Content warning: This episode contains occasional explicit sexual references and depictions of graphic events that some may find disturbing. Madame Restell is a figure you’ve likely never heard of. Our guest this week points out that Restell, an abortionist who became one of the most influential and wealthiest women in NYC during the 19th century, has been “deliberately written out of history.” But learning about Restell’s story provides incredible insight into the longstanding and contemporary battles over abortion access in the U.S. Jennifer Wright is a journalist and author of “Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist.” Wright joins WITHpod to discuss Restell’s rise to prominence, the opposition Restell faced from anti-vice crusaders like Anthony Comstock, why she says the U.S. is “heading back not only 50 years, but 150 years” and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Just a quick warning here. I want to note that this episode does contain some occasional explicit sexual references and depictions of some graphic events that some may find disturbing.
Jennifer Wright: People like Horatio Storer, who led the physicians’ crusade against abortion beginning in 1857, talked about how it depends on its implied white Protestant women’s loins, who the country will belong to. Will it be populated with their own children or those of aliens?
And so that’s the same thing we’re seeing now in terms of fears about a great replacement, that if white women do not keep having babies, then we might see a country that is filled with more minorities. And to some people, that is very, very frightening.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. I’m speaking to you right now. It’s Monday, April 24th. It’s a few days after the Supreme Court officially stayed a ruling by a Texas federal district judge named Matthew Kaczmarek that would have resulted in mifepristone, one of the two main medication abortion drugs, being removed from the shelves all over the country.
And there’s a lot to say about that case. I mean, first of all, just the preposterousness of the idea of suing 23 years after something is approved by the FDA and has been used with real time actual data for years. Also, the standing analysis that allowed basically, if it were to go forward, allow basically any physician anywhere to sue over any drug on the off chance that statistically a person could have a negative reaction to that drug that would then force them to take care of that person. So, the harm is that they would have to care for a person, which, as a doctor, is what they do.
Put all of that aside. One of the most fascinating aspects of the ruling, Matthew Kaczmarek, an alarming part of the ruling by that Texas federal judge, one of the things the plaintiffs are seeking is to make it impossible to send mifepristone through the mail. Obviously, that’s the way a lot of people get the drug and particularly would get the drug or getting the drug in places where abortion has been rendered illegal or criminalized.
And it turns out that there’s actually a federal law called the Comstock Act, which makes it illegal to mail abortion medication. And what’s really interesting about this law is that it was passed and signed in 1873, and you think to yourself, oh, it is a reminder of the basic fact that terminating pregnancies, abortion, is as old as people getting pregnant.
We tend to think about, I think particularly in the U.S. context, we think about sort of three eras. The pre-Roe era, which is the 50s and 60s, because we have a lot of sort of T.V. footage of people talking about the nature of the abortion regime at that time because people were organizing and mobilizing to get rid of abortion restrictions, because they were, you know, using coat hangers or going to, you know, unaccredited and dodgy doctors or having to travel abroad.
So, we think about the pre-Roe era, then we think about the Roe era, 1973 through 2022, and now we think about the Dobbs era, which is sort of like the bad old days returned to the pre-Roe era. But the pre-Roe era goes back to the, you know, the beginning of human civilization and even further.
And just in the U.S. context, as you’ll learn in this conversation, abortion was a part of life and a part of women’s lives and a part of the social fabric and a part of social controversy and political and ideological controversy throughout the 19th century. And in fact, the tale that is told in this fantastic new book and the topic of today’s conversation is about a woman who’d become the most famous abortionist of the 19th century, a woman who went by the name of Madame Restell, and she rose to prominence in the 19th century.
And there’s an incredible new book about her life, that is both about her, it’s also about Anthony Comstock, about whom the Comstock Act is named, and about abortion and the fight for reproductive equality that dates back to the 19th century. It’s called “Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist.” The author is journalist Jennifer Wright. And Jennifer, it’s great to have you on the program.
Jennifer Wright: Thank you so much for having me here.
Chris Hayes: You know, I get a lot of book pitches, obviously, and a lot of historical books are about things that I have some sense of. You know, this was a figure who I had never encountered before, and maybe that’s just my blind spot and ignorance. But this was completely new to me, when I first sort of saw your book. How did you come upon this topic?
Jennifer Wright: Well, first of all, I don’t think it’s at all surprising that you haven’t heard of Madame Restell before, because I think she has been deliberately written out of history by people that want to pretend that abortion is a very new phenomenon. And of course, it’s not. Abortion dates back to the beginning of human society.
And as I was looking into that and writing a lot about the history of abortion, there was one name that I kept seeing come up over and over in the mid-1800s, and it was Madame Restell. And she was a British immigrant who came to New York, began working on the Lower East Side, making birth control pills, and then performing surgical abortions, and became one of the richest women in New York during the mid-19th century.
And she’s written about constantly in papers during the period, not just the court trials she was involved in and her profession, but also articles about her carriages and her mansion and her clothing and her diamonds. She was such a celebrity in this age, and it’s really remarkable that she has been almost forgotten today.
Chris Hayes: How did you find her?
Jennifer Wright: Oh, I had been writing for Harper’s Bazaar, a lot about modern abortion laws, and a lot about the history of abortion, and when abortion was still legal in America and how it became illegal. When Madame Restell started her profession in 1831, abortion before the quickening was still just a misdemeanor, and that law was passed first in Connecticut in 1827.
Now, the quickening is when a woman starts to feel a fetus move inside her, and that generally happens around five months, maybe a little bit later. So, any abortion performed before about 20 weeks was usually just punishable with a fine. It would never be punishable with more than a year in jail. And over the next few decades, that changes dramatically in America.
By the end of Madame Restell’s life in the 1870s, after the passage of the Comstock laws, you couldn’t even provide written information in the mail about abortion without facing jail time. So, I think it’s important to realize that things can go backwards just as we’re seeing them go backwards today in terms of reproductive rights.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Again, I didn’t know this history at all but, you know, I talk a lot in the program on reconstruction and then the sort of, you know, reactionary movement that destroyed reconstruction, which the South called redemption, which was, you know, white supremacist restoration of power. And, you know, we don’t learn a lot about that in American history.
Jennifer Wright: And we’re going to learn less about it now.
Chris Hayes: Well, that’s true. It’s one of the big targets. But this, to me, was a kind of, almost like abortion gender equity version where there was a really concerted, ferocious reactionary effort to roll back access, health care, and even a sort of conception of women’s equality or autonomy that was better before this reactionary push sort of shoved it backwards.
Jennifer Wright: Absolutely. And a lot of that does have to do with a desire for white supremacy. A lot of the pushback against abortion was the fact that wealthy white Protestant women were getting abortions.
Madame Restell and her contemporaries could charge up to $100 for an abortion, which was very expensive. The average visit to a doctor at the time would have cost about $2. So, they were charging a lot, they were making a lot of money, and the people who could afford that were often people who had disposable income.
So, this was happening at a time when there was also a massive influx of Irish immigrants to the cities, and there was also a newly freed Black populace after the Civil War. So, people like Horatio Storer, who led the physicians’ crusade against abortion beginning in 1857, talked about how it depends on its implied white Protestant women’s loins, who the country will belong to. Will it be populated with their own children or those of aliens?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: And so that’s the same thing we’re seeing now in terms of fears about a great replacement, that if white women do not keep having babies, then we might see a country that is filled with more minorities. And to some people, that is very, very frightening. And that’s rhetoric that I think we’ve all heard pushed a lot on certain news stations.
Chris Hayes: So, let’s start with Madame Restell and how she went from being a relatively anonymous, newly arrived immigrant from England to the U.S. to her, I don’t know what you call it, nom de plume, Madame Restell, but who was this woman and how did she find her way to this work?
Jennifer Wright: Well, before Madame Restell became Madame Restell, she was Ann Trow. She was born in Painswick, England around 1812. We don’t really know if it’s 1811 or 1812. Reports differ. But she was born to a fairly poor family. And she entered service as a maid of all work when she was a teenager, and she worked for a butcher.
Now, even at the time, she was considered very, very intelligent and she was also considered very beautiful. And as a maid of all work, she would have been very susceptible to sexual harassment. This is something that comes up a lot during the period. Jonathan Swift has a funny piece directed towards maids, talking about how you have to stay away from the eldest son in the house because you’ll get nothing from him except a big belly and the clap.
Chris Hayes: Oh.
Jennifer Wright: Yeah. So, harassment was really prevalent and directed towards women in service.
Chris Hayes: Maid of all work is just someone who lives in the house and does —
Jennifer Wright: All of it (ph). You would probably live in the attic. The attic would be freezing.
Chris Hayes: OK.
Jennifer Wright: You would get up before dawn. You would get all the fires ready. You would beat the rugs, so they were clean. You would be fetching all the water, which could be backbreaking —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: — if there wasn’t a well on the property. You would be emptying all the chamber pots. And there was also a good chance you were being sexually harassed by whatever men were in the house.
Chris Hayes: Right. Or worse, we should say. I mean —
Jennifer Wright: Yeah. And if you did get pregnant, you would no longer be employable. So, this was a very unpleasant profession, and I think it’s one of the reasons that later in life, Madame Restell always offered a very steep discount to women who were employed as servants.
And, you know, obviously, this was not Madame Restell’s dream for her life. She married a tailor around the age of 16. Now, the tailor unfortunately turned out to be an alcoholic. So, Madame Restell pretty quickly learned how to be a seamstress and take over his job for him.
And she convinced him to move to America because, as it always had been, America was supposed to be a place where, as an immigrant, your dreams could come true. You could get rich. So, she and her husband and her very young daughter made the voyage to New York. And unfortunately, once they made it to New York and settled on the Lower East Side, her husband very shortly thereafter died.
And this meant that Madame Restell was a single mother in the Lower East Side of New York, where she did not know anybody at the time, trying to take care of an infant daughter. And there were a tremendous number of working women in New York at the time, but work at a factory for a woman could go on 14 or 16 hours a day, and you would not really be making enough for childcare. So, often, women would dose their children with Laudanum so they’d be drugged, so their children would stay asleep through the day while they were at work.
Chris Hayes: Whoa, really?
Jennifer Wright: Laudanum was referred to as a poor child’s nurse or you —
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Jennifer Wright: — could send them off to a baby farm where a person would take care of your infants. Unfortunately, most of those infants died because they were not being given a supply of breast milk. They would be given something called pap that’s kind of mashed up bread and milk in an unsanitary vessel.
Chris Hayes: Oh my God.
Jennifer Wright: And infection would be rampant. Many of those children died. So, that wasn’t really considered a good option.
One of the saddest stories I found in the newspapers from this time was a woman who had two children. One of them was four. One was a baby. She had to work in the factory. She left her infant with her 4-year-old and asked the 4-year-old to take care of the baby.
And when she came home, she asked how the baby was, and the 4-year-old very proudly told her that the baby had started crying, but he had stopped it from crying. And when she went in to see the baby’s crib, she realized that the way he had stopped it was by bashing it over the head with a hammer.
Chris Hayes: Oh.
Jennifer Wright: So, this was a horrible time to be a poor single mother. And Madame Restell was very conscious of that because she lived on the Lower East Side. And what predictably happened was a lot of single mothers just became prostitutes because it’s a job where you can stay home with your child for most of the day and you would make a lot more money than you would in a factory.
Unfortunately, the life expectancy for prostitutes was very, very short. Sexual disease was rampant. As it is now, it is an unsafe profession, and it’s a profession that the police did not really have any sympathy for. So, the average life expectancy for a prostitute would only be something like five years.
Chris Hayes: I just want to pause this to digest this (ph) just avalanche of Dickensian.
Jennifer Wright: It’s horrible. It’s bad.
Chris Hayes: You know, misery that you just unspooled. Just to like take a second. I just need a second with the story of the 4 and the 2-year-old because I’m like tearing up a little. So, yeah, I mean, this is a nightmarish scenario if you are a single mother.
Jennifer Wright: A nightmare scenario where perhaps women would benefit from birth control.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: And Madame Restell very quickly realized that she could not make enough money taking in other people’s laundry and trying to be a seamstress. But she lived down the street from a pill compounder. Now, at the time, there wasn’t really any oversight on what you put into pills. You could take any herbs that you had lying around, smash them together into a pill and say, OK, this will cure your insomnia, or this will cure your headaches or liver complaints or anything else.
Chris Hayes: Right. Yeah.
Jennifer Wright: And sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t. Hopefully, they did work, because you’d have a better clientele if you were doing something that worked. And Madame Restell started making birth control pills that were seemingly very, very successful. We know that she used Tansy oil, and she used turpentine, which unfortunately are still things used today. They are very, very dangerous to use.
In the 1970s, doctors said that turpentine emerged as a kind of harrowing motif in do it yourself abortions because it will induce an abortion, but it is also very likely to kill you.
And there’s an interesting piece in “The New York Times” about a woman drinking Tansy tea to try to induce her own abortion. And this was recent. This was in this century. And as she was drinking it, writing letters to her loved ones in case a Tansy tea killed her.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: So, these are still things that are used in the recent past to induce abortions. And Madame Restell was seemingly able to mix them in a way that wasn’t killing her patients. We have one patient who said that she took Madame Restell’s medicines, and she had five successful abortions. And a lot of the other patients immediately became repeat clientele.
Chris Hayes: So, before we get to that, so what triggers her? I mean, she views it as a business, like she’s looking for a way out?
Jennifer Wright: Oh absolutely. Madame Restell had come to America to get rich. She has a daughter. She is trying to figure out a way that they can make money because the alternatives are disastrous.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: And just by virtue of being in the Lower East Side, a poor part of Manhattan —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: — and seeing a lot of single mothers and seeing a lot of women who are pregnant and know that it is going to destroy their lives, she would realize that, OK, there is a huge need for this.
It’s also very possible that Doctor Evans, the pill compounder she went to, probably provided this medication to some degree. He just didn’t do it as well as Madame Restell did it. And she also learned how to perform surgical abortions after that as she was always very clear that her pills were not infallible.
You know, we have her clientele. We have reports from women that they were effective. But these are by no means modern abortion pills. They would have had a very high failure rate. And you would see patients who would come to Madame Restell not for one abortion, but for something like 10 abortions.
And one of the most remarkable things about her practice is that, despite the fact that she had many enemies, there were people who very much wanted to see her arrested, we don’t have any reports that she killed a patient. She went on trial two times. But one of the people who accused her of killing her via abortion actually died from consumption. And the other one’s health was deteriorating due to syphilis, probably not her abortion.
So, the fact that Madame Restell was not killing patients is remarkable, because when you look at a lot of other abortionists from this period, they did. And Madame Restell was performing surgical abortions with a sharpened piece of whalebone. It would have been very similar to a coat hanger abortion. And if your hand slips even a little bit, you can punch a woman’s bladder and that will kill them. Or if it just goes off in another way, you can rupture something, and the woman will develop sepsis and die.
So, Madame Restell must have had a great deal of confidence and a very, very steady hand as she was doing this.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So, just to make an obvious point, there is no birth control at this point or very little medical birth control.
Jennifer Wright: There is very little medical birth control. There is the kind of birth control that Madame Restell is providing insofar as —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: — it can induce an early abortion.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: And the advertisements in the newspapers will say that if there has been a stoppage in your flow, if for some reason your menses is not proceeding as normal, they can give you pills that will return it to normal, by which they mean induce a miscarriage.
Chris Hayes: How does she go from providing this? Because she’s obviously quite good at this, right?
Jennifer Wright: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But the thing that makes her business grow is the reliability of the pills and her steady hand surgically, right?
Jennifer Wright: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But how does she go from providing what is essentially a kind of gray market neighborhood, word of mouth good, to sort of building an empire?
Jennifer Wright: Yeah. Well, to some degree, Madame Restell’s second husband, Charles Lohman, to thank for that. Charles was a printer. He worked at “The Herald.” So, he would have been very familiar with the kind of bombastic personalities that were advertising during this age. And this was probably a joint decision. But we imagine that he discussed with his new wife how they could sculpt persona that would entice not only poor people on the Lower East Side, but very wealthy people to come to Madame Restell.
And that’s really how Madame Restell was born. She wrote advertisements about how she had been trained in Paris. Her grandmother was a famous midwife. And this was at a time when French people were not only considered sexually sophisticated, but it was also known as the Paris period in medicine, where great medical developments were happening in places like Paris and Vienna.
So, to say that you had been trained there meant that many people would assume that you had medical knowhow that didn’t really exist in the United States. So that was something that wealthier women would feel a little more comfortable with.
And before long, you started seeing the carriages of the very rich pulling up to Madame Restell’s new office. And it became very clear that this was not only a problem that was afflicting women on the Lower East Side, but also something that very wealthy women needed treatment for.
Chris Hayes: This sort of persona, around what time is this that this goes from a sort of neighborhood operation to something bigger?
Jennifer Wright: Madame Restell’s business was really booming around 1839. So, about eight years after she had come to America, she was opening offices in other cities, places like Boston and Philadelphia. She had a tremendous number of patients. She had opened an office. She had moved into a slightly better part of town. So, by then she was becoming very well known.
And around that time, in addition to her advertisements, she was starting to fight with people in the press. So, she was beginning to explain why she felt that abortion was so important. And the initial objection to it didn’t have anything to do with fetal personhood or even really religious sentiments regarding the fetus.
It had to do with the idea that this would make it easier for your wife to cheat on you, that if you, say, needed to go on a business trip to Europe for six months, you could have relative certainty that your wife would remain chaste during that period, because if she didn’t, you’d come back and she’d be pregnant, and it would be a huge scandal. But with Madame Restell, she could have —
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Jennifer Wright: — affairs every minute of every day and nobody would ever know. And this was very upsetting to some of the male thinkers of the time.
Chris Hayes: And this was articulated explicitly as the argument for why what she was doing was so pernicious.
Jennifer Wright: The woman you think is a beautiful virgin when you marry her will have been soiled by a thousand hands. So, yeah.
Chris Hayes: That’s an actual quote.
Jennifer Wright: Yes. I think that’s very close to the quote. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Jennifer Wright: Yeah. And Madame Restell, I think, wrote what modern people would consider a really sensible argument, which was, well, your wife should be loyal to you because she loves you. Do you think your wife doesn’t love you?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: And unfortunately, many men thought their wives did not love them.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jennifer Wright: Yes,
Chris Hayes: Well, many men were probably correct.
Jennifer Wright: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I mean, in their defense.
Jennifer Wright: One of the things that I thought was so fascinating, because post Comstock, I think we think of this as being a very prudish period, is how much sex men seem to think that even briefly unattended women were having.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: There’s one excerpt from a trial of a woman who received an abortion that tries to paint her as a habitual slut who is having sex not every day, not every hour, but every five minutes. And I don’t think anybody has time for that. I don’t think we can keep doing that.
Chris Hayes: That’s so funny because that was the big controversy, right, when Rush Limbaugh went after Sandra Fluke.
Jennifer Wright: Yes, that’s right.
Chris Hayes: Who is the student advocate or the fight over birth control access, the ACA. He has this deranged rant where he’s like, she’s having so much sex. So much sex, right? That was like the entire monologue was about –
Jennifer Wright: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — this woman must be having so much sex. Like that was the obsession, and it’s literally exactly what you’re describing.
Jennifer Wright: Oh, absolutely. Yes. And there was also a thought that if you inserted a speculum into a woman, she would become a prostitute. She would love it so much that prostitution would become her only recourse. She would need constant penetration.
Chris Hayes: OK. So, at this point, Restell, her business is growing. She’s becoming a kind of public figure and a kind of public advocate for the services she’s providing, right?
Jennifer Wright: Yes. And she is absolutely unapologetic about her belief in this service. She talks about it as being akin to a lightning rod that will avert the worst ravages of nature. And I really do think that that mentality is in keeping with what Madame Restell must have seen in terms of what it means to have an unplanned pregnancy in this period.
So, I think that is very sensible and very understandable to anybody reading about this now. It was not at the time. This was considered a very bold position.
Chris Hayes: Right. And I guess my question, obviously, you write about this in the book, but talk to people that haven’t read the book about the kind of legal and social regime guiding this, because one of the points of the book is that women have been doing this, right, for –
Jennifer Wright: Oh, yes. Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: — as long as women have been getting pregnant, they’ve been terminating pregnancies.
Jennifer Wright: Yes.
Chris Hayes: This was true in the 17th century, in the 16th century. It was true in the 19th century.
Jennifer Wright: Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: It’s true in the 20th, right? So, but what is the sort of legal and social norm around this at the time that she starts to become this public figure, both providing the service and advocating for it?
Jennifer Wright: Well, a lot of things are changing in large part because you’re seeing a massive trend towards urbanization in America.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: You’re going from a mentality where if you live in rural America, you live on a farm, it is a very good idea to have a lot of children. You can start putting them to work very early and you’re going to want to have a lot of people to help you on the farm when they grow up. So, it’s a little reductive to say this, but on a farm, children are an asset.
If you are suddenly living in a city, and there are many reasons people would have wanted and still want to live in cities, there is more culture, you have more friends, you have more people to talk to, you can get a wide variety of things you need with much more ease, there’s more excitement.
So, for all the reasons that people enjoy living in cities, people are transitioning over to cities. But there is a deficit. If you are living in a tenement with one room and you have 10 children, they can’t work until much older, and you’ve got to feed them all.
Chris Hayes: You’re screwed.
Jennifer Wright: You’re screwed.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I should also say –
Jennifer Wright: Yes, it’s much harder. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — there’s also the, you know, sort of transition to industrial capitalism where, you know, subsistence farming or even non-subsistence farming, farming for exports, is incredibly volatile, incredibly difficult.
Jennifer Wright: It’s awful.
Chris Hayes: And people underestimate just how hard it is and how hard it’s always been.
Jennifer Wright: They do.
Chris Hayes: And part of what happens is people move for steady work in the cities where there is the offer of wage work.
Jennifer Wright: Yes. One of the things that didn’t quite make it into the book, but I wanted to include it because I have listened to so many well-meaning fellow liberal arts majors talk about how, like, one day, I think we should just buy a farm, I think we should just call my farm and we’ll all live on it, and we’ll do art, and it’ll be so much fun.
No. Farming is awful. Farming is terrible. Brook’s farm –
Chris Hayes: It’s hard.
Jennifer Wright: — did not make it into the book, and Nathaniel Hawthorne tried to do this in one of the most famous experiments of communal living where the idea was that people would farm during the day and then they would all do their beautiful creative work at night. And Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote really good things about how, like, you know, what I found out about farming. It’s really hard and you have no energy —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jennifer Wright: — to write poetry at night.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Correct.
Jennifer Wright: All you want to do is sleep.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jennifer Wright: He wrote to his fiancee afterwards, I’m so glad my soul is no longer buried under a dung heap because it was awful. So, yeah, for understandable reasons, people are leaving farms and they’re going to cities.
And you see the birth rate change dramatically, where at the beginning of the 1800s, the average woman would have about 10 children. By 1900, it’s down to three. And without really reliable birth control, the way you get that number down is by having abortions. And that became a fairly regular accepted thing.
Mark Twain talks about doctors being asked to perform abortions with no more compunction than people would have about asking them to pull a tooth. So, this is becoming a regular part of society. It is not becoming a well-liked part of society because, I mean, most changes to the social structure are not well liked when they’re happening.
Chris Hayes: Right. Sure.
Jennifer Wright: And there were a lot of women who thought that having abortions might give them a little bit more freedom. And there were a lot of men who did not like that.
Chris Hayes: As this develops, right, so there’s a bunch of things happening, right? There’s a sort of urbanization. The urbanization is producing all kinds of reactionary backlash and panics about gender roles.
Jennifer Wright: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Women who, on a farm, never even laid eyes upon by strange men, right? The only –
Jennifer Wright: Right.
Chris Hayes: — non-familial men would be people that you invited to the house, right?
Jennifer Wright: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: Now, they’re in urban (ph) space. All of a sudden, the male gaze that sort of –
Jennifer Wright: Exists, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And you see the paranoia in what you’re talking about, right? This paranoia about virtue exacerbated by the fact that you have people in close proximity to each other, even just the possibility of liaisons and affairs, you know, is just logistically far greater than it would have been in isolation, relative isolation on a farm.
Jennifer Wright: Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: So, you’ve got all of that happening. You’ve obviously got an increasing influx of immigrants, starts with the Irish and then moves to other folks over the course of this century. Along with urbanization, you’ve got the sort of problem of the slums, right? Factory work. There’s a lot happening and a lot of reactions against it.
Jennifer Wright: Life is changing.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And it sounds like it’s not a stable equilibrium, but the place in which she is sort of creating this very successful business is a place in which it’s a needed service. People know that it’s happening. It’s not like celebrated in any way, but it’s also not like harshly stamped out and regulated.
Jennifer Wright: It’s not.
Chris Hayes: Is that like a fair description?
Jennifer Wright: No. I think it is interesting. At the very beginning of Madame Restell’s career, you do see these kind of positive articles about her, talking about how she’s a pretty physician for the betterment of the human race. And they talk about how, you know, birth control has been used in prior societies to help improve the human race. Personally, I think that feels a little eugenics to me, and I don’t think that was ever Madame Restell’s intent. I think Madame Restell’s intent was very much financial.
And I think she also saw a financial benefit for families. A lot of her advertisements talk about how it’s not good to have more children than you can afford to care for. It will do bad things to you, and it will result in bad outcomes for your children. So, you should have smaller families.
And Madame Restell is pretty pragmatic all the way through. So, I think she never really understands why people aren’t going along with this. I think to her, she always just sees this as a very sensible way to handle societal problems.
Chris Hayes: And she gets really rich.
Jennifer Wright: She gets so rich. She gets so rich.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, she’s like one of the richest. She’s maybe the richest woman in New York, one of them?
Jennifer Wright: Definitely up there. Definitely independently during this period, yes, I would say she is probably the richest one. Madame Restell builds a mansion. And she builds a mansion because the archbishop of New York criticized her in a sermon. And he wanted to take this plot of land that was across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral that was being erected in the 50s in New York.
And Madame Restell outbid him by about $100,000 for this plot of land, and she built her mansion on it. Where, in the basement, she continued meeting patients to perform abortions. It was known in the neighborhood as Madame Restell’s home for lost children.
And one of the remarkable things about her mansion is that it was apparently so beautifully done that when you read newspaper reports of it, newspapers will talk about how, like, we don’t approve of Madame Restell’s business, but this is the most beautiful mansion we’ve ever seen. This is flawless. Absolutely no notes (ph).
Chris Hayes: She becomes a target at a certain point. I mean, she’s a target for criticism. Obviously, she’s famous enough the archbishop is targeting her.
Jennifer Wright: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And it was interesting to me that you have a Catholic bishop arguing against the practice all the way back then. You know, there’s questions about the lineage of antiabortion.
Jennifer Wright: You know, I think there are still questions about it, and it’s very frustrating to me that we don’t know exactly what that bishop did say about her. But we do know that that was a bishop who was very concerned with Irish women becoming prostitutes in New York. And again, that was understandable. That was probably for economic reasons. But it was really a personal cause of his. So, I suspect that he might have been talking about birth control —
Chris Hayes: I see.
Jennifer Wright: — in the context of prostitution.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So, she becomes a kind of target, and you mentioned at the beginning that there are two trials –
Jennifer Wright: There are.
Chris Hayes: — she is subjected to.
Jennifer Wright: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So, what happens? And are the laws changing in response to Restell specifically?
Jennifer Wright: To some extent, probably. But Madame Restell was not the only one doing this. And the minute Madame Restell started making more money, there were even more people following in her footsteps. So, she was by no means, the first abortionist in New York. She was probably just the one who was most forthright about her profession and writing about it constantly in the newspapers.
But at the first trial, she had a patient who had come to her for an abortion about two years ago, and then that patient was dying. Now, what we now know is that patient was dying of consumption. But on her deathbed, she confessed to her husband, I had an abortion, I’m dying now, I don’t know if it was because of the abortion.
Maybe. Probably it wasn’t. Consumption is a respiratory disease that is spread through coughing. So, unless somebody coughed on her and gave her consumption during the abortion, that was not the cause of her death.
But Madame Restell was taken to trial over it. And the woman’s testimony was ultimately dismissed for some legalese reasons that Madame Restell and a witness hadn’t been able to address her testimony when it was being given and the woman had died by the time the trial was underway. So, she couldn’t really be put on the stand to give proper testimony. Madame Restell gets off. I don’t feel like she got off for the right reasons.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: Again, please read the book on the specific legal reasons that her testimony did not hold up.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jennifer Wright: I’m not a legal scholar, and I talk to legal scholars to make sure we got everything right there, but I’m going to do a bad job recounting it.
And then the second trial was from another woman who Madame Restell had given a post-quickening abortion to. So, she performed the abortion on this woman around six months. She advised the woman not to have an abortion at six months. The woman said, I really need an abortion. Madame Restell said, OK, all right, I can do it.
She performed an abortion on this woman, and she apparently treated this woman with incredible tenderness. She told the woman that by the time this is over, you will call me mother. She slept in the woman’s bed with her to make sure that the woman didn’t get infected. She brought her soup. She brought her wine. When it was time for the woman to leave, she made sure that there were no policemen lurking around outside the house. She gave the woman money to have snacks on the train on the way home.
And it really is, in the woman’s testimony, like, quite a tender response to somebody undergoing this surgery. And unfortunately, the woman also later became ill, went to her doctor, and the doctor told her that he was not going to do anything for her because he could tell she had an abortion unless she confessed that she had an abortion.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Jennifer Wright: So, she said, fine, I had an abortion. What’s going on with me? And the doctor then reported Madame Restell to the authorities. And for that one, she did get arrested, and she was sent to Blackwell’s Island for a year.
Chris Hayes: So, abortion at the time, well, post-quickening was a crime, illegal?
Jennifer Wright: Yes, that was a crime. Yes. So, she did perform that one post-quickening, unfortunately. And what was wrong with the woman, we found out in the trial, was she had syphilis, and the doctor did not feel he needed to tell her that she had syphilis. He doesn’t mention it until the trial, which is so appalling to me.
Chris Hayes: So, you know, there is a rising tide of a kind of backlash against vice, right?
Jennifer Wright: There is.
Chris Hayes: The prostitution, the saloons. I mean, it’s sort of linked to prohibition in some ways. But you’ve got the saloons, you’ve got the prostitutes, you’ve got abortion, you’ve got, you know, magazines in some cases.
Jennifer Wright: Have magazines with naked ladies in them.
Chris Hayes: Yes, with naked ladies in them. There’s a kind of Javert character in your book who is Anthony Comstock.
Jennifer Wright: Anthony Comstock.
Chris Hayes: And in fact, he is a remarkable character who is newly relevant, thanks to the federal district court in Amarillo, Texas where a federal judge basically ruled that the act named after him or acts, actually Anthony Comstock acts, apply today with mifepristone —
Jennifer Wright: Yes, that is very unfortunate.
Chris Hayes: — that federally prohibit the law. But who is Anthony Comstock?
Jennifer Wright: Well, Anthony Comstock was an intensely religious young man. He grew up on a farm with a mother and a father who read the Bible every day with special emphasis on staying away from pleasures of the flesh. And Anthony Comstock’s mother died when he was 10-years-old, giving birth. She, I think, was on her 10th birth at that point.
And Anthony Comstock saw his mother as an almost saintly figure, that she was fulfilling her role as a woman, and really wanted more women in the world to emulate his mother.
And Anthony Comstock, and this feels like a gossipy tale, but I think it’s really important to understand Anthony Comstock’s worldview was also a chronic masturbator. And we know this because he wrote about how he’s always wrestling with it. Like it’s so terrible for him.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jennifer Wright: And he feels incredible guilt about this. So, Anthony Comstock later got testimony from a doctor saying that this doctor estimated that about 90% of young men engage in self-abuse. And rather than hearing this and being like, well, I guess it’s not that freakish, Anthony Comstock writes about how, like, you can’t even imagine, like all of these beautiful young minds are being blighted forever. We have to put a stop to this.
And Anthony Comstock’s solution is to try to create a world where nothing will arouse lustful temptation. And that is very unfortunate because many men —
Chris Hayes: It’s a tough mission.
Jennifer Wright: That’s a tough mission because –
Chris Hayes: It’s a tough mission.
Jennifer Wright: — everything arouses Anthony Comstock.
Chris Hayes: Particularly a tough mission. I’m thinking about the modern meme, like men will literally ban the mailing of birth control rather than go to therapy.
Jennifer Wright: Rather than go to therapy. Exactly.
Chris Hayes: Yes. It really feels like Anthony Comstock could have worked some stuff out.
Jennifer Wright: Anthony Comstock could and should have worked stuff out.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and spared everyone. Yeah.
Jennifer Wright: Anthony Comstock was in the Army. He was appalled by the amount of pornography that men were looking at in the Army. He was also very –
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jennifer Wright: — upset by the drinking in the Army. Every week, people –
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jennifer Wright: — would get a ration of liquor. And not everybody drank, but the common practice was if you got your bottle of liquor for the week and you didn’t want it, you would give it to someone who was having a bad week.
Anthony Comstock instead would pour out his bottle of liquor in front of everybody while citing Bible passages about how bad liquor was.
And his fellow soldiers responded by throwing all of their trash into his bunk. And Anthony Comstock writes at the time that there seems to be a strong feeling of hatred for me among the boys. So, Anthony Comstock —
Chris Hayes: Oh, my God.
Jennifer Wright: — then undeterred by any of this, moves to New York, where he becomes a clerk at a dry goods store. Now there are debates about what was really going on here, but his fellow clerk showed him an obscene book and said, this book gave me an STD. Now, there’s debate about whether or not the clerk was maybe trying to hide the fact that he was sleeping with prostitutes, or if he really thought that a book gave him an STD. He might have just been confused. I think he was making fun of Anthony Comstock.
I think he had this very prudish co-worker, and he was playing a joke on him.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: But Anthony Comstock immediately took his own money and went to find the publisher of this book, bought this book, brought it to the police, told the police this man is making pornography, you have to come arrest him.
And he kept doing this for some time. But eventually, he was running out of money. He didn’t have as much money as he wanted to buy pornography. So, he went to Morris Jesup, who was the head of the YMCA. And the two were really simpatico. One of the ideas behind the YMCA was that this was a place where men could lead a clean Christian life uncorrupted by the big city.
So, Morris Jesup starts funding his crusade against vice. And by 1873, Anthony Comstock manages to pass the Comstock Act, which forbids the mailing of anything regarded as obscene. What’s obscene is never fully defined.
So, you could be writing a dirty letter to somebody that you are sleeping with. It could be an erotic picture. It could be a reprint of a statue from classical antiquity. And it can certainly be any information about birth control or abortion. And it also means that you could not send abortive devices or birth control through the mail.
And Anthony Comstock is made an officer of the U.S. Postal Office so he can enforce this through checking the mail. And if you violate the Comstock Act, it could be punished by up to five years in prison.
Chris Hayes: It’s sort of fascinating because it’s like Restell and Comstock are this sort of yin yang figures, right? She becomes a sort of famous and wealthy. He launches himself into fame and power. Actually, the act is named after him through his sort of single-minded, neurotic, pathological crusade against vice and his own masturbation.
You know, manages to get these acts passed, you know, named after him and him the head of the enforcement arm of the post office —
Jennifer Wright: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — to enforce this act.
Jennifer Wright: Yeah. And I hope Anthony Comstock, if there is an afterlife, never finds a moment of peace, because dozens of people committed suicide as a result of these acts. We have lost what could have been countless records of what life was actually like during this period because people were too afraid to record what was going on.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jennifer Wright: And it’s important to remember that this didn’t actually work. It’s estimated that in the mid-1800s, about one in five pregnancies was terminated by abortion. Horatio Storer –
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Jennifer Wright: — who led the physicians’ crusade against abortion, thought it was a bit higher in New York. He thought it was one in four.
And the Michigan Board of Health in 1898, 25 years after the passage of the Comstock Act, estimated that in their state, one in three pregnancies was terminated by abortion.
So, this didn’t stop women from having abortions. It just made abortions a lot less safe because women had no idea what they were doing.
And we also see just a very direct blood of women that Anthony Comstock has on his hands. When we hear testimony from people like Margaret Sanger, one of the reasons that she started writing about birth control and family limitation was because she had been a nurse in the inner city.
And she had gone with a doctor to deliver a woman’s third child. And the woman gave birth. Very difficult birth. And afterwards, the doctor told her, well, you can’t have any more children. If you have any more children, you’ll die. And the woman, understandably, who has just given birth, said, wait a second, my husband isn’t going to stop sleeping with me. What do I do? And the doctor smiles and wiggles his finger at her like she is a naughty child and then walks out of the room because he could not distribute any information about birth control. And Margaret Sanger went back the next year to deliver that woman’s fourth child and watched the woman die.
So, this is all a result of the shame that was brought about by Anthony Comstock and the secrecy that was brought about by Anthony Comstock. And I think we’re seeing people attempting the same thing right now. When I hear about people in Texas trying to ban websites that offer information about abortion, what that will result in is not women having more children. What that will result in is women throwing themselves down staircases because they don’t know how to have an abortion safely. And that is very frightening.
Chris Hayes: I’m going to do something that I sometimes do when I have book authors, which is, inevitably, we have set up these two trains heading towards each other on the tracks, Madame Restell and Anthony Comstock. And they will, of course, meet. But I’m not going to spoil, because it is an incredible tale. Particularly what happens when they meet is an incredible tale. People should pick up the book to find out. So, I want to keep that as a kind of deep tease to your excellent book. But I want to finish on this question, which is, you were working on this book before Dobbs came down, before the Dobbs decision leaked.
Jennifer Wright: I was. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still alive.
Chris Hayes: Ruth Bader Ginsburg was alive. You know, I’m just curious how the developments over the course of the time that you’re working on this book in which we have literally gone back to a pre-Roe regime in which the Comstock Act is now apparently good federal law according to a district court judge. Like how did that change the way that you thought of the story and the work on it?
Hey, let me note that you may have heard, or may not, we may have taken this out (ph) in the mix. Your child —
Jennifer Wright: Yes.
Chris Hayes: How old is your child?
Jennifer Wright: Oh, she’s 2.
Chris Hayes: Hello.
Jennifer Wright: Yeah. You want to come say, hi? Do you want to come say hi?
Chris Hayes: Can I say hi?
Jennifer Wright: You did not have a successful nap with daddy. Can you —
Chris Hayes: The telltale sounds of a non-successful nap with daddy.
Jennifer Wright: Yeah. But now you’re having a banana. You’re OK.
Chris Hayes: So, how did it change, you know, just watching this news cycle develop, us being catapulted into a pre-Roe era, changed the way you thought about what you were writing in the book?
Jennifer Wright: Well, I think one of the things that the book made very clear is that the rights you were born with are not necessarily going to stay your rights. Things can go backwards. And that’s something that is being made so clear to us again today. And I think it is a reminder that we have to keep fighting for rights that our grandmothers would have had.
And it is going to take a very long time to do that. It took 100 years to overcome the Comstock laws fully and to legalize abortion in America. And I’m hopeful that it won’t take quite as long this time because we have a generation of women that grew up with certain rights and will want to see them back. But obviously, I worry for my daughter, and I worry for the young women of this country whose bodies will be used in ways that they have no say over. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And that’s your 2-year-old daughter right there sitting on your lap –
Jennifer Wright: It is. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — as you as you finish that, which is a perfect punctuation.
Jennifer Wright is a journalist. She’s the author of the new book “Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist.” It is an absolutely fascinating tale. I knew essentially nothing about any of this, and it’s just essential for understanding our modern context. Jennifer, thanks so much for joining.
Jennifer Wright: Oh, thank you for having me.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Jennifer Wright. It’s an incredible tale. You should definitely check it out, Madame Restell. You could tell us your feedback. Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHPod. Email WITHPod@gmail.com. Be sure to follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHPod.
“Why is This Happening” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening.
Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. Follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.