The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime

By Nicholas L. Syrett

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.

Restell began practicing when abortion was largely unregulated in most of the United States, including New York. But as a sense of disquiet arose about single women flocking to the city for work, greater sexual freedoms, changing views of the roles of motherhood and childhood, and fewer children being born to white, married, middle-class women, Restell came to stand for everything that threatened the status quo. From 1829 onward, restrictions on abortion began to put Restell in legal jeopardy. For much of this period she prevailed—until she didn’t.

A story that is all too relevant to the current attempts to criminalize abortion in our own age, The Trials of Madame Restell paints an unforgettable picture of the changing society of nineteenth-century New York and brings Restell to the attention of a whole new generation of women whose fundamental rights are under siege.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The New Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781620978092

Nicholas L. Syrett

Nicholas L. Syrett is associate dean and professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Kansas. He is a co-editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality and author of The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities, American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States, An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton, and The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (The New Press). His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Daily Beast. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

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Cover: The Trials of Madame Restell, Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime by Nicholas L. Syrett

ALSO BY NICHOLAS L. SYRETT

An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities

Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (co-editor)

THE TRIALS

OF MADAME

RESTELL

NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA’S

MOST INFAMOUS FEMALE PHYSICIAN

AND THE CAMPAIGN TO MAKE

ABORTION A CRIME

NICHOLAS L. SYRETT

Logo: The New Press

To Angela and Tim, Alex and Zach

and to all those working to keep abortion legal and accessible

CONTENTS

Introduction

1.Ann Trow Summers Lohman

2.A Letter to Married Women

3.In the Family Way

4.Madame Restell’s Competition

5.Illegitimacy and Infanticide

6.A Disgrace to Her Sex

7.A.M. Mauriceau, Professor of Diseases of Women

8.Seduced and Abandoned

9.In the Public Eye

10.Doctors Against Doctors

11.Nemesis

12.A Reckoning

13.End of an Infamous Life

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Map by Elisabeth McCalden.

INTRODUCTION

The New York Express told the story this way: In the middle of March in 1855, a forty-three-year-old English immigrant named Ann Trow Lohman, a resident of Lower Manhattan, set out on an errand. Lohman had a large order of linens that she needed to be repaired. She took her carriage, or perhaps an omnibus, up Broadway to the headquarters of the Shirt-Sewers’ and Seamstresses’ Union, located at 1 Astor Place, about one and a half miles north of Lohman’s sizable residence at 162 Chambers Street.¹

Later that week, when the Shirt-Sewers’ and Seamstresses’ Union delivery girl returned part of Lohman’s order to her home, she was surprised to see the name Madame Restell on the door. That was not the name on the order. This name she knew, for it was notorious throughout New York and indeed the better part of the United States. Madame Restell was no ordinary client; she was the female abortionist, a professor of infanticide, a child murderess, the wretched creature who builds her fortune upon the misfortunes of her sex, caring no more for their sufferings of mind or body than does the butcher for the lives of the animals which it is his business to take. Or at least that’s how newspapermen described her. It would have been difficult to live in New York City in the year 1855 and not be aware of Madame Restell, who had been advertising her services in newspapers there and elsewhere since 1839. By 1855, she had been arrested multiple times, tried twice, and already spent a year as a prisoner on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). Publishers released cheap transcripts for sale on the city streets in the wake of these trials. Even when her own advertisements did not appear in the papers, her name was invoked as the symbol of abortion in antebellum New York; Restellism was by that point a synonym for the termination of a pregnancy.²

Rushing back uptown, the delivery girl reported to her supervisor just whose linens the Union of Seamstresses had been mending. After consultation, the board of managers bundled up her linen, and promptly returned it to her, along with a note, which explained that although in need of work, they should never be poor enough to accept patronage from a woman of her character. It is unlikely that the women employed at the Shirt-Sewers’ and Seamstresses’ Union—that is, the actual seamstresses—were ever consulted before Lohman’s business was refused. The ladies who sat on the board of managers prided themselves on their reputation as upstanding members of society. This was part of the reason they served, voluntarily, on the board of this charity in the first place. They were in a position to refuse good work in the name of virtue; not so the women who actually worked, day in and day out, at the union, assembling and repairing the clothing of New Yorkers as well as of the garment manufacturers who profited from their labor.³

The union was essentially a cooperative of, at any given time, between seventy and one hundred seamstresses, who worked out of a spacious and comfortable work-room, according to the New York Times. Run by a board of lady managers, the union had been established to provide work for the suffering needle-women of our City, many of whom are vainly endeavoring to support life from a pittance of $2 a week. Patrons brought their linens to the union for construction or repair, and the women who worked there could be ensured a decent wage. In an industry where women might spend much of their days seeking out work, moving from sweatshop to factory trying to sell their labor, the union was designed to provide steady employment.⁴

The Friday of the following week, March 16, the New York Express published a short article recounting the entire incident under the title Madame Restell Repudiated. Compared with the coverage Restell had already garnered in the papers of New York, the article, which was only thirteen lines long, was insignificant. But that the paper had chosen to print it at all signals that its editors found the incident noteworthy. The New York Tribune thought so as well, reprinting the article on the same day, as did other papers in Upstate New York. This reporting led to coverage in the New York Atlas two days later, wherein the editor claimed it was in bad taste, to repudiate the small charity which Madame Restell, in all seeming honesty, made.⁵

The Atlas also reprinted Madame Restell’s own response to the original story, which she claimed was false in every particular. She clarified that no assumed name was given, rather the work given to them [the Union] was for the person whose name was given, that is, Ann Lohman, her legal name. She explained further that no large order was placed last week, rather, the women of the ‘Union’ had been working for [her] for the last six months, and the last work sent was in their possession for at least six weeks. She claimed that there was no note refusing her business and that no sign announced her name at 162 Chambers Street: There is not now, and never was Madame Restell’s name, either on the door, or anywhere else in the mansion. She told the story from her perspective: she had long taken her sewing to the Shirt-Sewers’ and Seamstresses’ Union as a matter of charity and benevolence to extend them a helping hand. On this particular occasion, she explained, she had delivered some sewing to the union on behalf of a lady in the country, believing, that in thus contributing to give them employment, [she] was committing no grievous wrong, but assisting them in the only way they deserved assistance, viz: by furnishing them with work.⁶

Because, in some way or another, the board of managers of the Shirt-Sewers’ Union had indeed divulged this story to the press, even if not in quite the fashion the newspaper reported, Restell then excoriated both the union and the Express. She asked rhetorically if it was an offense to help the needy who loudly call for help? She criticized the women who reap the fruits of the hard earnings of the poor sewing girls in their employ, accusing the lady managers of profiting from the labor of the seamstresses. She attacked the lady managers for revealing her name in the first place: "They could not submit to hide their light or their superlative virtue under a bushel. They must proclaim both the one and the other in the market places and in the highways. They must advertise their excessive purity in the newspapers. She accused the union of using her name to drum up business, claiming that any article about her would serve as advertisement for their shirt concern. Near the end of her diatribe, Restell made a series of suggestions: Perhaps it would not be amiss for them to notify the public by a placard or a sign that all persons bringing shirts to be made are required to bring reference from the last place where they had shirts made. And that all such persons applying to have shirts made or mended, must be church members of six or seven years’ standing, or to post up moral shirts made here." With that, she signed off.⁷

This drawing of Madame Restell by Frederick C. Strype dates from 1847, eight years prior to the incident with the Shirt-Sewers’ and Seamstresses’ Union, and is a relatively sympathetic depiction of her. Reprinted from the Wonderful Trial of Madame Restell, November 16, 1847.

The incident was typical. Newspapers regularly reported on Restell, and the coverage ranged from the newsworthy to the mundane. Only a year later, the New York Police Gazette ran a story reporting on the fact that Madame Restell and her husband did not have any friends: When they drive through Broadway they are shunned by the crowd, like a pair of lepers. They are as isolated in a city of three quarters of a million of inhabitants as they would be on the most desolate spot on God’s earth. This story was reprinted as far away as Wheeling, West Virginia, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a testament to Restell’s national fame.⁸ While Restell could not possibly keep up with this much coverage, on many occasions she took it on herself to write back to newspapers to set the record straight. She was unafraid to publicly assert her right to guard her reputation and to operate her business in New York. That alone upset many people.

For some New Yorkers, Madame Restell was emblematic of all that was wrong with the growing city, and by extension with a changing sexual and moral culture in the United States writ large. Her sins were legion: by terminating or delivering the pregnancies of single women, she contributed to immorality because she helped those women—and their seducers—hide the fruits of their sins. When she secretly found new homes for their illegitimate children, she helped hide the shame that the sinners should rightfully have been bearing. She terminated the pregnancies of white, middle-class, married women at a moment when newly arrived immigrants had large families, which some nativists feared was the end of American civilization as they knew it. She called herself a female physician, but she had no medical degree and no formal training; the growing number of educated MDs wanted her out of business. She was a successful businesswoman when business was meant to be a man’s domain. She had a husband, but his own occupation was largely eclipsed by her fame, almost entirely inverting what was seen as the proper gendered order of a marriage. On top of all this, her profits were sizable, and she was not afraid to show them off. She dressed in fine clothing, paraded about town in a carriage pulled by matching horses, and lived in a large home—indeed, she would soon move to an enormous mansion on Fifth Avenue, which her detractors would refer to as a palace of death.

All of this was true.

Also true was that she could not have had this success without skill and demand for her services. No client ever died in her care, which is not something many other female—or male—physicians could say. And despite the clamor of voices who decried her practice, a stream of clients—eventually a river—quietly and steadily came to her door. The voices speaking out against her were loud and plentiful; few and far between were those who spoke in her defense. So she did it herself.

Madame Restell, the pseudonym of Ann Trow Summers Lohman, was in business in New York City from 1839 to 1878. She ran what was called a lying-in hospital, a place where women could stay during their pregnancies and be delivered of their babies. She sold contraception to prevent pregnancy, as well as emmenagogues, herbal remedies to restore menstruation. She also terminated pregnancies, either by manually bringing on miscarriage or via an abortifacient, an herbal concoction designed to stimulate labor. It was the abortions that made her famous, though people objected to most of her services at one time or another. While her detractors called her an abortionist, she used the term female physician, because abortion was not her only skill. She saw to all of women’s reproductive needs. She was a female practitioner who saw women patients, like midwives had been doing for centuries.

Restell had the skill, the good fortune, and, paradoxically, the horrible luck to go into business at precisely the moment monumental changes were underway in how Americans lived, loved, and worked. In the midnineteenth century, more and more Americans moved to cities. They worked for wages in the open market, they consolidated their finances, and they had smaller families. As a consequence of these changes, American thinking about sex and gender and children also changed, all of which would have an enormous impact on how Americans thought about abortion. Some Americans, mainly women, found abortion newly necessary, while a vocal minority, mostly men, condemned it as child murder. No figures are available, but there is no doubt that during this era the number of women who chose to terminate a pregnancy, sometimes multiple pregnancies, increased dramatically. Large numbers of single and married women began to regulate their reproductive lives by means that earlier generations of women had utilized far less frequently. Abortion was not the only way of doing so—contraception, abstinence, prolonged lactation, and delayed first marriage, not to mention the rise of commercialized sex as an outlet for men, also played a role in the declining birth rate—but abortion was the most controversial and freighted of these changes.

When Restell began practicing in 1839, early-term abortions had been criminalized for only a decade, but the laws were rarely enforced, and the crime was a misdemeanor. In earlier centuries in America, abortion had been largely unregulated, and there is evidence that Indigenous, African American, and Euro-American women were aware of herbal remedies, native to North America, that brought on miscarriage. Over the course of Restell’s career, a once unremarkable procedure became increasingly criminalized across the country. By 1872 in New York State, abortion at any stage was a felony, and both the abortion provider and the woman who had undergone the procedure could be charged, though they faced different punishments. Almost anyone who had assisted a woman in obtaining an abortion—via medicine or surgery—was also liable to prosecution. These laws were passed by legislators, urged on by male doctors, to put people like Madame Restell out of business and, at least in the doctors’ telling, to protect women. And yet the women kept coming, not just to Restell’s office but to the offices of countless other female physicians.

Madame Restell herself was sui generis. No other female physician of her era was so vilified. No other became so wealthy. She became the living symbol of all her contemporaries, who, like her, continued to break the law that was meant to punish them and to regulate women’s reproductive autonomy. No one answered back like she did either. In an era when the dialogue about abortion and contraception was so overwhelmingly one sided, so misogynist and condemnatory of women’s ability to make choices about their own bodies, Restell was often a lone voice speaking publicly for women. She was self-interested, to be sure—a trait rarely condemned in men—and she could be vague and pedantic in defending her practice, but that was precisely because to be explicit was to admit to breaking the law, which she could not do if she wanted to stay in business.

While Restell was unique, certainly the services she provided were not. Female physicians were in operation throughout the nineteenth century, not just in New York but across the developing nation. And while lawmakers often spoke out about Restell, in particular, the laws they passed targeted specific practices—abortion and contraception—that were administered and sold by thousands of practitioners nationwide and demanded by countless clients. The life of Madame Restell provides a window into the decades-long process whereby American lawmakers—urged on by doctors and so-called vice crusaders—slowly but surely limited American women’s bodily autonomy, criminalizing not just the termination of pregnancy but also any attempt to prevent it in the first place via contraception. Restell’s life also serves as a prism for understanding the steady decline in respect for women’s understanding about their own bodies, as the purview of male doctors slowly but surely usurped a domain that had once been occupied by women and midwives. The eventual downfall of Madame Restell was only the most famous example of sacrifices made in the nineteenth-century quest to purge American culture of sexual sin and to limit the reproductive freedom of American women.

The 1855 incident with the Shirt-Sewers’ and Seamstresses’ Union, illustrative as it might be of her peculiar notoriety as well as of her character and backbone, was the most minor of distractions in Madame Restell’s ascent to a place of prominence in New York’s illicit market in reproductive services. In the years that followed, her fame and fortune would only increase, and she would, time and again, outwit the doctors, the lawmakers, the police, and the vice crusaders who saw her as a threat to the morality not just of people in New York City but of those throughout the United States. Until, at last, she no longer could. And at that moment Madame Restell would exit this life in a manner as shocking and as singular as her career itself was. This is her story.

1

ANN TROW SUMMERS LOHMAN

The first advertisement she placed was small and unobtrusive. It appeared in the New York Sun in late March of 1839 and was the first instance in which Ann Trow Summers Lohman was transformed into Madame Restell, though in this advertisement she opted for the more unassuming Mrs. Restell. She addressed married women readers and asked them: 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? She then described scenarios in which a woman might want to limit her childbearing years. Is it desirable, then, 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? Clearly Restell thought not. She then announced that she had opened an office where married females can obtain the desired information at 160 Greenwich Street, near Cortland. It would be open between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m.¹

Madame Restell was officially in business.

At first Restell was vague about what, precisely, she was selling. Just information? Medicine? Medical services? Over time, it became clear that Restell offered what midwives had offered for centuries. She sold emmenagogues to revive a woman’s menstrual flow, which could be disrupted for a variety of reasons, including low body weight, hormonal imbalances, or stress. She delivered babies. She terminated pregnancies, either through medicine (abortifacients) or through manual intervention (by bringing on miscarriages). Sometimes she sold contraceptives. Most of these practices had been uncontroversial—indeed unregulated—in the United States and its earlier colonies. But times were changing. Madame Restell lived and worked in what had become the biggest city in the country, at a time when more and more Americans—including immigrants like herself—were moving to urban areas. She ran her own business, selling goods and services as the economy itself was expanding and as increasing numbers of Americans, especially those in cities, were purchasing what they needed to survive rather than producing it in their own households. All of these factors worked in her favor. More controversial was what she was selling and that she was doing it on an open market out of her home, rather than relying on local networks of families, neighbors, and friends, through which midwives had traditionally found their clients. Madame Restell had melded a traditional woman’s role, that of midwife, with the urban market economy at precisely the moment when gender roles and traditional conventions of marriage and sexual propriety were also undergoing seismic shifts, especially in cities like New York. Madame Restell had announced her arrival, but was New York ready for her?

* * * *

Very little in the story of Madame Restell’s origins would have suggested a rise to fame as a notorious female physician in New York City, more than three thousand miles and an entire ocean away from the place of her birth. Ann Trow, as she was first named, was born in the village of Painswick in the county of Gloucestershire, in the western part of England, not far from its border with Wales. At the time of her birth on May 5, 1811, Painswick had fewer than five thousand residents and was largely sustained by the cloth weaving trade, which relied on the many streams that flowed through Painswick and the mills built to power the looms that spun wool into textiles. Ann was the daughter of John Trow and his wife, Anne Biddle Trow. She was baptized in the Church of England a month after her birth, on June 9, 1811. Her parents had been married for almost ten years at the time of her birth, and her father is listed in various records as a labourer, likely in one of the textile mills or perhaps in agriculture. In 1802, both of her parents signed the marriage register with an X, meaning they were very likely illiterate.²

Ann was her parents’ fourth child, after three brothers. Anne Biddle Trow would give birth to five more children, four sons and a daughter, following daughter Ann. All were baptized in the Church of England in their local parish of Stroud. Given the gaps between their births, it is possible that some of Ann’s siblings died soon after birth and were not baptized. A family of eleven, the Trows lived in Painswick in a cottage called Combe House.³

Like many women of her era, the next time Ann Trow appears in historical records is at the moment of her marriage. On March 26, 1829, Ann Trow married twenty-six-year-old Henry Summers in the village of Wootton Bassett, a little under thirty miles southeast of Painswick, in the county of Wiltshire. How they met is uncertain, though it is clear that Henry, who is listed in some records as a tailor, was himself born and raised in Wootton Bassett. Ann Trow was seventeen years old at the time of her marriage. This was younger than the average age of first marriage for women at the time, but it was perfectly legal and would not have been regarded as especially unusual. Ann and Henry posted banns (announcements of their intent to marry) three Sundays in a row before their marriage. Ann did not give birth until eleven months later, so it does not appear that pregnancy brought them to the altar, but it also cannot be ruled out: an initial pregnancy could have ended in miscarriage.⁴

Ann and Henry Summers remained in Wootton Bassett following their marriage. Their daughter, Caroline Summers, was born there the following year and baptized on February 21, 1830. She would be their only child. The next step in their lives together was both the most consequential and the one for which there is the least documentation: they emigrated from England to the United States. We do not know precisely when they chose to do so, or on which ship they voyaged; many of these early records were destroyed by fire in the late nineteenth century. It is certain that they had arrived in New York by the late summer of 1831, when they first appear in records there. Sometime in that eighteen-month period they made the choice to leave behind the lives they knew in England in the hopes of a fresh start in the United States. Immigration to the United States in the early part of the nineteenth century was nothing like the deluge it became by the late 1800s. Just over 23,000 people immigrated to the United States in the year 1830, for example. During the whole decade of the 1830s, only about 600,000 people did so. This pales in comparison with the millions who arrived beginning in the 1880s. Most arrivals in this earlier era came from Ireland, Germany, England, and France. English emigrants like the Summerses were essentially economic migrants. They left not because of the religious persecution that had pushed some early English settlers to colonial New England but because they, like many immigrants today, believed they could do better in the United States than they could do at home.⁵

Ann, Henry, and their infant daughter, Caroline, likely embarked on their journey from the Port of Liverpool, which is where most English emigrants departed. The cost of tickets on ships—especially packet ships, which carried both mail and people—remained relatively low during the 1820s and 1830s, which meant that even those who were poor enough to be attracted to economic opportunities in the United States were also able to afford the ticket to get there. While the voyage’s price included food, passengers needed to cook it themselves. They were also responsible for bringing their own bedding. If they were sailing in the lower-cost steerage section, which most did, they were crowded in among their fellow passengers. Sanitation on board was often poor, which made the ships dirty and smelly; rats and insects were common. The only entrance to the steerage section on a freighter was through a hole in the deck, which meant there was almost no ventilation. In 1830, when the Summerses likely made their way from England to New York, the sailing time was over two weeks. Many found the voyage monotonous, while others suffered from seasickness and found it quite the opposite. Still others succumbed to diseases like cholera and typhus and died. Ann and Henry Summers made the trip with Caroline, whom Ann had to care for throughout the voyage. The Summerses would have been enormously relieved when they arrived in New York Harbor.⁶

Long before the opening of the immigrant processing stations at Castle Garden (in 1855) and Ellis Island (in 1892), those arriving in New York City from abroad would have disembarked at the lower tip of Manhattan, either on the east side, at what is now South Street Seaport, or on the west side via the Hudson River. Some captains anchored off the coast of Long Island or New Jersey and sent smaller boats with their human cargo to Manhattan. Under the New York State Passenger Act of 1824, each ship captain arriving in New York was required to provide a manifest of his passengers that included their names, ages, prior places of settlement, and occupations. The shippers then had to attest that they would be financially responsible for the cost of an immigrant should he or she fall into sickness or poverty within two years of arrival.⁷

No sooner had immigrants arrived in Lower Manhattan than a series of runners boarded the ships trying to convince newly arrived passengers to purchase a steamboat ticket to another destination upstate or farther west or to entrust them with his or her belongings and come with the runner to a boardinghouse located near the seaport. At the time the Summerses arrived in Manhattan, there was very little immigration control, and inspectors were primarily interested in whether passengers were healthy and appeared to be capable of supporting themselves. The modern immigration system of passports and visas as we know it today did not yet exist. Instead, immigration to New York was effectively a municipal affair and was really only for those who arrived by ship. Countless immigrants entered the city and state from other states and from Canada without ever registering. Once the Summerses had arrived, they were able to disembark and, provided they were healthy, they were effectively on their own. There were emigrant aid societies in the city, but most of them were organized around specific nationalities and none catered specifically to the English.⁸

In 1830, New York City had approximately two hundred thousand residents, which made it the largest city in the United States. Of those, just under eighteen thousand were foreign born. The remainder of the residents were native-born people of English, Irish, Dutch, and Huguenot ancestry. A sizable minority of Black New Yorkers—just under fourteen thousand, all of whom were free after 1827—and a small minority of Native peoples lived in the city. New York had achieved its status as the country’s largest city in part through the very process that Ann, Henry, and Caroline Summers had recently undertaken themselves: immigration. More immigrants arrived in New York Harbor than at any other port of arrival. New York also dominated the manufacturing economy, meaning that it was a destination not just for immigrants from other countries but, more significantly, for migrants from rural areas of the United States, especially for people who were no longer able to make a living as farmers or in farming families. New Yorkers worked in the shipping, brewing, sugar, publishing, and garment manufacturing trades, among many others. New York also grew when it became a trade destination for importers, especially after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which connected New York with the Great Lakes via the Hudson River.⁹

In 1830, New York effectively meant Manhattan, and really only Lower Manhattan at that. The towns of Brooklyn, Bushwick, and Williamsburg existed independently and were not incorporated into the city of New York until 1898. In 1830, the vast majority of New Yorkers lived below Fourteenth Street, though beginning in the 1820s, some wealthier residents had already begun to move uptown, the domain of the grand estates that Alexis de Tocqueville referred to as country houses, complete with lawns and orchards, some of which were visible from the East River. Homes like these were the province of only the very wealthiest. The more moderately wealthy left Lower Manhattan for Hudson Square and for newly developed neighborhoods on Bond and Bleecker Streets. Broadway was the commercial hub of the island, home to genteel residences and churches like Trinity and St. Paul’s as well as storefronts, hotels, restaurants, and theaters. Pedestrians strolled along the avenue, the high and the low mixing indiscriminately. The occasional pig also joined them. As the city expanded, former private residences along lower Broadway were subdivided into boardinghouses and occupied by clerks and other laborers. As the wealthy moved uptown, Lower Manhattan became even more densely commercialized, and parts of it—especially farther east in the Five Points neighborhood—became poorer, largely home to newly arrived immigrants.¹⁰

In many Lower Manhattan neighborhoods where laboring people and immigrants lived, workplaces and residences intermingled. Indeed, many people’s homes served also as their workplaces. Greenwich Village was home to the building trades, Corlears Hook, located along the East River, to the shipping industry. Five Points was home to any number of businesses, including tailors, breweries, and tobacco manufactories. In poorer neighborhoods, twoand three-story homes that had originally been designed for one family were often packed with multiple families, who sometimes lived crowded together in one room, reliant on chamber pots and sometimes a privy in the backyard. Some of the most crowded of buildings housed more than one hundred people. Many households kept livestock, pigs in particular, that often wandered around the neighborhoods scavenging for food. The poorest of neighborhoods, like Five Points, were squalid with waste, odor, and disease.¹¹

When the Summers family first arrived in New York City, it is likely that Henry found work as a tailor, the occupation listed for him at least once in English records. Though the Summerses do not appear in city directories in the 1830s, for which one would have had to pay a fee, one later account has them living on William Street, two blocks east of Broadway. Ann Summers worked as a seamstress, a skill she might have learned from Henry or perhaps from her mother. It was among the very most common occupations for women in New York during this era, and it paid badly. It was the kind of work that could supplement the income for a couple or for parents whose daughter still lived with them. Women, especially those with young children, could usually take in piecework, a form of work where laborers were paid by the piece instead of by the hour. They could do this work at home, which allowed them to manage a household and care for its residents at the same time that they sewed. As a longtime friend of Madame Restell’s, named Phoebe Parry, would attest many years later: She was a Mrs. Somers [then], and she was a seam stress; she worked for a shop in Broadway, making pantaloons; that was her business. Ann Summers may have worked in the shop on Broadway or may have assembled pantaloons for the shop out of her own home. Either way, by combining their earnings, Ann and Henry Summers managed to survive.¹²

This state of affairs, however tenuous, did not last long. On August 1, 1831, Henry Summers died of a bilious fever, a catchall term that referred to any kind of fever thought to originate in disorders related to bile. It is impossible to say with any certainty precisely what caused Henry Summers’s death. Certainly disease—typhoid, typhus, malaria, tuberculosis, yellow fever, and outbreaks of cholera—was rampant in the tenements into which immigrants crowded in Lower Manhattan at the time. The underlying cause of his bilious fever could well have been one of those diseases. The record for Henry’s death noted that he was twenty-seven years, three months, and twenty-eight days old. The Summerses had not been in New York for even a whole year.¹³

Ann Summers was now the single mother of a daughter who was not yet two years old. Ann had one skill, sewing, but it was unlikely to pay enough to fully support herself and her daughter. Her employment options were relatively limited. The best-paying jobs for a woman at the time were as a domestic servant or as a sex worker. Both were largely unsuitable for a woman with a child. Live-in domestic servants, the most common female occupation at the time, were unmarried women without families of their own to support; most employers would not have welcomed a servant and her infant daughter. There was a thriving sex trade in antebellum New York, both brothels and streetwalkers located in among the wealthiest and the poorest of neighborhoods. Sex work paid, far and away, better than any other occupation available for women at the time, but it could be dangerous and unpleasant work, and Ann was similarly unlikely to find a brothel that would want to take in her child as well as herself, though it was not impossible. The extant evidence suggests that in the interim, Summers continued to support herself as a seamstress.¹⁴

Observers at the time noted that one of the reasons wages were so low for seamstresses was that there was too much competition, too many women in search of these jobs, which drove wages down. There were also seasonal fluctuations for work—large orders were generally geared toward the winter and summer seasons—that made off-season work harder to find, especially for those women who worked out of their own homes. These women might waste precious time searching for work, time that they could have spent sewing. Women’s wages were also lower simply because they were being paid to women, who were assumed to be primarily dependent on men—husbands or fathers—who could support them. Even though many of New York’s working women during this period were heads of household, the sole wage earners in their families, employers took advantage of the assumptions about family life to pay women less than men, even when they did similar work. Historian Christine Stansell has estimated that wages for a seamstress in New York between 1820 and 1860 averaged between 75¢ and $1.50 per week, increasing