by Kim Todd
The same papers where these stories appeared were often funded by ads for abortion-causing medicines. Their financial security depended on the procedure they pretended to despise. For example, among offers of quills, coal, and beauty potions, readers of the New-York Tribune in 1841 could be tempted by “Genuine French Female Monthly Pills” promising “astonishing success in cases of irregular and obstructed” menstruation or the “Female’s Friend,” designed for “relieving and removing all those complaints peculiar to females.” The New York Herald featured ads for “Dr. Van Hambert’s Female Renovating Pills, from Germany” which noted, slyly, “They must not be taken during pregnancy, as they will produce abortion.”
Even stories that appeared about something else entirely often had abortion at their root; the issue was everywhere. In 1841, Mary Rogers, a young New York woman who worked behind the counter selling tobacco in a store in Lower Manhattan, so pretty she’d been dubbed “the beautiful cigar girl,” disappeared one Sunday afternoon. She was found dead, several days later, floating in the Hudson. In one of the last sightings of Rogers alive, an innkeeper said she’d been drinking lemonade with several young men. The coroner determined she’d been raped and strangled. Who could have done it? A lover from the boardinghouse her mother kept? A marauding gang? The Herald, known (and condemned by competitor journals) for frank descriptions of bodies and sex, embraced and ran with the story. Not long after the corpse was recovered and the Herald printed a detailed coroner’s report, a petticoat, shawl, and handkerchief with “Mary” on it were found in the woods.
With graphic descriptions of the corpse, the Herald and other papers grasped the potential of mysteries implied by the body of a dead, young, beautiful girl, the same potential exploited by the Jack the Ripper reporters decades later. As anyone who has walked through a forest littered with mouse bones or along the seashore peppered with shells and crab carapaces knows, to be dead is to have lost the ability to hide. The body is exposed to the wandering eyes and wondering thoughts of whoever may encounter it. It will reveal its clues, its secrets, if only we look hard enough. While killers might have peered at this body obscenely, readers tell themselves they look on it in righteous pursuit of justice. In this, the papers hit on a formula that would be a staple of murder mysteries and police procedurals far into the future.
Over time, many people wondered whether Rogers died not of murder but of an attempted abortion, a suspicion buoyed by the deathbed confession of the innkeeper, who changed her testimony to say that Mary had turned up with a doctor who planned to help her with a “premature delivery.” The innkeeper’s son helped dispose of the body.
At the same time, the troubles of another, very different woman dominated the newspapers—one who was decidedly alive and in charge of her destiny, too in charge for some. Madame Restell, an alias for businesswoman Ann Lohman, was on trial for providing an illegal abortion. Her advertisements in papers in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York for pills that offered a remedy for “obstinate and long-standing cases of derangement in those functions of nature” called to “females in delicate health.” One of her clients, dying of consumption, revealed to her husband that she’d become pregnant and sought out Madame Restell. Her husband told the police, and they arrested Restell and threw her in jail. As New York watched the Mary Rogers mystery unfold, Restell’s case wound its way through the New York courts.
Restell, her faux French flair and constant press coverage, was famous enough that she inspired a new vocabulary. Abortion and its promotion was “Restellism.” Competing papers deemed the New York Herald, which included many ads for abortifacients and dogged coverage of the trial, “Madame Restell’s organ.” When Mary Rogers was dragged from the river, she was (rightly) feared to be a victim of the “Restell school.”
Restell appealed her case to the New York Supreme Court in 1842. And her letter to the newspapers on that occasion showed all the reasons the male physicians would want to put her out of business. One witness testified that a man had attended the operation. Restell scoffed: “In no case do I engage a ‘man’ or physician, for the simple and all abundant reason that, whatever I undertake, I feel myself competent, as well by study, experience and practice, to carry through properly.” In fact, many pregnant women prefer to be treated by a woman, she wrote. And propriety demanded a lady, “provided always she is skillful, should attend in preference to a gentleman.”
Not long after the Restell trial, both New York and Massachusetts passed stronger antiabortion legislation. New York’s law banned advising, administering, or prescribing abortions. Seeking abortion also became a crime, making a criminal of the patient for the first time. As the antiabortion campaign of the doctors accelerated, it continued to be fueled by newspaper coverage. In 1871, the New York Times ran a series of articles called “The Evil of the Age” about a reporter and a female friend pretending to seek an abortion and their reception at various doctors and midwives. Unlike the Chicago Times pieces, only the man, Augustus St. Clair, wrote his interpretation of events; the woman was just a prop. St. Clair described guns brandished in his face and aborted fetuses left to disintegrate in vats of lime.
In St. Clair’s account, he targeted newspapers advertising abortion as much as the practitioners themselves: “The mails go burdened with the circulars of such people, and come laden with money enclosures for pills, ‘drops,’ and other vile humbugs. The best home firesides in the land have been invaded by these advertisements, either in the newspapers or in letters.” In a jab at the New York Herald, the couple used addresses listed in the paper’s medical advertisements as a map of places to go, following their lead throughout the city. Their reporting took them to see Dr. Mauriceau, a relative of Madame Restell, at one of her offices. They visited Madame Restell at another. She started to talk with them but was interrupted by her daughter, who pulled her out of the room to confer. When Restell came back, she was dismissive. Apparently, the reporter’s disguise needed work. He then stopped in to see a man with a thick German accent who went by both “Dr. Rosenzweig” and “Dr. Asher.” Pale faces of patients peered through the blinds, St. Clair reported.
Soon, things became much worse. One of these patients, allegedly spotted by St. Clair in Rosenzweig’s office, turned up dead a few days later, her body in a trunk bound for Chicago, leading to a week’s worth of headlines about the “trunk murder” and the arrest of Dr. Rosenzweig.
These kinds of grisly rumors (the reporting is highly questionable) aided the passage of even stricter antiabortion statutes and ramped up enforcement. At the time, an 1869 New York law banned “articles of indecent and immoral use,” as well as advertisements for them. This included not just playing cards with naked women on the back, racy daguerreotypes, and dildos, but contraceptives and abortifacients. It was a hard law to uphold, though, because while the good men of the YMCA’s Committee for the Suppression of Obscene Literature took it very seriously, the police didn’t. In April 1872, though, the YMCA found its own detective. Anthony Comstock, a Brooklyn man dismayed by the printing houses peddling smut in his neighborhood, was the ideal enforcer—energetic and fired with holy motivation. He began ordering scandalous books and arresting those who sold them, amassing a mountain of photos, pamphlets, catalogues. Each year, he printed details of his haul in a booklet: 181,600 obscene photos and pictures, 6,000 dirty watch charms, five tons of bound books. He also included numbers of arrests of manufacturers and dealers; even their deaths were tabulated—in the credit column.
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice annual report, 1880
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Sixth Annual Report Cover Image, 1880. Kautz Family YMCA Archives. (University of Minnesota Libraries). Used with permission.
The federal Comstock Act passed two years later, in 1873. Comstock had campaigned for it by going to the Capitol and showing senators his collection of obscene books. And here the prohibition against certain procedures veered into a serious, nationwide campaign of cen
sorship. The act forbid publishing advertisements, books, pictures, pamphlets, or other printed matter deemed “obscene,” as well as sending any such materials through the mail. And again, the definition of obscenity included mentions of abortion and birth control. So not just the practice of controlling women’s fertility was outlawed; writing about it was as well. The federal law specified a minimum prison sentence of one year, while the New York law allowed for only a fine. Some states went further, attempting to outlaw even talking about abortion and birth control.
But despite jail time that resulted in her spending a year on Blackwell’s Island, despite tightening laws, despite harassment by the newspapers, Madame Restell kept taking out advertisements, advising patients, giving them what they wanted. Her lavish house (bane of her Fifth Avenue neighbors), her flashy sleigh pulled by four horses, and her net worth were all constant subjects of criticism—to no avail.
Eventually, though, Comstock caught up with her. In January 1878, he showed up at Restell’s famous mansion to launch an undercover sting of his own. When the sixty-six-year-old woman answered the door, Comstock claimed to be a poor man seeking medicine for his wife. This time, her sense for disguised enemies deserted her. She gave him pills, and he returned again waving a warrant, flanked by police officers. They found medical tools and waiting patients. The judge denied bail and she was taken to the Tombs. Eventually bail was allowed but Restell, perhaps fearing a return to Blackwell’s Island, slit her own throat in the bath and bled to death before trial.
Comstock was unrepentant. The Society for the Suppression of Vice (whose logo proudly featured a gentleman burning books) gloated: “It is a cause for profound thanksgiving that this city is rid of the disgrace of this woman and her murderous business, which for so many years has been flaunted with bold defiance on one of the most prominent avenues of the city.”
And still, after decades of suppression of the practice and discussion about it, by the time the Girl Reporter made her rounds in 1888, abortion was everywhere. There was the sad, coded story from the St. Paul Globe in 1889 about a girl found dead in her sweltering boardinghouse room. Originally from Minneapolis, she’d gone to Montana eight months before, only to have returned to rent a room for herself and her husband, who never showed. Several days before she’d taken ill, she’d visited a Twin Cities doctor because of “uterine trouble.” He suspected she may have died of “an internal hemorrhage.” Maybe she took some drug or the cause was her smoking cigarettes, the paper speculated. But it doesn’t seem much of a mystery. There were the ads that persisted, despite decades of campaigns against them. The same month as the Girl Reporter’s exposé, December 1888, the Boston Globe touted the ability of “Wilcox’s Compound Tansy Pills” to “afford speedy and certain relief.” Birthrates for white women* were slipping from an average of 7 children per woman in 1800 to 3.5 in 1900. And there was the rebellion triggered by all these restrictions and revealed by the Girl Reporter’s series for the Chicago Times. Doctors, midwives, and women rich and poor traded secrets, recipes, and information in coded language and a private economy.
The Girl Reporter and the other stunt journalists offered an inverted version of the Mary Rogers narrative and the novels it inspired—female detectives were now the ones unraveling mysteries of the male world. And in writing about abortion in particular, revealing how commonplace it was, the Girl Reporter showed the lie at the heart of the idea that women could be divided into good and bad, fallen and chaste. Those with the means used abortions to conceal premarital sex or affairs. In writing about the operation and its uses, the Girl Reporter broke a powerful taboo.*
And as is often the case with writing that breaks a taboo, everyone read it. The assistant state’s attorney for Illinois insisted he hadn’t, but mentioned that the streetcar he took to work was filled with people poring over the Chicago Times. Dr. Oscar Coleman De Wolf, commissioner of health, claimed that the exposé reached from “St. Lawrence to the Golden Gate.” Like many others, he expressed concern that readers got the wrong message, and that the Girl Reporter painted a damaging portrait of Chicago: “I don’t exaggerate the influence and wide spread circulation of The Times when I say that every woman who is in that kind of trouble, from Maine to California, knows just how easy it is to get relief in this city.”
For some, the Girl Reporter had pushed stunt reporting way too far. The Buffalo Daily Times speculated she must be “lost to shame and womanly feeling,” and added, “the method adopted by the Chicago Times to acquire the information desired is so revolting and horrible as to inspire disgust instead of praise.” Female writers began to wonder if assigning editors had their best interests at heart. But for De Wolf, as well as others, the issue was not the Girl Reporter’s deceptions or the impropriety of her pretending to be “fallen,” but the raw information she provided. “A Friend of the Times” was blunt in his distress: “Some of the young girls will learn more out of The Times in a few weeks than they could get out of a medical work in a year.” A father wrote in to say he had originally shielded his eighteen-year-old daughter from the articles but decided he needed to “take the bull by the horns” and let her read them.
Letters to the editor poured in deep into January, bubbling with praise and outrage and frank evaluations of relations between the sexes. Another letter, under the title “Bring the Husbands to Book,” raised the issue of rape. Still another, from a female doctor, said patients had asked her for abortions three hundred times in her first year of practice. A doctor who didn’t sign his name confessed that the Girl Reporter’s entreaties might have swayed him. He had turned a woman away, only to be called to her family’s house days later, after she had killed herself. “It is our duty to preserve life whenever possible. Did I do it?” he asked.
Dr. Sarah Hackett Stevenson, who had refused the Girl Reporter an abortion, wrote in a letter to the editor that the burden of parenthood should be shared: “The social order that permits a father to disown his child without the loss of public esteem is the very social order that permits a mother to destroy her child. Destruction is the mother’s only method of disowning.” One way to make men face consequences, another female physician suggested, would be to outlaw sex out of wedlock.
The December 17, 1888, meeting of the Chicago Medical Society overflowed Parlor 44 of the massive castle of the Grand Pacific Hotel. Attendees waited, perhaps jostling, perhaps impatient, perhaps shoved into the hall, through debate on new members, through a paper on “A Novel Treatment of Gonorrhea” and a display of specimens of pathological lesions resulting from typhoid fever.
Finally, they carved into the meat of the meeting: the claims unfolding in the Chicago Times over the past week. The paper implicated many society members, including the president, Dr. Etheridge. According to the published story, he had told the Girl Reporter, when she asked for an abortion, “I don’t handle such cases. . . . You know it is lawbreaking,” and sent her to see a man at the corner of Wabash and Harmon Court. The very day of the meeting, the Times started publishing names and addresses of doctors under the headings “Physicians who would commit abortion” and “Physicians who would recommend others who would commit abortion.”
No one knew who would be named in the next issue. Tempers flared. The doctors must have been running through all their recent patient encounters in their heads. Some suspected a doctor was behind the whole thing, colluding with the Times to put competing physicians out of business. A Dr. Franks insisted the society needed to support its members, ignoring “what any woman might say who went sneaking around like a snake, trying to make a reputation.” Her disguise and ambition made her inherently untrustworthy. A medical journal suggested, sneeringly, that she told her sad story with “many a pearly tear trembling on her pretty little eyelids.” On the other hand, Dr. N. S. Davis said, if no one was held to account, the whole series became just a big advertisement for abortionists listed.
In the end, the Judiciary Committee was instructed to investigate three doctors on
ly: E. H. Thurston, F. A. Stanley, and C. C. P. Silva. The case against the society president was dismissed with a unanimous vote in his support.
Earlier, Etheridge had met with a cooler reception at the newspaper office, where he’d gone to justify his actions, maybe to have the Chicago Times make a correction. When he explained that he only referred the Girl Reporter to the other doctor to catch him in the act, a reporter pressed him. Was Etheridge saying he set up a trap?
Not a trap, exactly, Etheridge fumbled. He knew her “brother” would find someone eventually, so he might as well send him to an office where he knew the address. If “anything happened I could locate it and we could get a hold on him.” Etheridge seemed to imply that if the Girl Reporter died, police would know which doctor to arrest. The paper found this a thin excuse, and published, along with the letter, an editorial scornful of doctors whose only interest was in keeping their hands clean.
At the January meeting, the Judiciary Committee kicked Dr. E. H. Thurston out of the society but declared another doctor innocent. The society then decided to stop looking into the Chicago Times reports unless a doctor requested it. Despite the vocal stance many had taken against illegal abortion, their priority was shielding their own. At the meeting after that, they stopped investigating entirely. And at the meeting after that, they resolved to inform the State Board of Health of their concerns about personal cleanliness among midwives.
All in all, the Chicago Times’s abortion exposé was owner West’s dream—a sensation. The paper, which eight months before had run ads for an abortifacient marketed as Chichester’s English Pennyroyal Pills, packed its editorial page with demands that abortion be stamped out.