A review by redhairedashreads
Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist by Jennifer Wright

5.0

TW: discussions of abortions, rape, sexual harassment/coercion in the workplace, alcoholism, homelessness, starvation, abandonment of children, death of children, drug overdose (including in children), sex work, death of husband, incest, child kidnapping, incarceration, racism, lynching, the Civil War, torture, death of family members, suicide. 

“Restell was a businesswoman, a scofflaw, an immigrant, and an abortionist. She made men really, really mad. She deserves a place in the pantheon of women with no fucks left to give.”

Ann Trow, aka Madame Restell, was a well known 19th century abortionist who spent her life helping women. Madame Restell is a woman who should be a name that you would think would be pretty well known to women, especially with the current fight to protect abortion rights, but sadly, she has mostly been forgotten, probably because she was really hated for what she did.

Restell’s story was a fascinating one of an immigrant coming to America with a husband and child hoping for a better life and quickly finding that it was just as hard to survive here as it was in Britain. After her husband died, things got worse for Ann but she was an extremely hard worker and eventually started working as an abortionist, which eventually became successful. So successful that she became one of the wealthiest women in the city and had a beautiful horse drawn carriage, lavish dresses, and the best education for her daughter. 

While Restell did help many women by providing access to abortions, we also see that she was a flawed person. She wasn’t doing this to help women because it was the right thing to do but because it would make her money. We also see her do some very not nice things, like kidnap an unwed woman's newborn baby because she thought the woman would be better off without the child.  Restell was arrested several times for providing abortions and was jailed for over a year for doing the right thing for these women, even if she was doing it for the profit. 

When I started this book, I knew nothing about Ann Trow, 19th century abortion history, Anthony Comstock and the Comstock laws,  and everything else women had to deal with during this time period. Ann Trow Sommers (Madame Restell) was a fascinating woman who lived her life on her terms and said fuck you to anyone who got in her way. She fought for everything she had and she died on her own terms instead of letting her haters destroy her. While I don’t like some of the things she did, I really enjoyed learning about this remarkable woman and how important she was for so many women in New York during the 1800’s. Also, it was remarkable that she reportedly never had any deaths from her abortions. 

“American’s are entering a new age of Comstockery, where if women do not want to be mothers, they will be made to be.”

I highly recommend this book if you are interested in learning about remarkable women performing illegal abortions successfully when surgery was still extremely dangerous and abortions were illegal, and now are again. Also, the epilogue is really poignant right now and discusses our current situation with the overturning of Roe v Wade. 

 
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