American Antiquarian Society
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Madame Restell (1811-1878) was the most famous abortion provider and female physician in nineteenth-century America, so much so that "Restellism" became a synonym for abortion. Nicholas Syrett, author of The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America's Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (2023), reflects on Restell's life, placing it alongside the history of the criminalization of abortion in the United States. While Restell was most famous for providing abortions, she also operated a successful lying-in hospital where she delivered babies and sold contraceptives and emmenagogues. In conversation with AAS member Ann Fabian (elected April 1997), Syrett focuses in particular on those latter services, while highlighting the connections between illegitimacy, abortion, and changing sexual mores in antebellum New York City.
Nicholas L. Syrett is an associate dean and professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Kansas. He is the coeditor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality and the author of four books, most recently The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America's Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (2023).
Ann Fabian is Distinguished Professor of History, emerita, at Rutgers University. Her work has explored aspects of the cultural history of the nineteenth-century United States from economics to print culture to race and science. Her books include Card Sharps, Dream Books & Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (1991), The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (2000), and The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (2010). She was elected to AAS membership in April 1997