My book on the history of Madame Restell, the most famous female physician and abortion provider in nineteenth-century America, was published in the fall of 2023 by the New Press. I wrote most of it during the pandemic with the help of an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship. You can read more about the book here.
I have done a handful of interviews about the book since it came out with Foreword Reviews, Bio Podcast, and Shepherd.
Reviews and Advance Praise
“Nicholas Syrett’s masterful study of the nation’s most famous ‘abortionist,’ Madame Restell, is at once the story of a significant and poorly understood woman and an illuminating origin story of criminal abortion laws. … Syrett captures the complexity of both pregnancy and its medical treatment, as well as the way that politicians, social movements, and prosecutors deliberately blind themselves to this nuance.”
— Mary Ziegler, Legal History Jotwell
“…provides a thorough and discerning history of abortion in 19th-century New York City. … His rich and focused study follows Restell through her many court cases, as she ‘blithely continued on, uncowed by […] warnings. She was defiant.'”
— Los Angeles Review of Books
“Compelling … Thorough and well-researched.”
— Washington Post
“A sobering dispatch from a past marked by familiar prejudices. The Trials of Madame Restell is Nicholas L. Syrett’s consequential biography of a woman who defied changing norms to protect women’s health.”
— Foreword Reviews
“In this illuminating narrative … Syrett reveals an entire underground industry that flourished in 19th-century American cities, and tracks the rise of opposition to women’s reproductive care over time. It’s an eye-opening account.”
— Publishers Weekly
“The Trials of Madame Restell takes readers on a fascinating and timely journey through four decades of Restell’s pioneering medical practice and constant legal predicaments in a rapidly changing New York City. Syrett’s historical sleuthing through legal records, archives, and newspaper accounts paints a complex portrait of Restell and the society that vilified her, and brings antebellum and Gilded Age New York to life.”
—Tom Meyers, co-host of The Bowery Boys Podcast
“Nicholas Syrett digs deep to present for the first time a fully three-dimensional Madame Restell, the legendary nineteenth-century New Yorker whose name became a national synonym for abortion—“Restellism”—for three decades and beyond. Syrett probes behind the hype of scandal-driven newspapers to portray a committed female physician providing contraception and abortion services to probably hundreds of women each year. And how did the authorities treat the Madame? Read on, to learn about this surprising chapter of America’s abortion history.” —Patricia Cline Cohen, author of The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York |
“Nicholas Syrett’s The Trials of Madame Restell is as illuminating as it is haunting. [In this] careful historical reconstruction of abortion, midwifery, and women’s reproductive healthcare in the nineteenth century told through the life of one New York woman, Syrett makes clear that the right to choose has been used by men as a tool to control women for centuries. Madame Restell is an unforgettable character: feminist, progressive, social justice warrior, and shrewd businesswoman. Her very life embodies a fight over women’s rights that has gone on for far too long. I read this book aghast, breathless, enraged—every sentence a whisper of our world today.” —Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises and Women We Buried, Women We Burned |
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“Syrett’s meticulously detailed account … traces Restell’s nearly forty-year career as an abortion provider in nineteenth-century New York and the rapid changes in the medicine, morality, and law of pregnancy that shaped it.”
— Moira Donegan, The New Yorker
“I recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding how women experienced the economic, social, and legal changes afoot in nineteenth-century America. Syrett took great care to write with elegant, economical prose. he embedded people, laws, and mores in their time. This fascinating story of Madame Restell, the women, she served, and the foes who sought to crush her deserves wide readership.”
— Karissa Haugeberg, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Reviews
“Syrett has written a thoroughly researched and scholarly account that is blessedly free of academic jargon. … Syrett’s analysis proves most illuminating when he turns his attention to the class and gender dynamics that fueled male rage over Restell.”
— Susan Faludi, New York Review of Books
“Syrett, a scholar of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, draws on considerable archival sources to recount the life of British-born Ann Trow Summers Lohman, aka Madame Restell. … Syrett portrays her as empathetic toward her clients–if less so toward her daughter and brother; strong-willed as she fought against misogyny; and wily in her business dealings. … A richly detailed biography of a defiant woman.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“A timely, well-researched account that provides historical insight into present-day debates about abortion and reproductive rights in the United States.“
— Library Journal
“In an era when men of law and medicine were aggressively eliminating women’s sexual and medical rights, Madame Restell was one of the few women who dared to openly defy them. She earned international notoriety and a small fortune providing birth control, abortions, and a refuge for pregnant women who had nowhere else place to turn. But Nicholas Syrett’s account of Madame Restell’s extraordinary career and tragic ending could be ripped from today’s headlines. Anyone who wants to understand the current conflagrations over abortion needs to read The Trials of Madame Restell.”
—Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
“This extraordinary and compelling story of the trials of Madame Restell will thoroughly engage you, totally enrage you, and hopefully persuade you to join her courageous legacy and fight for women to have control over their bodies and lives.”
—V (formerly Eve Ensler), author of The Vagina Monologues and Reckoning
“Famous, infamous, and undaunted, Madame Restell believed fiercely in the right of nineteenth-century women to control their own bodies. A savvy entrepreneur, a wife, and a mother, Restell was also an unceasing target of the press, the police, and the courts. In this compelling book, Nicholas Syrett gives us an all-too-timely tale of the untimely demise of an unconventional woman.”
—Martha Hodes, author of My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering
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“‘Are we not bound by every obligation, human and divine . . . to guard, to protect our health, nay our life’ is how Madame Restell advocated for contraception and abortion publicly—in the year 1839! We honor this inspirational provider ancestor when we learn her story, uplift the good she did, and build on her legacy of fierce resistance.” —Viva Ruiz, founder of the Thank God for Abortion initiative |