Years ago, I wrote mystery novels featuring women investigators when that was new in the genre. Now, I discover stories of real-life women whose lives have a natural story arc that can engage the reader from start to finish. Like gambling and prostitution, abortion, when it was illegal in the US, as it is now again in many places, was simultaneously in your face and undercover. It was also largely practiced by women, which is why I’m fascinated by books about it.
I wrote
The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill: Abortion, Death, and Concealment in Victorian New England
An old story retold in modern language can be fun; I know because I highlighted so many sections of this book on my e-reader that I nearly wore out a finger.
This book breezily recounts the eventful life of Madame Restell, who boldly provided women with abortions in the mid-nineteenth century even as the legal noose tightened around her. I laughed out loud as the author described Restell’s “go-to” gown for her trial appearances. Not even Julian Fellowes could make history feel more immediate.
**Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Nonfiction (2023)**
**An Amazon EDITOR'S PICK for BEST BOOKS OF 2023 SO FAR in BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR and HISTORY**
**An Amazon EDITOR'S PICK for BEST BOOKS OF THE MONTH (March 2023)**
**A Bookshop.Org EDITOR'S PICK (March 2023)**
“This is the story of one of the boldest women in American history: self-made millionaire, a celebrity in her era, a woman beloved by her patients and despised by the men who wanted to control them.”
An industrious immigrant who built her business from the ground up, Madame Restell was a self-taught surgeon on the cutting…
I thought I had nothing left to learn about Madame Restell, the unapologetic 19th-century abortion provider until I saw how this book was organized. While keeping the narrative flowing, Syrett helpfully organizes Restell’s career into phases defined by changes in the law, her trials, and the emergence of one male adversary after another.
I loved learning that, even after Restell met her Waterloo, her loving grandchildren profited from her legacy. As told by Syrett, a gender-norm-defying woman who was literally hounded to death somehow managed to have the last laugh.
The biography of one of the most famous abortionists of the nineteenth century-and a story that has unmistakable parallels to the current war on reproductive rights
For forty years in the mid-nineteenth century, "Madame Restell," the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control medication, attended women during their pregnancies, delivered their children, and performed abortions in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. It was the abortions that made her famous. "Restellism" became the term her detractors used to indict her.
This book has a permanent place on my nightstand, where I reach for it whenever I need a pithy, brilliant reminder of how the US completed its late-nineteenth-century transformation from a country with no abortion laws to a place where abortion was banned everywhere at every stage.
I’m amazed that a book first published in 1978, long before the advent of the Internet, managed to marshal evidence from newspaper classified ads and forgotten trials to present a portrait of America where abortion was widespread but seldom dared to speak its name.
'The history of how abortion came to be banned and how women lost--for the century between approximately 1870 and 1970--rights previously thought to be natural and inherent over their own bodies is a fascinating and infuriating one.
Until I read this book, I thought I’d have to wait forever before someone exploded the myth of the back alley abortion.
As Leslie J. Reagan proves in her mind-blowing account of the period when abortion was criminalized throughout the US, an era that, sadly, has restarted with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, criminalization drove abortion underground, but not the way most modern-day Americans imagine it.
Skillfully marshaling her evidence from ads, press accounts, and medical journals, Reagan recreates an era when everyone was engaging in crime or knew someone who was, but no one would talk openly about it. I was entranced by this cautionary tale for our times.
The definitive history of abortion in the United States, with a new preface that equips readers for what's to come.
When Abortion Was a Crime is the must-read book on abortion history. Originally published ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this award-winning study was the first to examine the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with that monumental case in 1973. When Abortion Was a Crime is filled with intimate stories and nuanced analysis, demonstrating how abortion was criminalized and policed-and how millions of women…
This book had me at Page One as the author followed the strange 1968 journey taken by a young San Francisco teacher, who gratefully received an abortion, performed on top of a clothes washer, from a seasoned pro named Ruth Barnet, only to find a detective at her door some weeks later.
This is the story of Barnet, based in Portland, OR, who is said to have performed tens of thousands of illegal abortions between 1918 and 1968.
Artfully alternating the tale of Barnet’s life in crime with a historical perspective, Solinger kept me taking notes while at the edge of my seat.
Prior to Roe v. Wade, hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions occurred in the United States every year. Rickie Solinger uses the story of Ruth Barnett, an abortionist in Portland, Oregon, between 1918 and 1968 to demonstrate that it was the law, not so-called back-alley practitioners, that most endangered women's lives in the years before abortion was legal. Women from all walks of life came to Ruth Barnett to seek abortions. For most of her career she worked in a proper suite of offices, undisturbed by legal authorities. In her years of practice she performed forty thousand abortions and never…
In 1898, the dismembered body of a woman was discovered in a Connecticut pond. A forensic examination found signs of an abortion, and suspicion fell on “Dr.” Nancy Guilford, a local practitioner with a criminal record. Hoping to identify the dead woman, the police put her severed head on display. Tips poured in. Although abortion was a felony, everyone seemed to have a friend or neighbor who, they said, might have gone for the procedure. By the time the dead woman was identified as Emma Gill, Nancy Guilford had fled, with many rooting for her to elude the police.
Examining this case through its female protagonists, both patient and provider, this book explores an America we could return to, where abortion was criminal everywhere.
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.
Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.
Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…
