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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2025
Anthony Comstock arrested many people, but perhaps none was so famous as Madame Restell, whom he arrested on February 11, 1878, for selling contraceptives and abortifacients. While Comstock’s actions had led to the arrest of other celebrated personae in the past – including Victoria Woodhull, her second husband James Blood, and her sister, Tennessee Claflin in 1872 – Restell’s arrest and looming trial led her to commit suicide by slitting her throat on April 1, 1878, which leant even further notoriety to the arrest.1 Because Restell remains best known as an abortion provider, and because Comstock succeeded in passing a federal statute that bears his name, one might assume that abortion occupied a central place in his campaign, or that Restell was arrested for performing an abortion. Neither is completely accurate. Indeed, Restell was not even arrested under the aegis of the federal statute, but instead under New York State law, though certainly at the instigation of Comstock and by him personally. By taking the arrest of Restell as a case study, this essay considers the various legal modes by which Comstock did his work, and the way he understood abortion as related to his greater campaign against obscenity and sexual license.
1 On Woodhull, Blood, and Claflin, see Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Crown, 2007), 422. Ida Craddock also took her own life in 1902 after having been arrested by Comstock for selling obscene materials and subsequently tried and convicted. See Burton, Shirley J., “Obscene, Lewd, and Lascivious: Ida Craddock and the Criminally Obscene Women of Chicago, 1873–1913,” Michigan Historical Review 19 (Spring 1993): 1–16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Parts of this piece are drawn from Syrett, Nicholas L., The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (New York: New Press, 2023)Google Scholar.
3 “To Married Women,” New York Morning Herald, Nov. 2, 1839.
4 “Madame Restell and Her Husband,” printed in Wheeling (West Virginia) Daily Intelligence, Aug. 28, 1856, and Weekly Wisconsin (Milwaukee), Oct. 15, 1856.
5 Anthony Comstock to David R. Parker, Feb. 13, 1878, Ann Lohman folder, box 23, RG 28, Postal Inspection Service, 1832–1970, Records of the Post Office Department, National Archives, Washington, DC.
6 Entry for Feb. 11, 1878, volume 1, page 111, New York Society for the Suppression of Vice Records, 1871–1953, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as NYSSV Records).
7 New York first passed a statute on abortion in 1829 and revised it multiple times in subsequent years. For the first statute, see Revised Statutes of the State of New York, 3 vols. (Albany, NY: Packard and Van Benthuysen, 1829), 2:661, 663.
8 Werbel, Amy, Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (New York Columbia University Press, 2018), 51–95 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Comstock, Anthony, Frauds Exposed; Or, How the People are Deceived and Robbed, and Youth Corrupted (1880; Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1969)Google Scholar.
10 Werbel, Lust on Trial, 52.
11 Van Wagner was arrested on January 17, 1876, and Beebe in December 1875; NYSSV Records.
12 Werbel, Lust on Trial, 68–69.
13 Testimony of Anthony Comstock, The People on the Complaint of Anthony Comstock v. Ann Lohman, Feb. 23, 1878, 5–7; Testimony of Anthony Comstock and Charles O. Sheldon in The People on the Complaint of Anthony Comstock, Feb. 23, 1878, 13–14, both in Comstock Folder, Madame Restell Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.