by Kate Lister
Evidence:
Some company gave me Cyder and Brandy, my Mistress and I were both full of liquor, and when the company was gone, we could scarse get upstairs, but we did get up; then I laid me on the bed, and my mistress brought a kind of instrument, I took it to be like an iron skewer, and she put it up into my body a great way, and hurt me.
Court:
What followed upon that?
Evidence:
Some blood came from me.
Court:
Did you miscarry after that?
Evidence:
The next day … I had a miscarriage.
Court:
What did the prisoner do after this?
Evidence:
She told me the job was done.12
Eleanor was found guilty and sentenced to three years imprisonment and to stand in the pillory for the next two market days. The mob was so incensed by Eleanor’s crimes that she barely escaped being pilloried with her life. Records describe townsfolk hurling eggs, turnips and rocks at her head until she was bleeding heavily and barely conscious. After trying to wriggle free, she was dragged back to the jail, only to repeat the ordeal the following market day.13
In 1760, poet Thomas Brown wrote ‘Satire Upon a Quack’, where he attacks an abortionist who ‘murdered’ his friend’s child. The poem is a bitter and sustained attack upon the ‘graveyard pimp’ who ‘unborn infants murder’d in the womb’. Brown curses the abortionist to hear ‘the screams of infants’ and their dying mothers for all eternity, to be the ‘jest of midwives’ and ‘strumpets without noses’, and to be stalked by ‘the most solemn horrors of the night’.14 Brown refers to the abortionist’s tools throughout the poem. He does not mention an ‘iron skewer’ but he does allude to ‘baleful potions’, ‘stabbing verse’, ‘pointed darts’ and a ‘murdering quill’.15 Any thin, sharpened tool, even the sharpened point of a quill pen, would serve as a suitable ‘instrument’ to pierce the cervix and ‘bring down the flowers’. This procedure could be self-induced, or well-meaning friends or family members could attempt to penetrate the womb. How many women suffered irreparable damage, mutilation, infection and death as a result of this practice is not known, but many were willing to risk the dangers.
The National Police Gazette’s depiction of Ann Lohman (aka Madame Restell), ‘the female abortionist’, in 1847.
If this method failed, or if the poor girl simply could not afford the abortionist’s fee, there were three options left: keep and raise the child, abandon the child, or murder the child and hide the body.
In Francis Grose’s Lexicon Balatronicum: a Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence (1785), there is a truly disturbing entry: ‘To stifle a squeaker: to murder a bastard, or throw it into the necessary house [privy]’.16 This phrase also appears over a hundred years earlier in A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (1698), and in various collections of slang through the nineteenth century. That infanticide had its own slang suggests that the practice was alarmingly common. Christian Russel, of the Parish of St Paul’s Covent Garden, was found guilty of murdering her illegitimate child in 1702 by ‘throwing the same into a House of Office’. In 1703, Mary Tudor was put on trial for murdering her ‘female bastard child, on the 18th of January last, by throwing the same into a House of Office, whereby it was choked and strangled’. In 1708, Ann Gardner was found guilty of murdering her ‘female bastard … by throwing of it into a house of office, where ’twas suffocated with Filth’. Anne Wheeler was indicted for suffocating her ‘male bastard’ by ‘suffocating it in a house of easement’ in 1711. Elizabeth Arthur ‘drowned’ her ‘male bastard’ in a ‘house of office’ in 1717. Elizabeth Harrard was found guilty of drowning her ‘male bastard’ in 1739 – she was one of four women to be hanged for murdering their illegitimate children that year.17 The list goes on and on. In the court records for the Old Bailey alone, between 1700 and 1800, there are no less than 134 trials for infanticide, the overwhelming majority of which are the killings of illegitimate children. We must remember that this is only one court in one area, and these trials are only for those who were caught. The actual figures of illegitimate infanticide will never be known, but most of the women on trial were poor, unwed, unsupported and alone – they were desperate.
A woman who had sex or fell pregnant outside wedlock was said to be ‘ruined’ or to have ‘fallen’, both of which convey the consequences of sex before marriage. If she were wealthy enough, a pregnant woman could avoid scandal by hiding away for the duration of her pregnancy and then placing the baby in the care of relatives or someone who had been paid off. But for those who could not afford to pay for a cover-up, the consequences were bleak indeed. The social stigma was so great that an expectant mother could be turned out of her family home, lose her employment, and would be left to fend for herself in a very hostile world. Eighteenth-century bawdy literature, such as Fanny Hill, loves to tell the story of a virgin who was ‘debauched’ and abandoned, who must turn to the sex trade to survive. The sad truth is that once a girl had been ‘ruined’ and ‘fallen’ from polite society, there would have been precious few options available to her. Sex workers would have been familiar with methods of contraception and ways to induce abortion, but ‘brothel babies’ were inevitable. In 1993, a nineteenth-century New York tenement house in the Five Points district was excavated and the skeletons of two full-term infants, most likely twins, were discovered in the lower soil level of the privy. Evidence from the time suggested that this particular address, 12 Orange Street, was once a brothel. Although foetal remains have been excavated from privies before, this discovery is significant as it is the only one with strong contextual links to the sex trade.**
A hooked instrument once used for removing an aborted foetus.
In order to escape the noose, the mother’s life depended on being able to ‘prove’ that the child was stillborn. In 1624, parliament passed an act that made it a capital offence for unmarried mothers to conceal the death of an illegitimate child, the presumption being that if the child died, the mother had killed it. In order to prove that the birth was not concealed, the mother had to produce at least one witness statement that the baby was stillborn. The prosecution would also have to prove that the pregnancy and birth had been deliberately concealed. Ann Gardner, mentioned above, was proven to have murdered her baby as she had made no provisions for the baby, and told no one she was pregnant.
The Prisoner could say little in her Defence, it did not appear that she made any Provision for the Birth of the Child, nor was she heard to cry out, or us’d any endeavour to discover it, as the Statute of King James I [the 1624 Act] in such Cases requires. The Fact being clear, upon the whole the Jury found her Guilty of the Indictment.18
This was enough to condemn Ann to death; she was executed on 15 January 1708.
The philanthropist Thomas Coram opened the London Foundling Hospital in 1739. His primary aim was to give shelter to the children of the ‘unhappy female, who fell victim to the seductions and false promises of the designing man’, and had been left to ‘irretrievable disgrace’.19 When it first opened, the hospital expected to receive twenty infants, but was overwhelmed with demand. Eventually, the hospital had to limit admissions to infants under two months, and admittance was done through a ballot system. So that mothers could reclaim their child from the hospital, they were initially encouraged to leave a token with their baby so they could be recognised later. Thousands of ribbons, thimbles, broken coins, lockets, bits of buttons, pieces of paper and shells left with abandoned children are still housed at the Foundling Hospital Museum today. Of the 16,282 babies brought to the hospital between 1741 and 1760, only 152 were reclaimed.20
In 1967, when the UK Abortion Act was passed, midwife Jennifer Worth was asked to comment on the morality of abortions. After fourteen years of witnessing the reality of illegal abortion, she replied she ‘did not regard it as a moral issue, but as a medical issue. A minority
of women will always want an abortion. Therefore, it must be done properly.’21 Today, most of us would like to think that we are privileged enough to never find ourselves in the situation that women like Ann Gardner found themselves in over three hundred years ago: destitute, ill, alone, stigmatised and pregnant with no maternity rights, medical care, security or means to raise a child. But, the right to safely access abortion is severely under threat. As I write this, the states of Alabama and Georgia are passing two of the most aggressive anti-abortion bills in recent American history. The bills will outlaw abortion after a foetal heartbeat is detected – what was once known as ‘the quickening’. And until 2019, Northern Ireland had some of the most restrictive laws around abortion in the world, with women facing long jail sentences if they go through with one. While we have come a long way in terms of social security, medical care and attitudes to sex in general, the debate surrounding abortion is still rooted in religious moralising that seeks to demonise and punish both the women who seek abortions and the doctors who perform them. But as the history of contraceptives shows, abortion will always be sought, risks will always be taken and no amount of criminalisation, not even the death penalty itself, will change that.
A selection of tokens mothers left with their infants at the London Foundling Hospital. The tokens were to help mothers identify their children if they could come back for them. The thousands still housed at the Foundling Hospital today are testament to the fact that most never came back.
A metal token left with an abandoned infant at the London Foundling Hospital by a mother in the eighteenth century.
* * *
* In the eighteenth century ‘abortion’ was used interchangeably with ‘miscarriage’ and did not necessarily mean the deliberate termination of a pregnancy.
** In 1973, the remains of a newborn baby were found in an eighteenth-century privy site in Philadelphia. Foetal remains were also found at a site in Minneapolis that used to be a restaurant in 1870. Thomas A. Crist, ‘Babies in the Privy: Prostitution, Infanticide, and Abortion in New York City’s Five Points District’, Historical Archaeology, 39.1 (2005), pp. 19–46, p. 19.
1 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 2.3.49.5–7
2 William Buchan, Domestic Medicine: Or, a Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases by Regimen and Simple Remedies (London: Balfour, Auld and Smellie, 1769), p. 3.
3 Ibid., p. 531.
4 William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England, 1801–1803 (London: 1806), p. 36. The ‘quickening’ referred to the first movements of the foetus in the womb. Typically, a woman starts to feel movement around 18–20 weeks. Levene, Malcolm et al., Essentials of Neonatal Medicine (London: Blackwell, 2000), p. 8.
5 John Astruc, A treatise on all the Diseases Incident to Women (London: Cooper, 1743), p. 363; Martin Madan, Thelyphthora; or, A treatise on female ruin (London, 1785), p. 285; A. Civillian, Trials for Adultery; or, the History of Divorces, III vols, (London: Blandon, 1779).
6 Casanova, The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, Kindle Edition, location 33688.
7 Karen Harris, The Medieval Vagina: A Historical and Hysterical Look At All Things Vaginal During the Middle Ages (London: Snark, 2014).
8 L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 266–7.
9 Old Bailey Proceedings Online, central criminal court (2003),
10 John M. Riddle, Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
11 ‘The Tryal of Eleanore Beare of Derby’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1732, pp. 933–4.
12 Anon, ‘The Tryal of Eleanor Beare of Derby, on Tuesday 15 August, 1732’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, or, Monthly Intelligencer, 2. XXIV (1732), pp. 931–3.
13 Ibid.
14 Thomas Brown, ‘A Satire Upon a Quack’, in Works Serious and Comical in Prose and Verse (London 1760), pp. 62–5.
15 Ibid.
16 Francis Grose, Lexicon Balatronicum: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence (London: S. Hooper, 1785), p. 204.
17 Old Bailey Proceedings Online, central criminal court (2003),
18 Old Bailey Proceedings Online, Ann Gardner, 15 January 1708 (t17080115-1).
19 Dan Cruickshank, The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital (London: Windmill Books, 2010), p. 249.
20 Foundling Museum,
21 Jennifer Worth, ‘A deadly trade’, Guardian, 6 January 2005.
Period Drama
A History of Menstruation
Contact with [menstrual blood] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees falls off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison … Even that very tiny creature the ant is said to be sensitive to it and throws away grains of corn that taste of it and do not touch them again.
Pliny the Elder1
Few bodily functions evoke as strong and universal reaction as menstruation. Though Pliny ventured his opinion on the apparently apocalyptic properties of menstrual blood almost two thousand years ago, one merely has to look to the euphemistically titled ‘feminine hygiene products’ aisle in modern-day supermarkets to know that, though we have certainly moved on, as a culture we are still not entirely comfortable with the subject.
But a coyly worded sign is really the least of it. In 2005, the Nepalese government criminalised the ancient Hindu tradition of Chhaupadi, which banishes menstruating women from their family home and forces them to sleep in menstrual huts for the duration of their period.2 The practice stems from the belief that menstrual blood and by extension the menstruating woman is impure; Chhaupadi translates to ‘untouchable being’. To prevent others from being polluted, the menstruating woman cannot handle food or freely interact with others. Sadly, the 2005 ruling did not stop the practice. In 2018, following the deaths of several women who froze to death or died of smoke inhalation while trying to keep warm inside the hut, the Nepalese government made the practice of Chhaupadi punishable by three months in prison or a fine of 3,000 rupees.3 The practice of quarantining menstruating women is not unique to Nepal, and although the tradition is disappearing, it has been recorded around the world. In Ethiopia, for example, Jewish women still retire to a hut in the village named margam gojo, or ‘curse hut’, during menstruation.
‘Farr’s Patent Ladies’ Menstrual Receptacle’, advertised in American Druggist, January 1884.
A 1945 photograph, showing a menstrual hut to the left.
In 1974, the American Anthropological Association researched the menstrual taboos of forty-four societies around the world, and, in descending order, found the most common taboos were as follows:
1. Generalized belief that menstrual fluid is unpleasant, contaminating, or dangerous.
2. Menstruants may not have sexual intercourse.
3. Personal restrictions are imposed upon the menstruants, such as food taboos, restriction of movement, talking, etc.
4. Restrictions are imposed upon contact made by menstruants with men’s things, i.e., personal articles, weapons, implements used in agriculture and fishing, craft tools, ‘men’s crops,’ and religious emblems and shrines, where men are the guardians.
5. Menstruants may not cook for men.
6. Menstruants are confined to menstrual huts for the duration of their periods.4
Historically, menstrual huts were used by the Tohono O’odham (Native American people), the Cheyenne (Native American p
eople), the Ifaluk islanders, the Dahomey in present-day Benin, the Tiv people (West Africa), the Madia Gonds (Chandrapur, India), the Southern Paiute (Native American people), and the Ashanti in West Africa.5 And Huaulu women in Seram, Indonesia were still being banished to a hut and forbidden from eating certain types of meats until the 1980s.6
The 1974 research also explores various origin myths of menstruation within these cultures and found that many of these cultures believed menstruation was caused by the moon, with the exception of the Madia Gond, who believed the vulva once had teeth that were pulled out and menstruation results from a wound that never healed, and the Arunta of Australia, who ‘attribute the flow to demons who scratch the walls of vaginas with their fingernails and make them bleed’.7