Madame Restell

. . . a midwife named Ann Lohman, who killed herself in New York in 1878 after decades of harassment.

Lohman, who called herself Madame Restell, was an immigrant from Gloucestershire, England, who started out selling “female pills” to “regulate” women. The medicines — mostly herbs, perhaps some opium — promised relief from an “obstructed womb” and “suppressed” menstruation. “Not to be used when *******,” declared one of the many coy ads she placed, “as miscarriage may occur.”

In the event that the pills did not, in fact, induce miscarriage, Lohman offered a procedure in her offices, charging $20 for poor women, and as much as $100 for her increasingly wealthy clientele.

In partnership with her husband, Charles Lohman — also known as “Dr. Mauriceau,” to appeal to the Francophile vanities of the carriage trade — Madame Restell grew rich from her thriving mail-order business, and even had agents in Boston, Philadelphia and Providence, R.I. She drove her fine carriage through Central Park, creating a scandal. The press delighted in describing her wardrobe, her dresses of silk and velvet, her hat with its red feather, and her ostentatious five-story house, with its lush gardens and stables, its tessellated marble entry and grand fireplaces, which she had built in 1862 on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street.

Her published letters suggest that Lohman was passionately committed to the idea of providing reproductive health care to women.

I am sure she was, because there was a lot of money in the making. Her passion evidently did not extend to opening any clinics for these women, either. After an arrest by Anthony Comstock, she killed herself on the eve of her trial, in her marble bathtub (and no Charlotte Corday to help her dispatch). The editorial states that she did do to "spare" her family - I have to question whether it was the fear at age 66 of losing the good life as conviction seemed inevitable.

Who knows - might have even been guilt.