Queens of the Air: American Women Aviation Pioneers
Within the holdings of the National Archives, you will find many resources documenting the history and early days of aviation. Among these records include the stories and flights of American women aviation pioneers, captured by newsreel footage and World War I era photographs.
Within textual material for an item titled Aviation, Historical, Since 1919 you can find Ruth Elder, the first woman to attempt a transatlantic flight.
What may be her greatest feat however, took place on November 19, 1916, when she broke the existing cross-America flight air speed record of 452 miles set by Victor Carlstrom by flying nonstop from Chicago to New York State, a distance of 590 miles.
The next day she flew on to New York City. Flying over Manhattan, her fuel cut out, but she glided to a safe landing on Governors Island and was met by United States Army Captain Henry “Hap” Arnold (who changed her spark plugs in the Curtiss pusher), who would one day become Commanding General of the United States Army Air Forces. President Woodrow Wilson attended a dinner held in her honor on December 2, 1916.
Other American women aviation pioneers include Bessie Coleman, the first African American and Native American woman pilot, and known for her daring stunt tricks in the air.
In 1922, Coleman became the first African American woman to complete a public flight and audiences were thrilled with her loop-the-loop and Figure 8 tricks in her plane. She also became known for giving flight lessons and inspiring both Africans Americans and women to fly planes.
Willa Beatrice Brown was an aviator, flight instructor, officer, and civil rights activist, who created a path for thousands of black men and women to become pilots.
Brown’s efforts to establish a training school for African American Air Force cadets led to the creation of the Army Training facility at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1941.
Katherine Stinson became one of the first women in the United States to earn a pilot’s license on July 24, 1912, at the age of 21. After earning her license, Stinson and her family founded the Stinson Aircraft Company, and the Stinson School of Flying, in San Antonio, Texas.
In 1918, Stinson became the first woman commissioned as a mail pilot for the Post Office Department. After working for the Post Office, Stinson applied to be a volunteer pilot for the army during World War I, but was rejected twice due to her gender.
THE FORMER CITI BUILDING BEING STRIPPED OF ITS LOGO TO BECOME ALTICE
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
NEW YORK ALMANACK
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Eighth Avenue and 56th Street today looks nothing like it did when painter Lucille Blanch captured this otherwise ordinary block south of Columbus Circle 93 years ago.
Today, modern office buildings and apartment towers obscure the view of the Argonaut Building—the castle-like white structure that still stands down the block on Broadway and 57th Street. The enormous billboards are long gone, too. The church below it, the flamboyant Broadway Tabernacle, met the wrecking ball in the 1970s. The tenement with the empty storefront next to the tire shop has also disappeared, replaced by a McDonald’s. This stretch of West Midtown in the 1920s was known as the automobile showroom district, which explains the tire store and what look like car dealerships on the left-hand corner and in the middle of the block.
Lucile Blanch made a living as a painter, departing her Minnesota hometown to study at the Art Students League on West 57th Street on scholarship. She then became involved with the Fourteenth Street School, a group of artists with a social realist bent.
In 1930, she would have been 35 years old. Why she chose this corner to paint remains a mystery. But her depiction of the bright, colorful cityscape dwarfing the small, low-key residents might be saying something about the power of the urban environment over its residents caught in the toll of the Depression.
(Hat tip to Village Preservation’s Off the Grid blog, which included this painting recently in a post about unheralded female artists living and/or working South of Union Square.)
STAINED GLASS WINDOWS IN THE NARTHRAX OF CHAPEL OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD GLORIA HERMAN GOT IT!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
Shop girls, down and out men, lone pedestrians on the way to the elevated train—from the 1930s to the 1980s, Isabel Bishop observed these men and women from her Union Square artist’s studio, painting them in soft tones that reveal their humanity and fragility.
Born in 1902 in Cincinnati, Bishop moved to Manhattan at age 16 to attend the New York School of Applied Design for Women. She then took classes at the Art Students League, developing her talents as a printmaker and painter.
Bishop married in 1934 and moved to Riverdale. But she kept her studio first at Nine West 14th Street and then another at 857 Broadway. The Union Square area in those pre- and postwar decades was home to lower-end department stores, offices, and cheap entertainment venues.
And of course, there was the park itself, a gathering place for everyone from soap-box agitators to workers on their lunch hour to derelict men with no where else to go.
The subject matter right outside her studio suited Bishop perfectly.
“It was in New York’s pulsating environment that Bishop combined her admiration for the old masters with a contemporary taste for urban realism,” states the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
“With her discerning eye, she portrayed ordinary people in an extraordinary manner, often monumentalizing her figures within spaces that barely created context or indicated a location.”
“She chose average models from the streets of Manhattan and often rendered them in a state of physical activity—a sharp departure from the idealized, passive nudes of previous traditions.”
[“Fifteenth Street and Sixth Avenue,” 1930]
Bishop focused many of her paintings on women—the otherwise ordinary women who passed through Union Square, coming in and out of offices or catching a train. Neither mothers nor sex symbols, they “exist for themselves,” as one critic put it.
“On the street corner, in the automat, in the subway and on park benches in fine weather, Miss Bishop proved herself a perceptive observer,” wrote the New York Times in her obituary. “For young women in the big city who were as yet unmarked by life, she had a particular feeling.”
[“Fourteenth Street,” 1932]
As time went on, Bishop’s style seemed to become more muted, with figures of women in what looks like perpetual motion—perhaps a comment on the rise of women in American society.
Bishop kept her Union Square studio until 1984; she died in 1988. This self-portrait was done in 1927, when she was just 25.
She isn’t as well-known as she should be, but her amber-hued men and women caught in ordinary, fleeting moments speak to the anonymity and motion of urban life in the 20th century.
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
The other day we featured a photo of the island’s Holy Spirit Chapel with an adjoining pergola. While examining it, I was curious about the photographer Shirley Carter Burden. That is a familiar name. Check out his famous family history below.
Plaque on side of brick building: Erected 1906 for D.P.C., Robert W. Hebberd, Commissioner; etc.
Plaque on rusticated wall: Pathological Laboratory of Metropolitan Hospital, completed in 1910. William J. Gaynor, Mayor
Side of stone 3-story building with turrets and balustrade, pointed arched windows. of Smallpox Hospital
Wall of above building with turrets and pointed arched windows, attached to brick building with coins and bays. Smallpox Hospital
Smallpox Hospital: Closer view of above photograph. 2nd story balcony over door.
Close-up of gnarled branches of large tree alongside of building fire escape.
Fire escape of unidentified stone building.
Fire escape of unidentified brick building, looking SE. Queensboro Bridge in background, street lamp foreground.
Side view of small rusticated building. (A chapel?) Looking West, huge apartment building under construction. Ramp foreground.
Large tree trunk in foreground, wooden stool at foot of tree. Blurry church door in background.
Rectangular pergola in foreground; chapel in background.
Stained glass window seen from exterior.
Smallpox Hospital: 3 1/2 story stone building. Arched windows, 2nd story balcony with columns.
Looking SW across East River. Posted on street lamp: One-Way arrow and To Bridge arrow. Manhattan skyline in background.
SHIRLEY CARTER BURDEN
THE PHOTOGRAPHER
FROM WIKIPEDIA
Shirley Carter Burden (December 9, 1908 – June 3, 1989) was an American photographer,[1][2] author of picture essays on racism, Catholicism, and history of place.[3][4] He served on advisory committees of museums, including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California, and was the Photography Committee chairman at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and of Aperture,[5] which named the Burden Gallery (New York) in his honor.
He was at the Browning School in New York City until 1926, but did not go on to college or university education.[8]
Career
Beginning in 1924, Burden assisted at Pathé News. In 1926, he and his cousin filmed an Ontario Indian tribe for their The Silent Enemy, and from 1927 held a minor position at Paramount Studios. A 1929 meeting with Edward Steichen inspired his interest in photography and later gained his mentorship. He sought better motion picture prospects in California and Hollywood[9] and from 1929 to 1934 used his contact Merian C. Cooper to gain associate producer work, most significantly at RKO on Academy Award nominated “She“.
Commercial career
During World War 2 Burden established Tradefilms in 1942, successfully producing training films which were then in demand from the US Navy, the Office of Education, and Lockheed Aircraft. This business was unsustainable postwar and Burden and Tradefilms partner Todd Walker opened a photography studio in Beverly Hills, California, in 1946, producing advertising and architectural photography for magazines Architectural Forum, House and Garden, Arts and Architecture.
Fine art career
Dissatisfied with commercial photography, and having embraced Roman Catholicism, Burden decided on a more fulfilling fine art career, encouraged by Minor White[10] whom he met in 1952. The friendship developed into his patronage of White’s Aperture magazine. He assisted Edward Steichen in gathering photography for, and subsequently contributing images to, MoMA‘s highly successful, international travelling Family of Man (1955), working on this also with Dorothea Lange whom he befriended.
These contacts and experience launched a successful fine art photography career.; his photo-essay on the all-but-abandoned Ellis Island,[11] was exhibited under the auspices of the City of New York, and an invitation to exhibit his essay on the Weehawken ferry at MoMA in Diogenes With a Camera IV in 1958, curated by Steichen, who encouraged Burden to photograph Trappist monks at the abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Kentucky (God Is My Life).[12] Travel to Lourdes in 1960 resulted in Behold Thy Mother, published by Doubleday in 1965, and notoriety continued with the well publicised I Wonder Why, which documented racism experienced by a young black girl.[13]
He continued with his photo essays (on Japan, and his ancestors, the Vanderbilts[14]) and he repaid his success by chairing or advising a range of photography organisations, and teaching (1978–81, at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.).
Personal life
In 1934, Burden married Flobelle Fairbanks, an actress and niece of actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr.[15] Together, they were the parents of two children, a daughter and a son:[6]
Margaret Florence (1936–2019), who married Daniel Childs.[16]
After the death of his first wife Flobelle on January 5, 1969,[16] Burden married Julietta Valverde Lyon in 1971.[8][19]
Burden died June 3, 1989 above Teterboro Airport, on a Los Angeles to New York flight.[6] His grandson, S. Carter Burden III, is the founder of the managed web hosting provider Logicworks.[20] His granddaughter, Constance Childs, married celebrity chef and Food Network host David Rosengarten.[21]
Legacy
He gifted or exchanged, in memory of his first wife Flobelle, large numbers of photographs from his generous and eclectic collection of modernist works to MoMA, The Centre for Photography and other institutions. In 1989, 5 years after Aperture moved headquarters to a five-story brownstone at 20 East 23rd Street in New York,[22] the building’s second floor was devoted to the Burden Gallery, in recognition of Burden’s longtime support.[6]The Burden Professorship in Photography at Harvard University in 1999 was established posthumously by his family.
THREE VISITORS AT THE LGHTHOUSE IN THE 1950’S PLEASE NOTE: NO SEAWALL PEDESTRIANS BEWARE! GLORIA HERMAN AND ALEXIS VILLAFANE GOT IT RIGHT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
NEW YORK CITY MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES WIKIPEDIA
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
SAVE THE DATE-TUESDAY, MARCH 7TH, IN PERSON PRESENTATION NO RESERVATIONS REQUIRED ALL ARE WELCOME
FROM THE ARCHIVES
WEEKEND,MARCH 4-5, 2023
ISSUE 930
REFORMING WOMAN OF
BLACKWELL’S ISLAND #7
MARY BELLE HARRIS
Superintendent of Women
and
Deputy Warden of the Workhouse
on
Blackwell’s Island
NYC CORRECTIONS DEPARTMENT
JUDITH C. REVEAL
Harris, Mary Belle (1874–1957)
American prison administrator. Born on August 19, 1874, in Factoryville, Pennsylvania; died on February 22, 1957, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; the only daughter of John Howard and Mary Elizabeth (Mace) Harris; graduated from Bucknell University, A.B. in music, 1893, A.M. in Latin, 1894; earned Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indo-European comparative philology from the University of Chicago, 1900.
Mary Belle Harris was born in Factoryville, Pennsylvania, the oldest of three children. Her father John Howard was a Baptist minister and president of Bucknell University from 1889 to 1919. Her mother Mary Mace Harris died when Mary Belle was only six. John Howard married Lucy Adelaide Bailey —a close family friend—a year later. Their family grew by six sons as a result of this second marriage, and Bailey was a much-loved stepmother to Mary Belle. Harris and her brothers received an education at the Keystone Academy, a Baptist secondary school founded by her father.
Harris did not actually start in the career for which she became famous until she was nearly 40. She worked as a scholar and teacher after earning an A.B. in music, an A.M. in Latin at Bucknell University, and a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indo-European comparative philology from the University of Chicago. Harris taught Latin in Chicago and Baltimore between 1900 and 1910. In Baltimore, she studied archaeology and numismatics at Johns Hopkins University. In 1912, she traveled to Europe to teach at the American Classical School in Rome.
When Harris returned to America in 1914, a close friend from her years at the University of Chicago, Katharine Bement Davis— now commissioner of corrections in New York City—offered Harris the post of superintendent of women and deputy warden of the Workhouse on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island), a strip of land in the East River, between Manhattan and Queens. Harris, who had no job prospects, accepted the post, even though she lacked experience in corrections administration. The Workhouse, severely overcrowded with a daily population of 700 women, was known for its grim atmosphere. Harris, who believed that prisons should teach employable skills and rehabilitate, dedicated herself to prison reform. She created a library and permitted card playing and knitting in the women’s cells in order to alleviate boredom; she also facilitated daily outdoor exercise by fencing off a section of the prison yard. She quickly earned a reputation for success based on common sense.
Harris remained at the Workhouse for three years. In 1917, the defeat of reform mayor John Mitchel forced her resignation, and, in February of 1918, she assumed the superintendent’s position at the State Reformatory for Women in Clinton, New Jersey. She continued her reforms, which included a system of self-government in the cottages and an Exit Club for women preparing for parole.
In September of 1918, Harris was granted a leave of absence to join the War Department’s Commission on Training Camp Activities. She became assistant director of the Section on Reformatories and Detention Houses, where she was responsible for dealing with women arrested in camp areas. She set up detention homes and health facilities in various cities in the South, including Florida, South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia.
In May of 1919, Harris became superintendent of the State Home for Girls in Trenton, New Jersey, a juvenile institution notorious for its dangerous inmates. Although plagued with continual problems, Harris was successful in establishing a system of self-government, then resigned from the State Home in 1924. The following year, on March 12, 1925, Harris was sworn in as the first superintendent of the Federal Industrial Institution for Women, a new establishment to be built at Alderson, West Virginia. She worked with the architects, overseeing all aspects of construction to ensure that Alderson would be a place of education for the inmates. It opened November 24, 1928, and, under Harris’ direction, became a model institution. The innovative features of the prison included the absence of a large surrounding wall or heavily armed guards, the establishment of farming and other physical activities, a system of self-government, and the promotion of education and vocational training. Despite the relative freedom of the institution, there were few disciplinary problems or escapes.
Following Harris’ retirement from Alderson in March 1941, she returned to Pennsylvania and served on the state Board of Parole until it was abolished in 1943. She then settled in Lewis-burg, Pennsylvania, served as a trustee for Bucknell University, and lectured and wrote about her activities in the world of female incarceration. In 1953, she began an extended tour of Europe and North Africa, visited her nephew in Cyprus, and inspected two Libyan prisons. She returned to Lewisburg in July of 1954 and died there on February 22, 1957, of a heart attack.
Harris was outspoken in her quest for re-form in women’s penal institutions, emphasizing the need for women to “build within them a wall of self-respect,” to learn employable skills which they could use upon their release, and to free themselves from dependency upon the community and/or men. She was considered a tough and powerful administrator and was recognized for her positive contributions to penal reform.
sources:
Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.
PERGOLA SOUTH OF HOLY SPIRIT CHAPEL, NOW THE SANCTUARY .
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
Katharine Bement Davis, (born Jan. 15, 1860, Buffalo, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 10, 1935, Pacific Grove, Calif.), American penologist, social worker, and writer who had a profound effect on American penal reform in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Davis graduated from the Rochester (New York) Free Academy in 1879 and for 10 years thereafter taught high-school science in Dunkirk, New York. In 1890 she entered Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, as a junior, and after graduating in 1892 she pursued further studies at Columbia University, New York City. She then served as head resident at the St. Mary’s Street College Settlement in Philadelphia (1893–97). In 1897 she undertook doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, and, after work there and at the University of Berlin and Vienna University, she received her Ph.D. in economics in 1900.
In January 1901 Davis began work as superintendent of the newly opened state reformatory for women at Bedford Hills, New York. Over the next 13 years the institution became famous for its experimental approach to penology. Davis instituted a prison farm, courses in various vocational subjects, and a cottage system. She was particularly interested in identifying various classes of reformable, habitual, and incorrigible offenders, and her work in that field induced John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in 1912 to establish a Laboratory of Social Hygiene on property adjacent to the reformatory to further such research. In 1909, during a European trip, she won international acclaim for her work in organizing self-help relief programs following a disastrous earthquake in Messina, Sicily.
In January 1914 Davis was appointed commissioner of corrections for New York City. She was the first woman to hold a top-level post in the government of that city, and she moved quickly to improve conditions in its 15 penal institutions, especially to suppress drug traffic, segregate women prisoners, and upgrade dietary and medical facilities. She established the New Hampton Farm School for delinquent boys and laid plans for a separate detention home for women (ultimately opened in 1932). In 1915, principally as a result of her efforts, the New York legislature enacted a program of indeterminate sentencing and parole supervision, and in December of that year Davis was named first chairman of the city parole board to direct the new system. She held the post until the end of the reform administration in 1918.
From 1918 until her retirement in 1928 Davis was general secretary and member of the board of directors of the Bureau of Social Hygiene, the department of the Rockefeller Foundation that had operated the Bedford Hills laboratory. There she directed research into narcotics trade and addiction, the “white slave trade,” various forms of delinquency, and other aspects of public health and social hygiene. In 1929 she published Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women; she was also author of a great many articles in professional and popular journal.
Commissioner Davis visiting Blackwell’s Island institutions
JAY JACOBSON, GLORIA HERMAN, ED LITCHER, ANDY SPARBERG & ELLEN JACOBY GOT IT RIGHT
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
Mollie Steimer (Ukrainian: Моллі Штаймер; 1897–1980) was a Ukrainian Jewishanarchist activist. After settling in New York City, she quickly became involved in the local anarchist movement and was caught up in the case of Abrams v. United States. Charged with sedition, she was eventually deported to Soviet Russia, where she met her lifelong partner Senya Fleshin and agitated for the rights of anarchist political prisoners in the country. For her activities, she and Fleshin were again deported to western Europe, where they spent time organising aid for exiles and political prisoners, and took part in the debates of the international anarchist movement. Following the rise of the Nazis in Europe, she and Fleshin fled to Mexico, where they spent the rest of their lives working as photographers.
Biography
On November 21, 1897, Mollie Steimer was born in Dunaivtsi, a village in the south-west of the Russian Empire (modern-day Ukraine). At the age of 15, she and her family emigrated to the United States, settling in a ghetto of New York City and setting to work at a garment factory. At this time, she started to read radical political literature, such as Women and Socialism by August Bebel and Underground Russia by Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky.[1]
Early activism
By the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, Steimer had gravitated towards anarchism, inspired by the works of Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman. Together with other Jewish anarchists, Steimer helped form a clandestine collective called Der Shturm (“The Storm”), which published radical works in the Yiddish language. Following some internal conflict, in January 1918, the group reorganized and launched a new monthly journal titled Frayhayt (“Freedom”), which published articles by Jewish radicals such as Georg Brandes and Maria Goldsmith. The journal’s motto was a Henry David Thoreau quote: “That government is best which governs not at all” (Yiddish: Yene regirung iz di beste, velke regirt in gantsn nit).[2]
Several of the collective’s members, including Steimer, lived and worked together in a six-room apartment on Harlem‘s East 104th Street. Due to the political repression brought by the Espionage Act of 1917 and the tense political climate that preceded the First Red Scare, the collective was forced to distribute Frayhayt in secret, as it had been among the papers banned by the federal government for its anti-war and far-left political stances.[3] By the summer of 1918, the group had drawn the attention of the authorities, after they had begun distributing leaflets denouncing the allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and calling for a social revolution in the United States by means of a general strike.[4]
Arrest, trial and imprisonment
Steimer herself distributed thousands of copies around New York, including at her own workplace. On August 23, she threw a handful of the leaflets out of a window, which alerted the police, who arrested Steimer after receiving information from an informant within the Frayhayt group. Their apartment was subsequently raided and a number of their other members were arrested, on charges of conspiracy, under the Sedition Act of 1918.[5] During their trial, which came to be known as the case of Abrams v. United States, Steimer gave a speech in which she declared:[6]
“By anarchism, I understand a new social order, where no group of people shall be governed by another group of people. Individual freedom shall prevail in the full sense of the word. Private ownership shall be abolished. Every person shall have an equal opportunity to develop himself well, both mentally and physically. We shall not have to struggle for our daily existence as we do now. No one shall live on the product of others. Every person shall produce as much as he can, and enjoy as much as he needs—receive according to his need. Instead of striving to get money, we shall strive towards education, towards knowledge. While at present the people of the world are divided into various groups, calling themselves nations, while one nation defies another — in most cases considers the others as competitive — we, the workers of the world, shall stretch out our hands towards each other with brotherly love. To the fulfillment of this idea I shall devote all my energy, and, if necessary, render my life for it.”
On October 25, 1918, Steimer and her co-defendants were found guilty, with Steimer herself being sentenced to 15 years in prison and a $500 fine (equivalent to $9,000 in 2021).[7] With support from a wide range of society, notably including Zechariah Chafee and the entire staff of Harvard Law School, the sentence was appealed and the defendants were released on bail.[8] Steimer returned to activism, for which she was arrested multiple times over the following year. On March 11, 1919, during a police raid against the Russian People’s House on New York’s East 15th Street, Steimer was arrested on charges of incitement and subsequently transferred to Ellis Island.[9] Following a hunger strike against the conditions of her solitary confinement, Steimer was released before she could be deported, although the government kept her under surveillance. Back in New York, she met Emma Goldman, with whom she developed a lifelong friendship.[10]
On October 30, 1919, Steimer was arrested again and imprisoned on Blackwell’s Island. For six months, she was again held in solitary confinement, which she likewise protested with another hunger strike and by loudly singing revolutionary songs. When the Supreme Court upheld her conviction, her co-defendants informed her of a plan to flee the country into exile, but Steimer herself refused to cooperate, as she didn’t want to dishonor the workers that had paid her $40,000 in bail (equivalent to $625,000 in 2021).[11] In April 1920, Steimer was transferred to Jefferson City, Missouri, where she was held for a year and a half. By this time, she had learnt of the death of her brother from influenza and her father from shock.[12] Her lawyer managed to secure her release, on the condition of her deportation. But she initially refused to accept this, due to her staunch opposition to state borders and her concern for fellow political prisoners of the United States.[13] Nevertheless, after some convincing, she arrived back at Ellis Island, where she eagerly awaited her chance to participate in the Russian Revolution.[14]
Deportation and exile
On November 24, 1921, Steimer and her co-defendants were deported to the Russian Soviet Republic on the Estonia. By the time they arrived in Moscow, on December 15, 1921, there were no anarchists left to greet them. Emma Goldman had left for exile, Peter Kropotkin had died of old age and any left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks had been suppressed by the Red Army, while hundreds more anarchists were still held in the prisons of the Cheka.[15] Despite the climate of political repression, Steimer made a new home in Petrograd, where she met and fell in love with Senya Fleshin, a veteran of the Makhnovist movement.[16] Together they established an organization to aid political prisoners in Russia, for which they were arrested on November 1, 1922 and sentenced to exile in Siberia. But after they carried out a hunger strike, they were released on November 18, on the condition that they remain in Petrograd and report regularly to the authorities. Despite these conditions, they continued their activities, and were again arrested on July 9, 1923. Following another hunger strike and protests made to Leon Trotsky by anarcho-syndicalist delegates of the Profintern, they were again released, although this time they were to be deported.[17]
Fleshin; Steimer; Voline 1930
On September 27, 1923, Steimer and Fleshin were deported to Germany, where they were reunited with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman in Berlin. From the German capital, Steimer wrote articles about her experiences in Russia for the British anarchist newspaper Freedom, to which she denounced the authoritarianism of the Communist Party.[18] The couple also continued their activities in aiding Soviet political prisoners, now as members of the International Workers’ Association. In 1924, they joined their fellow exile Volin to Paris, where they established a mutual aid society for anarchist exiles from all countries and participated in the debate around the Platform, which Steimer criticised as authoritarian.[19] During this period, Steimer also met a number of other anarchsts, including Harry Kelly, Rose Pesotta, Rudolf Rocker and Milly Witkop, and was briefly reunited with her co-defendants Jack and Mary Abrams, who had also left Russia out of disillusionment with the Revolution.[20]
In Mexico City, the couple operated a photographic studio, became close with a group of Spanish anarchist exiles and were once again reunited with Jack and Mary Abrams. In 1963, Steimer and Fleshin retired to Cuernavaca, where they kept up with the development of the international anarchist movement and received visitors from the United States. In the late 1970s, Steimer was interviewed by a number of film crews about Emma Goldman and her anarchist convictions, to which she remained a stalwart into her old age.[25]
Mollie Steimer died of heart failure in her Cuernavaca home on July 23, 1980, aged 82.[1] Senya Fleshin died less than a year later.[25]
COVER OF BROCHURE COMMENORATING THE OPENING OF THE EAST RIVER DRIVE IN 1941, A WPA PROJECT (NOW THE FDR DRIVE). THIS IS A COMPOSITE IMAGE OF DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE DRIVE. ARON EISENPREISS, GLORIA HERMAN, HARA REISER AND NINA LUBLIN GOT IT RGHT!!!
Text by Judith Berdy Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
WIKIPEDIA
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Ida C. Craddock (August 1, 1857 – October 16, 1902) was a 19th-century American advocate of free speech and women’s rights.[1] She wrote extensively on sexuality, leading to her conviction and imprisonment for obscenity. Facing further legal proceedings after her release, she committed suicide.
Ida Craddock
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ida Craddock
Born1 August 1857 Philadelphia, United StatesDied16 October 1902 (aged 45) New York City, United States
EARLY LIFE
Ida Craddock was born in Philadelphia; her father died before she was five months old. Her mother home-schooled her as an only child and provided her with an extensive Quaker education.[3]
In her twenties, after passing the entrance exams, Craddock was recommended by the faculty for admission into the University of Pennsylvania as its first female undergraduate student. However, her entrance was blocked by the university’s board of trustees in 1882.[4] She went on to publish a stenography textbook, Primary Phonography, and to teach the subject to women at Girard College.
In her thirties, Craddock left her Quaker upbringing. She developed an academic interest in the occult through her association with the Theosophical Society beginning around 1887. Through her writing, she tried to synthesize translated mystic literature and traditions from many cultures into a scholarly, distilled whole. As a freethinker, she was elected Secretary of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Secular Union in 1889.[5] Although a member of the Unitarian faith, Craddock became a student of religious eroticism, then proclaimed she was a Priestess and Pastor of the Church of Yoga. Never married in a traditional sense, Craddock claimed to have a blissful ongoing marital relationship with an angel named Soph. Craddock stated her intercourse with Soph was so noisy, they drew complaints from her neighbors.[3] Her mother responded by threatening to burn Craddock’s papers, and unsuccessfully tried to have her institutionalized.
Craddock moved to Chicago, and opened a Dearborn Street office offering “mystical” sexual counseling to married couples via both walk-in counseling and mail order. She dedicated her time to “preventing sexual evils and sufferings” by educating adults, achieving national notoriety with her editorials in defense of Little Egypt and her controversial belly dancing act at the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago during 1893.[6][7]
Craddock wrote many serious instructional tracts on human sexuality and appropriate, respectful sexual relations between husband and wife. Among her works were Heavenly Bridegrooms, Psychic Wedlock, Spiritual Joys, Letter To A Prospective Bride, The Wedding Night and Right Marital Living. Aleister Crowley reviewed Heavenly Bridegrooms in the pages of his journal The Equinox, stating that it was:
…one of the most remarkable human documents ever produced, and it should certainly find a regular publisher in book form. The authoress of the MS. claims that she was the wife of an angel. She expounds at the greatest length the philosophy connected with this thesis. Her learning is enormous. …This book is of incalculable value to every student of occult matters. No Magick library is complete without it.[8]
These sex manuals were all considered obscene by the standards of her day. Their distribution led to numerous confrontations with various authorities, often initiated by Craddock. She was held for several months at a time on morality charges in five local jails as well as the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane.
Her first two full-length books, Lunar & Sex Worship and Sex Worship, were on comparative religion.
Her writings on supernatural topics also continued throughout her life. One of her last books on this subject was Heaven of the Bible, published in 1897.
INDICTMENTS
Mass distribution of Right Marital Living through the U.S. Mail after its publication as a featured article in the medical journal The Chicago Clinic led to a federalindictment of Craddock in 1899. She pled guilty, and received a suspended sentence. In 1902, a subsequent trial in New York on charges of sending The Wedding Night through the mail during a sting operation ended with her conviction. Craddock refused to plead insanity in order to avoid being incarcerated, and was sentenced to three months in prison, serving most of her time in Blackwell’s Island workhouse.[3] Upon her release, Anthony Comstock immediately re-arrested her for violations of the Comstock Act. On October 10, Craddock was tried and convicted, with the judge declaring The Wedding Night to be so “obscene, lewd, lascivious, dirty” that the jurors would not be allowed to see it during the trial.
At 45 years old, Craddock saw her five-year prison sentence as a life term. On October 16, 1902, the day before she was due to be sent to a federal penitentiary, Craddock died by suicide after slashing her wrists and inhaling natural gas from the oven in her apartment. She penned a final private letter to her mother as well as a lengthy public suicide note condemning Comstock, who had become her personal nemesis. Comstock had opposed Craddock almost a decade before during the Little Egypt affair, and effectively acted as her prosecutor during both legal actions against her in federal court. He had sponsored the Comstock Act, which was named after himself, under which she was repeatedly charged.
AFTER DEATH
Theodore Schroeder, a free speech lawyer from New York with an amateur interest in psychology, became interested in Ida Craddock’s case a decade after her death. During his research of her life, he collected her letters, diaries, manuscripts, and other printed materials. Although he never met Craddock, he speculated she had at least two human lovers, although Craddock insisted she only had intercourse with Soph, her spirit husband.[3]
Sexual techniques from Craddock’s Psychic Wedlock were later reproduced in Sex Magick by Louis T. Culling.[9]
Today, Ida Craddock’s manuscripts and notes are preserved in the Special Collections of the Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her battle with Anthony Comstock is the subject of the 2006 stage play Smut by Alice Jay and Joseph Adler, which had its world premiere at Miami’s GableStage in June 2007.
In 2010, after a century of her works remaining almost completely out of print, Teitan Press published Lunar and Sex Worship by Ida Craddock, edited and with an introduction by Vere Chappell. Also in 2010, Vere Chappell wrote and compiled “Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock”. He describes this as “an anthology of works by Ida Craddock, embedded in a biography.” The book reprints “The Danse du Ventre (1893), Heavenly Bridegrooms (1894), Psychic Wedlock (1899), “The Wedding Night” (1900), “Letter from Prison” (1902), “Ida’s Last Letter to Her Mother” (1902), “Ida’s Last Letter to the Public” (1902). Another biography of Craddock, “Heaven’s Bride” by Leigh Eric Schmidt was also published in 201
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Michael Hennessey Higgins and Anne Higgins had a family with eleven children.[1] They had an Irish American background. Ethel and Margaret were two of the children. Her mother preferred Ethel. Margaret did not like this, and it caused problems in their relationship..[2]
Ethel had a short and unhappy marriage to Jack Byrne, a glassworker.[3] They had two children, Jack and Olive. In 1906, Ethel left her children in the care of their paternal grandparents to protect them from their abusive father;[4] Ethel only visited her daughter once in sixteen years. Olive grew up to become an important muse to the creator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston, and more details of Ethel Byrne’s life came to light when Jill Lepore wrote about the superheroine character in 2014.[5]
Ethel Byrne’s background in nursing was very important to her activism. It directly contributed to her desire to make birth control accessible to women of varying backgrounds. She was a trained nurse who assisted immigrant women who needed medical care in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, New York in 1916.[6]
Birth control activism
Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne leaving a courthouse
The two sisters and theatre artist Fania Mindell opened a birth control clinic in Brooklyn in October 1916.[7] They made flyers in different languages, including English, Yiddish and Italian,to advertise their cliniic. Byrne is not widely known today. Despite this, her early activism had a big impact on raising awareness of the importance of access to information about birth control. When Ethel Byrne was arrested, a group of politically active New York women wanted to meet President Woodrow Wilson. They wanted Wilson to undo laws that made distributing bith control a crime.
Arrest and hunger strike
The clinic was highly controversial because the Comstock Laws were enforced. Byrne and Sanger distributed pessaries and would show their clients how to use this method of contraception in direct violation of these laws.[8]
This was the first birth control clinic in the United States.[9] The clinic caused an immediate sensation in the press. It got national attention, and all three women were arrested and tried for “distributing obscene materials”.”The police monitored the Clinic from its opening and sent in a female undercover agent to purchase contraceptive supplies. On October 26 (1916) an undercover police woman and vice-squad officers raided the clinic, confiscated an assortment of contraceptives from pessaries to condoms, along with 20 ‘books on young women’, and arrested Sanger, Byrne and Mindell. After being arraigned, Sanger and Mindell spent the night in the Raymond Street jail, Byrne at the Liberty Avenue station. All were released the next morning on $500.00 bail.”
All three women were found guilty. After some time, the verdicts were overturned, and their campaign was successful in the end. This caused major changes in social policy and to the laws governing birth control and sex education around the world. The clinic closed but later became the basis for what was to become known as Planned Parenthood.
Byrn was arrested for distributing information about bith control. She was sentenced to 30 days in Blackwell’s Island prison.[10] She was jailed at Blackwell Island workhouse on January 22, 1917 for her activism and subsequently went on a hunger strike.[11] Sanger was concerned her sister would die as a result of this hunger strike and Byrne was force fed while serving her sentence after 185 hours without food or water.[12] As historian Jill Lepore reports in The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Ethel Byrne was the first female political prisoner in the United States to be subjected to force feeding.[13] Mrs. Byrne was prepared to starve herself to death in support of her cause. Her case was the first of a group of cases known as the “Sanger cases” to be brought to trial.
Sanger supported Byrne’s activism. Their confinement helped bring national attention to their push for the legalization of birth control.[14] It also hurt their relationship as Sanger’s notoriety grew after this arrest and she was sometimes known to take credit for Ethel’s infamous hunger strike.
Later years
Although her sister went on to become world-famous for her advocacy of birth control, Byrne’s legacy is not well known. This is apparent on the Planned Parenthood website, as it is noted Sanger opened her 1916 clinic with “her sister”.[15] Ethel is not even mentioned by name and unlike her older sister is not well known
Ethel Byrne had a stroke and died in 1955. She did not live to see the legalization of the birth control pill, as she died five years before it received FDA approval.[16]
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PART OF TRAM TOWER WAITING TO BE INSTALLED, 2010 JAY JACOBSON, ELLEN JACOBY, ARLENE BESSENOFF, GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VILLAFANE, AND NINA LUBLIN ALL GOT IT RIGHT
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All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
A likeness of Madame Restell, published in the National Police Gazette, 1847 The Wickedest Woman in New York
VICTORIAN era women experiencing “female trouble” could pick up a daily newspaper, scan the advertisements and translate the euphemisms. A dash of “uterine tonic,” an application of a “female wash,” a brushing of “carbolic purifying powder” or any product with “French” in the title promised to prevent conception, while a “female regulator,” “rose injections” or a dose of “cathartic pills” could alleviate “private difficulties” and “remove obstructions.” They knew the key ingredients—pennyroyal, savin, black draught, tansy tea, oil of cedar, ergot of rye, mallow, motherwort—as well as the most trusted name in the business: Ann Lohman, alias Madame Restell, whose 40-year career as a “female physician” made her a hero to desperate patients and “the Wickedest Woman in New York” to nearly everyone else.
Restell, like many self-proclaimed physicians of the time, had no real medical background. Born Ann Trow in May 1812 in Painswick, England, she had little formal education and began working as a maid at age 15. A year later she married a tailor named Henry Summers. They had a daughter, Caroline, in 1830, and the following year sailed for New York City, where they settled on William Street in Lower Manhattan. A few months after they arrived, in August 1831, Henry died of bilious fever. Ann supported herself as a seamstress, doing piecework at home so she could look after Caroline while she worked, all the while longing for something better. Around 1836, she met 27-year-old Charles Lohman, a printer at the New York Herald. He was well-educated and literate, a habitué of a bookstore on Chatham Street where the city’s radical philosophers and freethinkers gathered to debate, and he began publishing tracts about contraception and population control.
It’s unclear how Ann first embarked upon the patent-medicine business, but Charles encouraged her fledgling career. Together they concocted a story of a trip to Europe where Ann allegedly trained as a midwife with her grandmother, a renowned French physician named Restell. Upon her return, she assumed the moniker “Mrs. Restell” (soon tweaking it to “Madame Restell”), and Charles encouraged her to advertise in the newspapers. Her first notice ran in the New York Sun of March 18, 1839, and read, in part:
TO MARRIED WOMEN.—Is it not but too well known that the families of the married often increase beyond what the happiness of those who give them birth would dictate?… Is it moral for parents to increase their families, regardless of consequences to themselves, or the well being of their offspring, when a simple, easy, healthy, and certain remedy is within our control? The advertiser, feeling the importance of this subject, and estimating the vast benefit resulting to thousands by the adoption of means prescribed by her, has opened an office, where married females can obtain the desired information.
Clients arrived at her Greenwich Street office from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., and if they couldn’t seek treatment in person, Restell responded by mail, sending Preventative Powder at $5 per package or Female Monthly Pills, $1 apiece. Her pills (as well as those of her competitors) simply commercialized traditional folk remedies that had been around for centuries, and were occasionally effective. Restell counted on clients returning for surgical abortions if the abortifacients failed—$20 for poor women, $100 for the rich.
As her practice flourished it attracted other aspiring “female physicians,” male and female, and Restell began warning prospective clients to “beware of imitators.” To remain competitive she began expanding her range of services. In addition to selling abortifacients, she opened a boardinghouse where clients with unwanted pregnancies could give birth in anonymity. For an additional fee, she facilitated the adoption of infants. Restell placed more newspaper ads, many referring to the thousands of letters she’d received from grateful customers.
Madame Restell’s residence, on the northeast corner of 5th Avenue and 52nd Street. The Wickedest Woman in New York
When Madame Restell began her practice, New York State law regarding abortion reflected contemporary folk wisdom, which held that a fetus wasn’t technically alive until “quickening”—the moment when the mother felt it first move inside the womb, usually around the fourth month. An abortion before quickening was legal, but an abortion after quickening was considered to be second-degree manslaughter. Restell tried to determine how far along a patient was in her pregnancy before offering her services; if she intervened too late, she risked a $100 fine and one year in prison.
She had her first major brush with the law in 1840, when a 21-year-old woman named Maria Purdy lay on her deathbed, suffering from tuberculosis. She told her husband she wished to make a confession: While pregnant the previous year, she decided she didn’t want to give birth again; they had a ten-month-old child and she couldn’t handle another so soon. She had visited Restell’s office on Greenwich Street and joined several women waiting in the front parlor. When her turn came, Restell listened to her story and gave her a small vial of yellow medicine in exchange for a dollar.
Purdy took one dose that night and two the next day but then stopped, suddenly worried about the potential consequences. A doctor analyzed the medicine and concluded it contained oil of tansy and spirits of turpentine and advised her to never take it again. She returned to Restell, who told her that for $20 an operation could be performed without pain or inconvenience. Purdy had no cash, and instead offered a pawn ticket for a gold watch chain and a stack of rings, which Restell accepted. She led Purdy behind a curtain to a darkened room, where a strange man—not Restell’s husband—placed his hands on her abdomen and declared she was only three months along (if Purdy was past the first trimester, she didn’t correct him). She had the surgery, and was convinced that her present illness was a result. After hearing her deathbed confession her husband went to the police, who arrested Restell and charged her with “administering to Purdy certain noxious medicine… … procuring her a miscarriage by the use of instruments, the same not being necessary to preserve her life.”
The case launched a debate that played out in the press, and the debate was as charged as it is today. One antiabortion advocate called Restell “the monster in human shape” responsible for “one of the most hellish acts ever perpetrated in a Christian land.” She was a threat to the institution of marriage, allowing women to “commit as many adulteries as there are hours in the year without the possibility of detection.” She encouraged prostitution by removing the consequences. She allowed wives to shirk the duties of motherhood. She insulted poor women by providing abortions when they could seek aid and solace from their church. She not only abetted immoral behavior but also harmed misguided and naïve women, acting as a “hag of misery” preying upon human weakness. The word “Restellism” became synonymous with abortion.
Restell decided to defend herself, placing an ad in the New York Herald in which she offered $100 to anyone who could prove that her medicine was harmful.“I cannot conceive,” she wrote, “how men who are husbands, brothers, or fathers can give utterance to an idea so intrinsically base and infamous, that their wives, their sisters or their daughters, want but the opportunity and ‘facility’ to be vicious, and if they are not so, it is not from an innate principle of virtue, but from fear. What is female virtue, then, a mere thing of circumstance and occasion?”
She was found guilty at trial, but the case was appealed on the ground that Maria Purdy’s deathbed statement was not admissible. The appellate court ruled that such depositions were admissible only in civil suits. Restell was retried, with Purdy’s statement removed from the evidence, and found not guilty. Emboldened, Restell opened branch offices in Boston and Philadelphia and increased her advertising, targeting “married ladies whose delicate or precarious health forbids a too rapid increase of family.”
Classified advertisements from the New York Herald and the New York Sun, December 1841 From www.librarycompany.org
In 1845, the New York State legislature passed a bill stipulating that providing abortions or abortifacients at any stage of pregnancy was a misdemeanor punishable by a mandatory year in prison. Women who sought abortions or attempted to self-abort would also be liable, subject to a $1,000 fine, a prison sentence of tree to 12 months, or both. The legislators apparently overlooked the possibility that this provision would discourage testimony from women who had undergone abortions, making it more difficult to prosecute abortionists.
Public scrutiny of Restell continued unabated—she was accused in the press, on the basis of an anonymous letters, of performing a fatal abortion on Mary Rogers, the real-life inspiration for the title character in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget”—but she managed to avoid legal trouble for two years. In the fall of 1847, a woman named Maria Bodine visited her clinic, having been referred by an anonymous “sponsor.” Restell decided she was too far along for an abortion and suggested the woman stay and board instead, but Bodine’s lover insisted. Restell refused several times before allowing the surgery. Afterward, in pain, Bodine consulted a physician, who suspected an abortion and reported her to the police. She turned state’s evidence, and Restell was arrested for second-degree manslaughter.
Restell was found guilty of misdemeanor procurement and sentenced to a year on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). Upon her release she claimed she would no longer offer surgical abortions, but would still provide pills and stays in her boardinghouse. In an attempt to improve her image she applied for United States citizenship—one had to be a “person of good character” to be approved—and was naturalized in 1854. The mayor of New York, Jacob A. Westervelt, officiated at her daughter’s wedding.
But Restell wasn’t able to escape her reputation. Newspaper reports seemed as bothered by her wealth as by how she obtained it, detailing her collection of diamonds and pearls, her furs, her ostentatious carriage with four horses and a liveried coachman, her brownstone mansion on the corner of 52nd Street and 5th Avenue (built in part, it was said, to annoy the first Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, John Hughes, who had denounced her from his pulpit and who had bought the next block on which to build St. Patrick’s Cathedral). She was now so infamous nationwide that she was included in several guidebooks to the city, one of which dubbed her “the Wickedest Woman in New York.” Anthony Comstock, the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, likened pornography to cancer and drew no distinction between birth control and abortion. A federal passed in March 1873, which became known as the Comstock Law, made it a misdemeanor to sell or advertise obscene matter by mail, and made specific reference to “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.” Telling someone where they could find such information carried a prison sentence of six months to five years and a fine of up to $2,000. Comstock embarked on a personal campaign to hunt down violators. In 1878 he rang the bell of Madame Restell’s basement office on East 52nd Street, claiming to be a married man whose wife had already given him too many children. He was worried about her health and hoped Restell might be able to help, he said. She sold him some pills. Comstock returned the following day with a police officer and had her arrested. During a search he found pamphlets about birth control and some “instruments,” along with instructions for their use. Once again Restell defended herself in the press. “He’s in this nasty detective business,” she said of Comstock. “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.”
In 1845, the New York State legislature passed a bill stipulating that providing abortions or abortifacients at any stage of pregnancy was a misdemeanor punishable by a mandatory year in prison. Women who sought abortions or attempted to self-abort would also be liable, subject to a $1,000 fine, a prison sentence of tree to 12 months, or both. The legislators apparently overlooked the possibility that this provision would discourage testimony from women who had undergone abortions, making it more difficult to prosecute abortionists.Public scrutiny of Restell continued unabated—she was accused in the press, on the basis of an anonymous letters, of performing a fatal abortion on Mary Rogers, the real-life inspiration for the title character in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget”—but she managed to avoid legal trouble for two years. In the fall of 1847, a woman named Maria Bodine visited her clinic, having been referred by an anonymous “sponsor.” Restell decided she was too far along for an abortion and suggested the woman stay and board instead, but Bodine’s lover insisted. Restell refused several times before allowing the surgery. Afterward, in pain, Bodine consulted a physician, who suspected an abortion and reported her to the police. She turned state’s evidence, and Restell was arrested for second-degree manslaughter.Restell was found guilty of misdemeanor procurement and sentenced to a year on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). Upon her release she claimed she would no longer offer surgical abortions, but would still provide pills and stays in her boardinghouse. In an attempt to improve her image she applied for United States citizenship—one had to be a “person of good character” to be approved—and was naturalized in 1854. The mayor of New York, Jacob A. Westervelt, officiated at her daughter’s wedding.
The reformer Anthony Comstock The Wickedest Woman in New YorkBut Restell wasn’t able to escape her reputation. Newspaper reports seemed as bothered by her wealth as by how she obtained it, detailing her collection of diamonds and pearls, her furs, her ostentatious carriage with four horses and a liveried coachman, her brownstone mansion on the corner of 52nd Street and 5th Avenue (built in part, it was said, to annoy the first Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, John Hughes, who had denounced her from his pulpit and who had bought the next block on which to build St. Patrick’s Cathedral). She was now so infamous nationwide that she was included in several guidebooks to the city, one of which dubbed her “the Wickedest Woman in New York.”Anthony Comstock, the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, likened pornography to cancer and drew no distinction between birth control and abortion. A federal passed in March 1873, which became known as the Comstock Law, made it a misdemeanor to sell or advertise obscene matter by mail, and made specific reference to “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.” Telling someone where they could find such information carried a prison sentence of six months to five years and a fine of up to $2,000.Comstock embarked on a personal campaign to hunt down violators. In 1878 he rang the bell of Madame Restell’s basement office on East 52nd Street, claiming to be a married man whose wife had already given him too many children. He was worried about her health and hoped Restell might be able to help, he said. She sold him some pills. Comstock returned the following day with a police officer and had her arrested. During a search he found pamphlets about birth control and some “instruments,” along with instructions for their use.Once again Restell defended herself in the press. “He’s in this nasty detective business,” she said of Comstock. “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.”
An artist’s rendering of Restell’s suicide, 1878 The Wickedest Woman in New YorkThis time there was no trial. On April 1, 1878, Restell’s chambermaid found her nude body half-submerged in the bathtub, her throat slit from ear to ear. House servants told reporters that Restell had been restless and despondent, pacing her home and crying, “Why do they persecute me so? I have done nothing to harm anyone.” Since it was April Fool’s Day, Comstock initially believed the report to be a tasteless joke. When he realized it was true, he reached for his file on Ann Lohman and penned a final comment: “A bloody ending to a bloody life
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