.

At 67, she was tired as she read about herself in the papers. Terms like vile, wicked, nefarious were bandied about.

In 1878, Restell was once again arrested after Comstock pretended to buy birth control pills from her. (The Comstock Laws were passed 3 March 1873, also called Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.) Birth control was also considered immoral, not only in making, selling and using it, but even talking about it.

Madame Restell had had enough. On 1 April 1878, she slit her throat while in her bathtub.

According to various reports, she was the 15th abortionist that Comstock had driven to suicide.

There is no record of the number of abortions Restell performed, but she claimed no woman ever died. Most back-room abortionists cannot claim such a record. She may just have been one of the best obstetricians of her time and place.

If people were furious about abortions happening to poor women, nothing was done to alleviate the poverty. As for wealthier women, they could afford the better abortionists. Even if there were ways to prevent pregnancies, that too was outlawed. Women did what they needed to do to rid themselves of unwanted pregnancies.

Note: This is a chapter from Coat Hangars and Knitting Needles, a story of abortion in the US before Roe v. Wade. I've mailed a copy to every pro-life judge and leader I could find hopefully showing them that abortion will never be stopped, it can only make it safer for women.