Events & Calendars The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime

Presented by the Departments of History and Sexuality, Women's & Gender Studies

Professor Nicholas Syrett will deliver a lecture drawn from his forthcoming book, The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime. For forty years in the mid-19th century, “Madame Restell,” the nom de guerre 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.

Nicholas L. Syrett is associate dean and professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Kansas. He is a co-editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality and author of The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities, American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States, An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton and The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (The New Press). His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Daily Beast. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

Free pizza will be available.

Co-sponsored by the American Studies Department, the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, the Lucius Root Eastman 1895 Lectures Fund and the Corliss Lamont Lectureship for a Peaceful World