The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous “Female Physician” and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime

In the mid-nineteenth century, Madame Restell was the most successful female physician in America, selling birth control medication, attending women during their pregnancies, delivering their children, and performing abortions in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. Her detractors used the term "Restellism" to indict her, and restrictions on abortion began to put her in legal jeopardy. This story is all too relevant to the current attempts to criminalize abortion in our own age, as it paints an unforgettable picture of the changing society of nineteenth-century New York and brings Restell to the attention of a new generation of women whose fundamental rights are under siege.

Format: Hardback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 14 December 2023
Publisher: The New Press

The biography of one of the most famous abortionists of the nineteenth century—and a story that has unmistakable parallels to the current war on reproductive rights—is presented here. Madame Restell, the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, operated a series of clinics out of her home in New York City for forty years in the mid-nineteenth century. She sold birth control medication, attended women during their pregnancies, delivered their children, and performed abortions. It was the abortions that made her famous, and "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. However, 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 prevailed—until she didn't.

The Trials of Madame Restell is a story that is all too relevant to the current attempts to criminalize abortion in our own age. It 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.

Weight: 606g
Dimension: 160 x 236 x 29 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781620977453