April 27, 2007
Madame Restell Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:35 AM EST Ellen Feldman mentions “Madame Restell’s Female Pill,” one of the many supposedly abortifacient products on the market in the nineteenth century. Madame Restell was one of New York’s more colorful and, in some ways, remarkable characters in the Victorian era. Born in England in 1812 (her real name was Ann Trow Lohman), she came to New York in 1831 and was soon advertising herself in the city directory and newspapers as a “female physician and professor of midwifery.” Besides serving as a midwife, she was soon providing contraceptives, performing abortions, and arranging for the quiet adoption of unwanted babies.
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It was a brisk and lucrative business to say the least, and Mme Restell was obviously a highly competent businesswoman at a time when “businesswoman” was an oxymoron. By 1864 she was doing so well that she built a grand mansion on Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street (just across 52nd Street from where Cartier’s is today). This was north of the main area of development on Fifth Avenue at the time, but as development reached the lower fifties, no one would build next to her because she had become so notorious. One has to admire her so openly sticking it in the eye of the New York society that both scorned her, loudly, and utilized her services, very quietly.Vilified in sensationalist newspapers and by such people as the obnoxiously self-righteous Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (it might have been called more accurately the New York Society for Butting into Other People’s Business), she was often arrested and spent time in the prison on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island. Facing yet another trial in 1878, she committed suicide, much to Comstock’s ill-concealed satisfaction. She left an estate valued at between $600,000 and $1,000,000. That might not have put her on the Forbes 400 List, had it existed then, but it made Mme Restell a very, very rich woman.
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