The biography of one of the most famous abortionists of the nineteenth century--with unmistakable parallels to the current war on reproductive rights--published for the fifth anniversary of Dobbs

"Syrett's meticulously detailed account . . . offer[s] a portrait of a formidable woman navigating an era that, in several important respects, bears an unnerving resemblance to our own." -- The New Yorker

For forty years in the mid-nineteenth century, "Madame Restell," the alias 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.

In what The Los Angeles Review of Books calls "a thorough and discerning political history of abortion," women's studies professor Nicholas Syrett tells how 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.

A "compelling" (The Washington Post) 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.