In the spring of 1878, a 65-year-old woman who had spent four decades building one of the most notorious careers in New York City took her own life in her bathtub. She had been arrested again, and this time the charges threatened to keep her in prison for the rest of her life. The local papers had long since dubbed her New York’s wickedest woman, and much of the public despised her for the enormous fortune she had amassed through her illegal activities. But for decades, those activities had made her one of the most sought-after figures in the city, a woman known to thousands only by her assumed name: Madame Restell.
She was born Ann Trow on May 6, 1812, in the town of Painswick in Gloucestershire, southwestern England. Her father was a laborer, and the family was poor, so Ann began working as a maid in a butcher’s household when she was barely a teenager. At sixteen, she married Henry Summers, a tailor from Wiltshire. She soon realized he was an alcoholic, and by then she was already pregnant with their first child, a daughter named Caroline, born in 1830.
With economic prospects dwindling in England, the young family set sail for the Americas in 1831, joining the vast tide of Europeans seeking a better life across the Atlantic. Fortune did not improve upon arrival. They settled on William Street in lower Manhattan, but in 1833 Henry died of typhoid fever, leaving the young widow far from home, scrambling to support herself and her infant daughter. It was her second marriage that changed everything.
In 1836, she wed Charles Lohman, a well-educated 27-year-old printer who worked for the New York Herald. He had immigrated to America himself and was of German and Russian background. Charles belonged to a circle of radical thinkers in New York, and one of their concerns was the rapid expansion of the American and European populations since the early eighteenth century. Through his interest in population issues, he had published a number of papers on the subject in the 1830s, and he encouraged Ann to develop an interest in contraception herself.
Additional practical knowledge came from her brother Joseph, who had also immigrated to America and was working in a New York pharmacy. Soon, Ann had developed a contraceptive pill, a mixture of ingredients that included pennyroyal, black draft, savin, ergot, tansy, mallow, and motherwort, all ground up and made into pills and powders. Charles helped her concoct an elaborate backstory for her business: Ann claimed she had a grandmother in France, a woman named Madame Restell, who had shown her the recipes while Ann was visiting Europe training as a midwife. In the late 1830s, under the name Madame Restell, Ann began selling her female monthly pills.
At that time, abortion and contraception were legal in almost every American jurisdiction. Ann was free to advertise openly in the New York papers. Her first notice ran in the New York Sun in March 1839, effectively informing women that if they had an unwanted pregnancy, she could offer a certain remedy to those who called at her office on Greenwich Street. From 1839 onward, many New York women came to obtain Madame Restell’s female monthly pills and preventive powder, as they were soon described.
Out-of-town customers wrote to her, and the certain remedy was sent through the mail. The early remedies relied on folk ingredients of dubious effectiveness. But Ann soon expanded her services into more precise contraceptive and abortive methods. By 1840, she was operating a boarding house and referring to herself as a female physician.
Some women gave birth to unwanted children there, and Ann used her connections to find adoptive homes for them. But it was also clear that abortions, both through abortifacients and through surgical methods, were occurring on the premises. This was not a violation of New York state law at the time, so long as the abortion was carried out before quickening, the point at which the pregnant woman could feel the fetus move, usually around four or five months into the pregnancy. After that moment, the child was deemed to constitute life, and abortion services could bring legal trouble.
As early as 1840, Ann was in some legal difficulty. A woman named Maria Purdy died shortly after having an abortion at Madame Restell’s boarding house. On her deathbed, Purdy confessed the abortion to her husband, who contacted the authorities. The papers erupted in anger against Restell, calling her a monster in human shape and accusing her of acting against God.
Legal charges were brought, but Ann successfully defended herself in court. The following year, Mary Rogers, an attractive young woman who worked in a New York tobacco store, was found dead in the Hudson River. One eyewitness swore she had died after a failed abortion attempt, and the case was quickly linked to Madame Restell, though nothing more came of it. Rather than being dissuaded, Ann expanded her work, opening offices in Philadelphia and Boston.
But the notoriety of the Purdy case, combined with a growing movement against abortion, saw the laws tighten. By 1845, abortion was largely prohibited in New York state, and the punishments for performing one were considerably increased. An abortion performed after quickening was now deemed second-degree manslaughter and could result in several years in prison. Madame Restell’s services increasingly moved underground in the mid-1840s, but she continued her work as before.
Her motivations were not purely ideological. She was highly motivated by money, and there is evidence that on more than one occasion she was willing to assist in an abortion she had at first refused when offered a much higher sum. This was exactly the scenario that led to her arrest and first imprisonment in 1847. She had apparently facilitated an abortion for Maria Bodine, a woman who had become pregnant by her employer.
The employer had offered to pay Restell an unusually large sum to terminate the pregnancy after she first refused. The abortion was carried out, but when Bodine subsequently fell ill, she pressed charges. Restell argued at trial that Bodine’s illness was the result of syphilis rather than anything she had done, but the court and public opinion were firmly set against her. She was found guilty and sentenced to one year at Blackwell’s Island prison, now Roosevelt Island, in the East River.
The experience of prison did not dissuade her. Although she claimed she would forgo further surgical abortions, she continued to sell her pills and powders and resumed working at her boarding house. New York society apparently accepted this claim. In 1854, she applied for naturalized citizenship and received it, and around the same time, the mayor of New York City attended and officiated at her daughter Caroline’s wedding.
Behind the public facade, Madame Restell and her husband continued to offer illegal abortion services, now prohibited in an increasing number of states. Customers traveled from far and wide to obtain an abortion at her offices, and they paid handsomely. Between fifty and one hundred dollars was a standard fee, with upwards of a thousand dollars charged for higher-end clients who wanted greater privacy. By the end of the 1850s, the newspapers had begun to dub her the wickedest woman in New York, detailing the enormous wealth she and her husband had amassed.
Ann responded with an ostentatious display of affluence, appearing in public in the finest furs and wearing diamond jewelry. She traveled around the city in her own private carriage drawn by four horses, with liveried coachmen. Most strikingly, she and Charles had a huge mansion built as their private home on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street. Over the 1850s and 1860s, she earned hundreds of thousands of dollars, the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars today.
Despite her flaunting of the law, she avoided further legal jeopardy for many years. The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 pushed the abortion issue into the background, and Ann went about her business largely unhindered. But in the early 1870s, she met her match in Anthony Comstock, an anti-vice activist who in 1873 established the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Comstock campaigned against everything from abortion and prostitution to erotic material and gambling, and he was determined to bring about the demise of Madame Restell.
The same year he founded his society, he successfully petitioned the U. S. Congress to pass laws criminalizing the sending of obscene, lewd, lascivious, immoral, or indecent publications through the mail, including contraceptives and abortifacients. The legislation quickly became known as the Comstock laws, and it carried serious penalties.
Even providing information about where someone could find abortive or contraceptive services could result in a fine of up to two thousand dollars and a five-year jail term. Ann had to be more careful in her business dealings from 1873 onward. But her downfall came at the hands of none other than the architect of the new laws. On a spring day in 1878, Anthony Comstock showed up at the door of Madame Restell’s office, claiming to be a married man who needed contraceptive pills for his wife.
After she assisted him, Comstock took the pills directly to a police station. The following day, police arrived and searched the premises, finding instruments that could plausibly have been used to carry out abortions. Madame Restell was arrested, charged, and then bailed. In the days that followed, articles began appearing in New York papers from Restell and others, arguing various sides of the case.
It seemed as though the city was heading toward an explosive trial on the morality or immorality of what Ann had been doing for decades. But the trial never came. At 65 years of age, facing the prospect of spending much of the remainder of her life in prison, the woman who had become the most famed abortionist in New York City over a period of four decades took her own life on April 1, 1878.
Her maid found her in her bathtub, having cut her own throat.