New York Society for the Suppression of Vice annual report, 1880
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Sixth Annual Report Cover Image, 1880. Kautz Family YMCA Archives. (University of Minnesota Libraries). Used with permission.
The federal Comstock Act passed two years later, in 1873. Comstock had campaigned for it by going to the Capitol and showing senators his collection of obscene books. And here the prohibition against certain procedures veered into a serious, nationwide campaign of censorship. The act forbid publishing advertisements, books, pictures, pamphlets, or other printed matter deemed “obscene,” as well as sending any such materials through the mail. And again, the definition of obscenity included mentions of abortion and birth control. So not just the practice of controlling women’s fertility was outlawed; writing about it was as well. The federal law specified a minimum prison sentence of one year, while the New York law allowed for only a fine. Some states went further, attempting to outlaw even talking about abortion and birth control.
But despite jail time that resulted in her spending a year on Blackwell’s Island, despite tightening laws, despite harassment by the newspapers, Madame Restell kept taking out advertisements, advising patients, giving them what they wanted. Her lavish house (bane of her Fifth Avenue neighbors), her flashy sleigh pulled by four horses, and her net worth were all constant subjects of criticism—to no avail.
Eventually, though, Comstock caught up with her. In January 1878, he showed up at Restell’s famous mansion to launch an undercover sting of his own. When the sixty-six-year-old woman answered the door, Comstock claimed to be a poor man seeking medicine for his wife. This time, her sense for disguised enemies deserted her. She gave him pills, and he returned again waving a warrant, flanked by police officers. They found medical tools and waiting patients. The judge denied bail and she was taken to the Tombs. Eventually bail was allowed but Restell, perhaps fearing a return to Blackwell’s Island, slit her own throat in the bath and bled to death before trial.
Comstock was unrepentant. The Society for the Suppression of Vice (whose logo proudly featured a gentleman burning books) gloated: “It is a cause for profound thanksgiving that this city is rid of the disgrace of this woman and her murderous business, which for so many years has been flaunted with bold defiance on one of the most prominent avenues of the city.”
And still, after decades of suppression of the practice and discussion about it, by the time the Girl Reporter made her rounds in 1888, abortion was everywhere. There was the sad, coded story from the St. Paul Globe in 1889 about a girl found dead in her sweltering boardinghouse room. Originally from Minneapolis, she’d gone to Montana eight months before, only to have returned to rent a room for herself and her husband, who never showed. Several days before she’d taken ill, she’d visited a Twin Cities doctor because of “uterine trouble.” He suspected she may have died of “an internal hemorrhage.” Maybe she took some drug or the cause was her smoking cigarettes, the paper speculated. But it doesn’t seem much of a mystery. There were the ads that persisted, despite decades of campaigns against them. The same month as the Girl Reporter’s exposé, December 1888, the Boston Globe touted the ability of “Wilcox’s Compound Tansy Pills” to “afford speedy and certain relief.” Birthrates for white women* were slipping from an average of 7 children per woman in 1800 to 3.5 in 1900. And there was the rebellion triggered by all these restrictions and revealed by the Girl Reporter’s series for the Chicago Times. Doctors, midwives, and women rich and poor traded secrets, recipes, and information in coded language and a private economy.
The Girl Reporter and the other stunt journalists offered an inverted version of the Mary Rogers narrative and the novels it inspired—female detectives were now the ones unraveling mysteries of the male world. And in writing about abortion in particular, revealing how commonplace it was, the Girl Reporter showed the lie at the heart of the idea that women could be divided into good and bad, fallen and chaste. Those with the means used abortions to conceal premarital sex or affairs. In writing about the operation and its uses, the Girl Reporter broke a powerful taboo.*
And as is often the case with writing that breaks a taboo, everyone read it. The assistant state’s attorney for Illinois insisted he hadn’t, but mentioned that the streetcar he took to work was filled with people poring over the Chicago Times. Dr. Oscar Coleman De Wolf, commissioner of health, claimed that the exposé reached from “St. Lawrence to the Golden Gate.” Like many others, he expressed concern that readers got the wrong message, and that the Girl Reporter painted a damaging portrait of Chicago: “I don’t exaggerate the influence and wide spread circulation of The Times when I say that every woman who is in that kind of trouble, from Maine to California, knows just how easy it is to get relief in this city.”
For some, the Girl Reporter had pushed stunt reporting way too far. The Buffalo Daily Times speculated she must be “lost to shame and womanly feeling,” and added, “the method adopted by the Chicago Times to acquire the information desired is so revolting and horrible as to inspire disgust instead of praise.” Female writers began to wonder if assigning editors had their best interests at heart. But for De Wolf, as well as others, the issue was not the Girl Reporter’s deceptions or the impropriety of her pretending to be “fallen,” but the raw information she provided. “A Friend of the Times” was blunt in his distress: “Some of the young girls will learn more out of The Times in a few weeks than they could get out of a medical work
