Ann Trow Lohman, (1812-Apr. 1, 1878), notorious New
York City "abortionist," was born to poverty-stricken parents
in the village of Painswick, Gloucestershire, England.1 At sixteen she married a widowed tailor, Henry Summers,
and thus became the stepmother of his daughter Caroline. The family migrated
in 1831 to New York City, where two years later Summers died, the cause
variously described as yellow fever, typhoid, and alcoholism. For a time
Ann worked as a seamstress, but in 1836 she was married to "Dr."
Charles R. Lohman, a newspaper compositor turned quack physician, and joined
him in selling various medications purported to inhibit conception and abort
unwanted fetuses. The compounds were prepared by Ann's brother, Joseph F.
Trow, who had emigrated to New York shortly after his sister and had secured
work in a pharmacy. Soon advertisements for "Madame Restell, female
physician and professor of midwifery," began to appear in the newspapers
and city directories, and Ann Lohman was launched on the career which was
to make her famous.
She quickly attracted the unfavorable notice of such groups as the American
Female Moral Reform Society, and her first recorded brush with the law came
in 1841, when she was tried and convicted on a charge of performing an abortion
which resulted in a woman's death. A more publicized case began in February
1846 when a seventeen-year-old Philadelphia girl, the mother of a baby born
at Madame Restell's Greenwich Street establishment and then given for adoption
against her will, complained to William F. Havemeyer, the newly elected
mayor of New York. A trial ensued but when Madame Restell was acquitted
the newspapers charged that her liberal political contributions had helped
her cause. On Feb. 22 an angry mob, inflamed by a lurid editorial published
in the National Police Gazette the preceding day, besieged Madame
Restell's house. Peace was restored only after a personal pledge by Mayor
Havemeyer to do his best to send her to prison. The following month a new
law was enacted under which the abortion of a quickened fetus was punishable
as manslaughter. In September 1847 Madame Restell was arrested under this
law, charged with having performed an abortion upon Marie Bodine, the mistress
of a Walden, N.Y., factory agent. The trial, in which Madame Restell was
represented by two well-known attorneys drew large crowds and was reported
in the Police Gazette and other periodicals with both moral indignation
and full clinical detail. After conflicting medical testimony Madame Restell
was convicted on a lesser misdemeanor charge. She served a year at the Blackwell's
Island prison, where the special treatment she received became so notorious
that near the end of her term the board of aldermen investigated and dismissed
the warden.
Upon her release the Lohmans resumed their profitable activities in a new
and larger location on Chambers Street. It is said that Madame Restell presented
her stepdaughter with $50,000 and a European honeymoon when she was married
about 1854. Another arrest, on a challenge similar to that in the 1846 case,
occurred in 1855, but the matter was settled out of court. In 1864, following
the fashionable trade uptown, the Lohmans moved into a four-story brownstone
at 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue. They continued to operate the Chambers
Street establishment, which had been remodeled into a"hospital,"
and to conduct an extensive mail-order business in various nostrums. Madame
Restell openly advertised in the newspapers, especially James Gordon Bennett_s
New York Herald. Although William M. Tweed, the political boss of
New York City from about 1859 until his downfall in 1873 refused both her
contributions and invitations to visit her socially, he did nothing to hinder
her activities. It was widely believed that George W. Matsell, for many
years New York's police superintendent, was on her payroll. Periodic public
agitation and pulpit denunciations by Archbishop John J. Hughes and other
clerics left her untouched. Indeed, it is traditionally said that she chose
the Fifth Avenue site in part to annoy the archbishop, who was erecting
St. Patrick's Cathedral nearby. At least two sensational books on Manhattan
devoted chapters to her as "The Wickedest Woman in the City."
Although her social ostracism was so complete that the houses adjacent to
hers stood vacant for want of buyers, she furnished her "mansion"
in tawdry opulence, maintained a full complement of servants, and frequently
rode in Central Park with a liveried footman.
After the death of her husband in 1876 Madame Restell seemed ready to retire.
Estranged from both her brother and her stepdaughter, she lavished affection
upon her grandchildren, Charles Robert and Caroline Summers Purdy, who lived
with her and for whom she was said to harbor high social aspirations. Early
in 1878, at Madame Restell's residence, Caroline Purdy was married to William
B. Shannon, the son of a New York attorney. In February 1878, however, Madame
Restell was approached by Anthony Comstock secretary of the New York Society
for the Suppression of Vice, who represented himself as a customer for contraceptive
materials. After making an initial purchase, Comstock secured a search warrant
and found sufficient evidence to bring Madame Restell to trial under a recent
law barring the possession of any articles used for "immoral"
purposes. The efforts of her attorney were unavailing and, after preliminary
legal maneuvering, the trial was set for Apr. 1. In the early morning of
that day, after a night of intense agitation, Ann Lohman slit her throat
with a carving knife in her bath. There was no funeral service. She was
buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, N.Y., beside her husband. Her
estate, estimated at from $600,000 to $1,000,000, went to her grandchildren,
with a $3,000-a-year annuity to her stepdaughter. The suicide was dismissed
by Comstock as "a bloody ending to a bloody life," but a number
of newspapers questioned whether his trapping her with a lie was morally
justifiable.
Madame Restell played a part in a largely hidden drama of the nineteenth
century. The decline in the American birth rate, particularly striking in
cities, was accomplished without any dependable mechanical or chemical methods
of contraception. It was achieved by delay of marriage, "voluntary
restraint," and what was probably an extremely high rate of abortion.
The precise nature of Ann Lohman's activities has been obscured by the haze
of rumor and tradition, compounded by her own silence and a contemporary
semantic confusion between contraception and abortion. Considerable evidence
suggests that she was less an abortionist than a dispenser of contraceptive
materials and mistress of a clandestine maternity hospital and adoption
agency. She seems to have been puzzled and distressed by the universal contempt
in which she was held. "Everything that the papers published she read
with intense interest," said her attorney after her death. "She
was deeply affected by all that was said against her" (New York
Tribune, Apr. 2, 1878) . She flourished in a society which, having failed
to live up to its own rigid sexual code, resolved the dilemma by outlawing_but
then tolerating_the troubling forms of behavior. Madame Restell, if not
quite a tragic heroine, was a victim of the literal minded Anthony Comstock's
refusal to accept this social hypocrisy.
Trial of Madame Restell, Alias Ann Lohman (1841),
Wonderful Trial of Caroline [sic]
Lohman, Alias Restell (1847)
The Restell Suicide, Her Secret Life (n.d.), a sensational pamphlet
of some biographical value
N.Y. Tribune, Apr. 2, 5, 1878
N.Y. Times, Feb. 12, 24, Mar. 2, 8, Apr. 2, 3, 1878,
Fifth Annual Report of the N.Y. Soc. for the Suppression of Vice,
1879
Junius H. Browne, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of N.Y. (1869),
pp. 582-87,
George W. Walling, Recollections of a N.Y. Chief of Police ( 1887)
N.Y. city directories, 1848-78. Secondary sources of value are Denis T.
Lynch, "Boss" Tweed (1927)
Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock (1927)
Howard B. Furer, William F. Havemeyer (1935)
Edward Van Every, Sins of N.Y. as "Exposed" by the Police Gazette
(1930)
Flora L. Northrup, The Record of a Century (1934), p. 25 (on the
Am. Female Moral Reform Soc. and Madame Restell )
Benjamin A. Botkin, ed., N.Y. City Folklore (1956), pp. 312-13.
1 Seymour J. Mandelbaum in Notable American Women,
Vol., 2, 424-425.