Monday, November 27, 2023 – SOME JUICY TALES TO READ THIS WINTER
FROM THE ARCHIVES
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2023
HOLIDAY BOOK SELECTIONS
ISSUE #1133
NEW YORK ALMANACK
JUDITH BERDY
HOLIDAY BOOK SELECTIONS
Made in New York: 25 Innovators Who Shaped Our World
New York has been a hotbed of innovation since its founding. Made in New York: 25 Innovators Who Shaped Our World (SUNY Press, 2023) by Frank Vizard tells the stories behind the innovators and their inventions.
Like many New Yorkers, some came from elsewhere to find success in their new homes. Others were homegrown. Some became famous; others struggled for recognition. All were visionaries and risk-takers who were willing to put their lives on the line if necessary.
From the first brassiere to the first modern submarine, and from Batman to the first mass-produced cameras, New York has been a seabed of life-changing innovations that have altered how we live.
Made in New York celebrates the compelling stories of these innovative men and women. Find out why invention of the teddy bear in Brooklyn is a civil rights story as is dry cleaning. The invention of voting machines in New York is still relevant to elections today. And baseball wouldn’t be what it is now without New York rules.
Luminaries like Nikola Tesla, Raymond Loewy and DJ Kool Herc shine alongside lesser known figures like George Speck, Katherine Blodgett, and Marie Van Britten Brown. What they did in New York impacted the world.
Frank Vizard is a former editor with Popular Science magazine and has written for a wide variety of publications ranging from Luxury Magazine to USA Today. Vizard’s other books include Why A Curveball Curves: The Incredible Science of Sports (2009) and the novel Screamer (2018). He lives in Westchester County, NY.
Radicals and Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern
Radicals and Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern (Reaktion Books, 2023) by Lottie Whalen, is an eye-opening new history of the women in New York City.
This is the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the tone for the rise of New York as the twentieth-century capital of modern culture.
Across the 1910s and 1920s, through provocative creative acts, shocking fashion, political activism, and dynamic social networks, these women re-imagined modern life and fought for the chance to realize their visions.
Taking the reader on a journey through the city’s salons and bohemian hangouts, Radicals and Rogues celebrates the tastemakers, collectors, curators, artists, and poets at the forefront of the early avant-garde scene.
Focusing on these trailblazers at the center of artistic innovation — including Beatrice Wood, Mina Loy, the Stettheimer sisters, Clara Tice, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Marguerite Zorach, and Louise Arensberg — Lottie Whalen offers a lively new history of remarkable women in early twentieth-century New York City.
Lottie Whalen is a writer, researcher, and curator working in the fields of feminist history, avant-garde art, and textiles. She is the co-founder of Decorating Dissidence, an interdisciplinary arts project that considers radical histories of craft and its potential as a force for change in the modern day. She lives in Glasgow.
The Trials of Madame Restell: A Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime
Nicholas L. Syrett’s new biography, The Trials of adame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (The New Press, 2023), tells the story of one of the most important female doctors of the nineteenth century, a tale with unmistakable parallels today.
“Madame Restell,” the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control, delivered children, and performed abortions for decades in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. “Restellism” becoming a term detractors used to indict her.
Abortion was then largely unregulated in most of the United States, including New York. But during the Industrial Revolution a sense of disquiet arose about single women flocking to the city for work and greater sexual freedom, amid changing views of motherhood, with fewer children born to white, married, middle-class women.
Restell came to stand for everything threatening the status quo. From 1829 onward, restrictions on abortion began to put her in legal jeopardy. For much of this period she prevailed — until she didn’t.
The Life of Madame Restell
Ann Trow was born in the wool processing community of Painswick, in in Gloucestershire, England, on May 6, 1812. Her parents were poorly paid mill workers, and it’s unlikely Ann received much education. When 15 years old, she became a live-in maid and the next year she married a tailor seven years her elder, Henry Summers.
Ann and Henry were struggling financially when she gave birth to a daughter in 1830. The following year they migrated as a family to the city of New York, settling a few block from the infamous Five Points. A few months after their arrival, Henry died, leaving Anna widow with a young child.
Ann worked as a seamstress and in 1836 met and married Charles Lohman, was a Russian immigrant working as a printer at the New York Herald. The family moved to Chatham Street, where Ann met Dr. William Evans.
Evans had no formal medical training, but made pills, tonics, and powders based on old herbal remedies which he sold as cures for everything from baldness to consumption.With Evans’ help Ann made and sold her own pills to cure liver, lung, and stomach ailments, establishing a small business until a customer asked for a medicine to end an unwanted pregnancy.
In the first half of the 1800s, family planning was considered the private business of women. Before “quickening,” or the moment when a woman first felt a fetus move, a woman could fairly easily obtain abortifacients, and if that didn’t work, midwives and doctors performed surgical abortions.
In New York State, doctors hoping to take control of the work of midwifes and female medical practitioners succeeded in lobbying for a law in 1827 that made providing an abortion a crime punishable by a year in jail and a $100 fine. Since most people cared little about what was considered a private matter, few abortions were reported to authorities, and the law was seldom used.
Historians believe Ann’s first abortion medication was simply a copy of an old recipe, part of a long tradition of female-led family planning. Ann’s abortifacient was popular however, and see gave up working as a seamstress to practice her brand of medicine.
After visiting her family in England in 1838 she returned and rented a respectable-looking office on a fashionable street. Ann spread the story that she had learned effective and safe medical abortions from a famous abortionist in Paris and adopted the name Madame Restell.
Her first advertisement ran in the New York Sun in March 1839 and she soon launched a mail-order business, establishing offices in Philadelphia and Boston.
Madame Restell’s medicines were not very effective however. Her birth control powder was ineffective and women who found themselves pregnant, spent more money for her abortion medicine. If that failed, Madame Restell offered a secret surgical abortion which cost $100 for wealthy women, and $20 for those who were poor (still an extraordinarily high price for the time).
After Madame Restell performed these surgical abortions in the back room of her office, the women could go to a doctor and claim they had suffered a miscarriage.
Ann’s popularity drew the attention. of a loose alliance of doctors, religious leaders, and social reformers who hoped to end her practice. Her first arrest occurred only five months after her first advertisement was published, but the charges were dropped.
This was only the beginning of decades of legal troubles. Called “the wickedest woman in New York,” and accused of hurting and killing her patients, in 1846 there was a riot outside her office.
The following year Ann’s detractors succeeded in securing a conviction for performing an illegal abortion. She served a year in prison and then stopped offering surgical abortions, focusing on her pills instead.
She made a fortune and her stature was great enough that Mayor Jacob Westervelt officiated her daughter’s wedding in 1854. In 1862, Ann and Charles built a mansion in an exclusive neighborhood where she opened an office in 1867.
At the end of the Civil War, the anti-abortion movement grew however, under the leadership of Anthony Comstock, U.S. Postal Inspector and head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.
Comstock sponsored the 1873 Comstock Acts that made it illegal to send obscene material by mail. In 1878, the year after her beloved husband had died, Comstock pretended to be a man seeking abortion services for a woman out of state, and had Ann arrested when she responded to the need.
Rather than face another trial and certain conviction, Ann Loham died by suicide on April 1, 1878, the day her trial was set to begin.
Syrett’s The Trials of Madame Restell paints an unforgettable picture of the mid-nineteenth-century New York and brings Restell to the attention of a whole new generation of women in the current fight over reproductive choices.
Author 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 (2011), American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (2016), and An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton (2021). His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Daily Beast. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
The Eight: The Lemmon Slave Case and the Fight for Freedom
October 22, 2023 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment
The Eight: The Lemmon Slave Case and the Fight for Freedom (SUNY Press Excelsior Editions, 2023) tells the story of Lemmon v. New York — or, as it’s more popularly known, the Lemmon Slave Case. All but forgotten today, it was one of the most momentous civil rights cases in American history.There had been cases in which the enslaved had won their freedom after having resided in free states, but the Lemmon case was unique, posing the question of whether an enslaved person can win freedom by merely setting foot on New York soil — when brought there in the keep of an “owner.”
The case concerned the fates of eight enslaved people from Virginia, brought through New York in 1852 by their owners, Juliet and Jonathan Lemmon. The eight were in court seeking, legally, to become people — to change their status under law from objects into human beings.
The Eight encountered Louis Napoleon, the son of a slave, an abolitionist activist, and a “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, who took enormous risks to help others. He was part of an anti-slavery movement in which African-Americans played an integral role in the fight for freedom.
The court ruled that the eight were free upon arriving on New York’s free soil, and the case became a battle cry for secession when appeals defied the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford.
The case was part of the broader judicial landscape at the time: If a law was morally repugnant but enshrined in the Constitution, what was the duty of the judge?
Should there be, as some people advocated, a “higher law” that transcends the written law?
These questions were at the heart of the Lemmon case. They were difficult and important ones in the 1850s — and, more than a century and a half later, we must still grapple with them today.Albert M. Rosenblatt teaches at the New York University School of Law and is a retired Judge of New York State Court of Appeals. His previous books include Opening Statements: Law, Jurisprudence, and the Legacy of Dutch New York (co-edited with Julia C. Rosenblatt) and Judith S. Kaye in Her Own Words: Reflections on Life and the Law, with Selected Judicial Opinions and Articles (co-edited with Judith S. Kaye and Henry M. Greenberg), both published by SUNY Press.
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Affordable Housing and the Future of New York’s Open Space
Learn the history of affordable housing in New York City and how Roosevelt Island, created in 1975, is an integral part of that history. Hear about ideas of open space that were supported by this approach to housing and how they are being reconsidered today.
Matthias Altwicker, AIA LEED AP, is an architect and an associate professor of architecture at New York Institute of Technology. Both his practice and research focus on housing and open space, including collaborations with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and municipal administrations in New York City and Long Island.
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