School of Humans.
Hello, friends, how's it going so good? I bet life is an infinite nightmare, but we try to find the joy in between the pain. Quick reminder of top. We are doing our first live show. It's gonna be in Atlanta, Georgia on June twenty ninth at this venue called Dynamic El Dorado. That's an edgewood for you at Lanton's. And it's gonna be fun. We're gonna have stand up improv, We're gonna have a history story, we're gonna have some fun facts. We're gonna hear some really inappropriate facts too,
So come on out. It's gonna be fun. That's June twenty ninth at Dynamic El Dorado. Also, it's a Saturday. Have you guys heard of this. That's a day in which you have fun. So come to the show. But you might be like, hey, Gabby, I just want to hear some history. So fine. End of promo. Into the episode we go. So last time on American filth we talked about mister Anthony Comstock, Come Come, Come, Come, Come Stock.
If you recall, he was the man behind the Comstock Act that basically made everything fun illegal because he was like, oh, all that stuff. It's obscene. We shouldn't be looking at it. One thing that was greatly affected by the Comstock Act was the distribution and production of birth control. But one thing we did leave out of the episode, which was another thing that mister Anthony Comstock absolutely abhorred, was this little thing called abortion.
Have you heard of it. If you haven't, I'll just tell you.
It's one of the least contentious reproductive topics in the history of time. Nary a person has ever had an opinion about that. No, mister Comstock, he hated. He was like, that's gross, that's obscene, that's horrific. I want to get rid of it entirely, you know, which is so unlike today.
Anyway. You might be.
Surprised to know that in the early part of the nineteenth century their abortion laws weren't that bad, but it was throughout the century. It was thanks to people like Comstock who made abortion access less and less available. And as there were more laws against it, there were more and more doctors and not so licensed doctors who came out of the shadows to offer their services to anyone who was having a WHOOPSI daisy in their uterus.
And one of those people.
Who was perhaps the most notorious abortionist in nineteenth century New y York City was a woman who went by the name Madame Restelle. Over the course of her career, she provided a countless number of women with birth control and abortions. And if you can imagine, a lot of people did not like that. And when obscenity censor and bad boy comstock came around, Madame Rostelle lost her livelihood and then her life.
Ha ha ha.
What a fun subject we're talking about today. Cue the theme song. This is American Filth and I'm Gabby Watts.
Every week I tell you a filthy story from American history.
This week's episode Comestock, Part two, Unpregnanted.
Something I will say about this episode is I will.
Be saying the term abortion a lot, because there's not really that many good synonyms. There's terminated, the pregnancy, or you could say something more crass like unpregnanted. Also, being pregnant is called being knocked up, so you could say an abortion is being knocked out.
That one's very bad and will get me canceled. Don't tell us and l Also, I think this is.
About the third or fourth time I have canceled myself on my own podcast, so I need somebody else to do it. Please cancel me this week. But like birth control powders and tonics and pills, throughout the nineteenth century, there was also a big rise in the number of abortions being carried out. It's hard to know concrete numbers because you know, it wasn't like people were writing down.
In their diaries I have had an abortion.
But some reformers from the time estimated that between eighteen hundred and eighteen thirty, for every twenty three to thirty births there was one abortion.
So yeah, one in thirty one and twenty five.
And then you get to the eighteen fifties and you might have had one abortion for every six births. And maybe that number was even higher because there was also a higher rate of still births at the time. And people were like, well, maybe that's because they did some abortion stuff.
And sure, maybe these numbers are grim.
But here's the thing, here's a little silver lining is simultaneously as abortion rates went up, the infanticide rate went down. How delightful. And then in the eighteen seventies some people were thinking that one third of all pregnancies ended in termination. The women seeking these procedures and treatments were not just single ladies. There's also people who were married who wanted to control the size of their family. Basically, anyone and
everyone was having an abortion. Like even a Confederate general had his wife terminate a pregnancy. He's like, the South will rise again, but that baby won't. I'm sorry. And remember this is the nineteenth century, so a lot of the procedures for abortion were quite dangerous and a lot of women actually died. Unlike today where everything is grand. Maybe if I say it in a French accent, it will sound like I'm saying it less. So how did people feel about a bausion in the nineteenth century That
actually makes it sound even worse. Well, at the beginning of it, a lot of people subscribe to this idea called quickening, which was the idea that life did not begin until a woman felt the fetus move inside of her, which would be about three to four months into pregnancy. So it's kind of like, ah, if you do something three months before, we don't care. But once you feel it, eh,
we got an issue with it. There were specific laws passed about a bossion in New York State, for example, in eighteen twenty seven, there was a law that said providing or getting an abortion was a crime, and you could be punished with a year in jail and a
one hundred dollars fine. But laws like this, most of them were passed not to criminalize abortion, but to protect women from being pressured into getting one, And so in general, no one was really getting arrested because of this law, and then when people did get arrested, they often weren't prosecuted for it. But then in the mid century that
started to change. There were more anti abortion laws which were like quickening, we reject that life starts at conception, so if you have an abortion or provide one, we will actually now arrest you and send you to prison. Also, you can't advertise these services in the newspapers.
Gross.
I don't know what accent that was. It came from a very dark place inside of me. And if you all can believe it. As abortion access became less and less, the whole process became more and more dangerous because women were going to quack medical practitioners who provided these services illegally, and I imagine in deep dark basements where it was gross and not hygienic at the same time.
However, some of.
These so called quacks were actually pretty good at what they did, and one such example was Madame Rastelle. Yeah, we're finally getting to the topic of the episode.
Some things people called her throughout her career were.
Female abortionist, a professor of infanticide, a child murderous, and this longer quote, the wretched creature who builds her fortune upon the misfortunes of her sex, caring no more for their suffering of mind or body than does the butcher for the lives of the animals, which it is his business to take a little bit dramatic, methinks. Madammoselle was a pseudonym. Her real name was Anne Troe Lohman, and she was the planned parenthood of mid nineteenth century New
York seting. She was born Anne Troe in a small town in England in eighteen eleven or eighteen twelve. She was one of eleven children, though it's likely many of them did not survive into adulthood, and she grew up quite poor where she was.
Born in Painswick, England.
It was a textile town, so likely her parents worked at a mill or were in agriculture and her parents they were likely illiterate, and because of that, it's very likely that Anne didn't have any formal education. The next thing we know about her for sure was that in eighteen twenty nine she married a tailor named Henry Summers. She was seventeen, he was twenty six. A little yucky, but not illegal. Actually it was quite typical of the time. Drake would thrive during this time.
Anyway.
They had a daughter in eighteen thirty named Caroline, and at that point they're like, dam we really got to get our shit together because we don't have any opportunities here. So in eighteen thirty one they hopped on a boat to New York City. They moved to a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, and it's likely that Henry got a job as a tailor and Anne got a job as a seamstress. A friend of hers said later that she was working making pentaloons. But unfortunately for Anne and Caroline, just a
few months after they arrived, Henry caught a fever and died. Damn, thought Anne, I'm in a tight spot.
You know. She had her job as.
A seamstress of pantaloons, but the problem with that work was that it was difficult, the hours were long, and the pay was low, so it really wasn't cutting it or sewing it. But then Anne met another man who had a similar fervor to her to better himself. His name was Charles Lowman. He was also an immigrant, but from Russia, and he worked as a printer for a newspaper. He was also in some radical groups that liked to think and write about such things as birth control and
reproductive health, those crazy guys. So Charles and Ann got married and they moved into a new apartment, and they just happened to live next to this guy named William Evans. His name is really not important at all, but the thing about him that is important is that he was a doctor.
But not just any doctor.
He was a quack aka he had no formal medicinal training. But what he would do is he would make tonics and tinctures and potions and all sorts of stuff and sell it to people, being like, yeah, this this thing that I made up in my kitchen, it's going to cure you. I mean, most likely it won't do anything at all, But sometimes it's just nice to know you're trying out something a little placebo effect. But this William Evans, well, he was making money, making bank doing this, I mean
not bank, but like he was making enough. And Anne, with perhaps some encouragement from her husband, was like, maybe I should try making some medicinal potions, powders and pills.
And sell those.
She knew she'd make more money doing that than being a seamstress. Yes, and learned something very important about America. Then, lying is much more profitable than honest labor. At first, she tried the usual stuff, you know, making elixirs and other medicines that could cure a whole variety of elms and illnesses. But then her business took a turn when one woman who bought some of her medicines was like, Hey, I have a little bit of a whoopsidaisy in my womb.
Do you have anything that could fix that? Aka, I need to have one abortion on now.
In the late eighteen thirties, when Antroloman got this request from her patient, birth control and abortion related merchandise.
Wasn't a new thing.
As I said in the last episode, people with uteruses have been trying not to have babies the whole time we've been around, and most of the solutions to getting rid of a little whoopsidaisy baby involved drinking or eating a gross combination of ingredients.
Like indigenous women.
They would try to induce a miscarriage using various roots and herbs. In Texas, there's a case of a black woman who drank a combination of calamel and turpin t yummy.
And then there are some white.
Ladies in the Midwest, and what they did is they rubbed gunpowder on their titties and drank tea made of rusty nail water. I bet it had a sharp taste. But besides ingesting gross stuff, some other things that birth control manual suggested for inducing miscarriages was, you know, jumping up and down a classic, exercising too vigorously, and douching.
And as I said, you know, some.
Doctors and quack doctors alike did do surgical abortions. They're just very dangerous, sometimes fatal, and even worse than that, they were all so expensive. Some doctors charged about one hundred dollars for a surgical abortion, which was a hefty sum. Or doctors would sell you a device that you could use at home. One doctor sold this eight dollars silver probe that you would just stick into your uterus and shake it around until something happened. And there is plenty
of demand for these products. One lady used that silver probe twenty one times and apparently she died on the last one.
Anyway, back to Anne.
And you know, she had this patient who was like, help, I need to get rid of this thing inside of me. And Anne was like, hmmm, I think I smell a business idea coming along. So she indeed made some medicine for this lady to take home to remove the whoops of daisy and that started Anne down her trajectory that would make her one of the most hated yet beloved women at the time in New York City. Notorious infamous,
We'll be back. After these soothing advertisements, Anne quickly made a crap ton of money after she saw that first patient. She had more and more women come to see her for her medicines. With that, she took her daughter back to England for a time to hang out with her family. But then when they returned to New York City, Anne
and her husband started ramping up their business. They got a fancy office and Ann started going by Madame Restelle, saying that she named herself after a French doctor who taught her all the secrets to preventing and terminating pregnancies. She was like, oh, yeah, when I was back at home visiting my family, Actually I was touring around Europe learning all these treatments, because back then, if anything was advertised as French or Parisian, it was often a euphemism for birth control.
Why. I don't know.
Maybe it's because an IUD looks like the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower didn't even exist then. Ah, And so Madame Restelle started advertising her services in the newspaper. Her first advertisement appeared in the New York Sun in March of eighteen thirty nine. Under some very coded euphemisms, the ad said, is it not but too well known that the families of the married often increase beyond the happiness of those who give birth?
Would dictate, is it desirable?
Is it moral for parents to increase their families regardless of the consequences to themselves or the well being of their offspring when a simple, easy, healthy and certain remedy is within our control. She was then like, come visit me at my office, where married females can obtain the desired information, and let's just say a lot of women wanted to obtain that desired information, married, unmarried, every sort
of Lady. Madame Rostelle's office in New York was open from nine am to ten pm every day, and often there is a horde of women in the waiting room, a line running out the door and around the block. At first, she was offering abortion pills and potions.
She didn't call them potions.
I'm just calling them back because it's fun, and she would send this stuff out in the mail.
But then she diversified her.
Business to include all sorts of services. You know how a lot of people think of Planned parenthood today as like an abortion factory, but it actually provides a lot of other services. That's how people start thinking about Madame Rostelle. They're like, she's the lady who gives abortions. Yucky, we don't like her.
But she was also.
Giving all types of health care to women. She was like, yeah, I'm just a physician, a female physician for females. Her various services include a contraception and then some herbal remedies that would.
Help restore instruation.
And another service she provided was that she had a boarding house where pregnant women could go and deliver their babies anonymously, and then she would coordinate adoptions and then she all so had her surgical abortions.
But she had a sliding scale. Remember she had grown.
Up poor, so she was like, hey, if you're a poor person, you only have to pay twenty Rich ladies, though you guys got to pay one hundred.
Sorry, not sorry.
And of course Madame Pistelle, she had haters the whole time. Can you believe it, someone who provides abortion has haters?
You know.
At the beginning of her business, people were still kind of like, hey, you can't prosecute someone until after three four months of them being pregnant, until that quickening stuff is happening. But as attitudes started changing, more and more people wanted doctor's like and to rot in prison. They were like, ugh, if women have access to birth control, if women can have abortions, they're going to be more sexually active. That's disgusting. We're gonna have all these single
ladies committing all this sin. And then a lot of feminists actually hated birth control because they were like, ough, this just encourages men to have more sexual liaisons and as you guys all know.
Sexuality is bad for society.
Her enemies were like, Madame Rosselle is making everyone im moral. Also, she's only aborting the babies of rich people, which means.
That she's aborting white babies.
And soon we're just gonna have all these other babies and not enough white ones. Another thing that people hated about Madame Rousselle was that she was this thing called a successful woman.
Have you heard of this?
Like she was making a lot of money, she was operating her own business. People hated that. They hated her wealth, which she flaunted in her fancy carriages and fancy clothes, and they're all like, oh, she's not even a real MD. She shouldn't be doing this medical stuff. The only people who should be doing medicine are men, because men get licensed. Men are smart men men. Despite her successes, though madem
Mirtelle could not avoid the law. The first time she was arrested was less than a year after she opened her business in eighteen thirty nine, and at that point she was accused of performing an abortion on a woman who later died. The woman was named Maria Pardi, and she had visited Madame Ristelle looking for a tonic to unpregnant herself. Madame Martelle obliged, but then Maria stopped taking
it because she was afraid she might get poisoned. So what she did instead is she went back to Madame Morstelle and was like, Hey, can I actually have a surgical abortion? I don't want to take this weird juice, and she was given the surgical abortion, and then she got sick and she was convinced it was from the procedure. But after Mademoiselle was arrested, her charges were eventually dropped
because there simply wasn't enough evidence. Few years later, in eighteen forty five, abortion laws changed again in the stay of New York. It became extra legal for anyone to get or perform an abortion, and two years later Madame Mirstelle was arrested again. There's this woman named Maria Bodine who had gone to see Madame Mirstelle and asked for
an abortion, but she was already too far along. Mademoiselle was like, yeah, you're definitely more than three or four months pregnant, so I'm not going to do it because.
I don't want to get arrested.
But then Maria's lover was like, hey, I demand that you give her an abortion, so Mademoistelle was like.
Okay, fine.
But then after the procedure, Maria got sick and went to a doctor who was like, m I can tell that you got an abortion, and that doctor reported her and Madame Mirstelle, so she had to spend a year in prison and pay a hefty fine. When she got out of prison, and Tree Lowman decided to make a change, at least on the surface. She was like, I'm not going to do surgical abortions anymore, but I am going to resume my business and just sell these concoctions that I make and not do the surgical ones.
Wink wink mm.
Because even though she limited her business, she just kept getting richer and richer. By that point, she and her family had moved into a ginormous mansion on Fifth Avenue, and that's where she moved her offices as well. And for even more people to take her seriously, she applied for citizenship, which was granted in eighteen fifty four. And the thing is other women also provided this type of medical services, but she was just so well known in making such a huge impact on the city that the
mayor himself officiated Madame Rostelle's daughter's wedding. Misseelle wasn't going to stay on top for much longer, because, as we all know, a woman with power pooh, sheesh, that's not gonna last. People hate when women are powerful, and she especially wasn't gonna last. If anti abortion, anti birth control, anti fun crusader Anthony Comstock had anything to say about it,
We'll be back after these soothing advertisements. After the Comstock Act was passed in eighteen seventy three, mister Anthony Comstock was on a rampage. And the great thing about him is not only did he want to destroy all obscene material, but he also just seemed to really hate women in general.
What a guy.
So obviously, women were usually the ones buying birth control and seeking abortions, so he doubly hated them because they were doing that, but then also because again, yuck, they're women. He especially hated a woman who was independent. He disliked women who had jobs, who had thoughts, and he even hated when women put too much effort into their appearance because he thought that was immodest. He said that when a woman was too done up that it made her
seem too independent and didn't belong to any man. That's right, ladies, that's what a little lip can do for you. So Madame Rastelle, she was the perfect target, and he wanted to pull her down off her high horse on Fifth Avenue, even though I guess she's more of like a British, So.
Pull it down from a high horse on Fifth Avenue. So here's what he did. In eighteen seventy eight. He was like, I'm gonna go undercover.
Mister Anthony comes costumed himself as a man who was seeking an abortion for his imaginary wife.
He knocked on the door of her office, went in and was.
Like, oh help, I need some abortion stuff and she was like, okay, chill, yeah, I can give you some stuff. And while he was there, he looked around at all the abortion birth control materials and was like, I'm gonna get this bitch. So after Madame Rostelle gave him what he asked for in his little dress up costume, Comestock scurried home like the little rat he is, and the next day he came back with some of his vice
squad and arrested her. At this point, Bail's fines for people who gave or had an abortion, were really high, and allegedly Madame Rostelle was like, hey, I got thousands of dollars with me on hand.
I can just give that to you right now, get me out of jail.
But then they wouldn't let her out until she we had two men come and bail her out. They're like, we won't accept this woman's money. We need man money.
After the arrest, Mademe Morstelle was pissed.
She wrote into a newspaper and said, Comestock is in this nasty detective business, and there are a number of little doctors who are in the same business behind him. They think if they can get me in trouble and out of the way, they can make a fortune. If the public are determined to push this matter, they will have a good laugh when they learn the nature of the terrible items of the preventative prescriptions. Of course, if
there's a trial, it will all come out. And Madame Mostelle was totally right because at this point male doctors were trying to take over the jobs that women like Madame Rostelle and then also midwives usually did with their female patients. These male doctors were like, actually, we've decided we want to control all healthcare, So these little women,
we need to get them out of the way. And sure, let's leak up with comstock and we can be like, boo boo boo abortion, we hate that, because that will help us round up all the women who provide these services, and then we can just take their jobs, take their industry, take their money, take their clientele, and we get to be the winners and the arbiter.
Of all things healthcare.
Like can you imagine how frustrating that was, because not only is madem Rousselle being arrested, her whole career is being usurped by a bunch of little angry dudes. She's like, all I've been doing my whole life is helping women providing healthcare, and now you're trying to make me out to be some sort of villain.
Fuck all the way off.
And the thing is also at this point, this came just a few months after her husband had died, So when Madame Rosselle got out of that jail cell, she did not feel good. And the end of the story takes a really dramatic turn.
There ended up being no trial.
Because in the days before Madame Mirtelle's maid found her dead in her bathtub. Her neck had been sliced with a knife from one side to the other, and she had bled out in the water. Most people at the time and also historians, agreed that this was a suicide. Other people say it might have been a murder, but
there's very little evidence to support that. Guys, I know this is really sad at the end, and I promise next week, well not next week, because we're going to do another sad one, but the week after that, we're going to do something really stupid.
Okay, I promise.
After Madame Marstelle was found dead, there's a huge response to it in the newspapers. Most people at the time were saying they didn't like the fact that she did abortions, but another newspaper called out Comstock, being like, why the hell are you dressing up and tricking people into selling you stuff that incriminates them.
That's fucked up.
This one newspaper wrote, no matter what the wretched woman was who took her own life with her own hand yesterday, her death has not freed the world from the last of detestable characters. Whatever she was, she had her rights. As always, we learn a lesson on American Filth and I think the lesson we learned today is that it has always been.
Great to be a woman in America. Que the credits.
American Film is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcast. This episode was written, hosted, sound designed, etc.
By Me Gabby Watts.
Our senior producer is Amelia Brock, and our executive producers are Elsie Crowley, Virginia Prescott and Brandon Barr. You can follow along with the pod at American Filth Pod on Instagram, and please leave a review, leave some stars, leave some comments, get that algorithm going. Tell your friends about the show, tell your enemies about the show, tell your doctor, tell your GUYO about the frickin' show. Okay, and also come to American phil Live on June twenty ninth, talk at you next time.
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