1. On the legal status of abortion, see James C. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800-1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America , rev. and updated (1976; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 49-61, 402-416; Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 155-195; Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Abortion and Woman's Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom , rev. ed. (1984; reprint, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 67-138; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 217-244; Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). [BACK]

2. Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood," American Quarterly 18 (summer 1966): 151-174; Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs 1 (1975): 1-29. [BACK]

3. See two critiques and reviews of the field of women's history, Nancy A. Hewitt, "Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women's History in the 1980s," Social History 10 (October 1985); reprint in Unequal Sisters: A Multi-Cultural Reader in U.S. Women's History , edited by Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1990), 1-14; Linda K. Kerber, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Women's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History," Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9-39. For collections of recent scholarship on the history of women of color and working-class women, see DuBois and Ruiz, Unequal Sisters; Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); and the pathbreaking collection by Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Random House, 1972). [BACK]

4. The key work generating intellectual thought and debate on the public sphere is Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society , translated by Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). For a collection of recent scholarship, see Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). For feminist thinking, see Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Linda K. Kerber, "A Constitutional Right to Be Treated Like American Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship," in U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays , edited by Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 17-35. [BACK]

5. This cooperative relationship may have been particularly significant for public health and women's lives. Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880-1960 (New York: Viking, 1988); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Robyn L. Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900-1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1980); Judith Walzer Leavitt, The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 190-213; Susan L. Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women's Health Activism in America, 1890-1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). [BACK]

6. For examples of earlier feminists' views of medicine, see Ann Douglas Wood, "'The Fashionable Diseases': Women's Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth Century America," in Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women , edited by Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 1-22; and the critical response by Regina Morantz, "The Lady and Her Physician," in Hartman and Banner, Clio's Consciousness Raised , 38-53. See also Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978). For a different view, see Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). [BACK]

7. For other patient-focused histories, see Leavitt, Brought to Bed; Roy Porter, ed., Patients and Practitioners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Mary E. Fissell, Patients, Power, and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). [BACK]

8. On police, see Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Roger Lane, Policing the City: Boston 1822-1885 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). On prisons, see Lawrence M. Friedman and Robert V. Percival, The Roots of Justice: Crime and Punishment in Alameda County, California, 1870-1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 288-309; Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters' Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971).

On marriage, divorce, and women's property rights, see Kerber, "A Constitutional Right to Be Treated Like American Ladies"; Nancy F. Cott, "Giving Character to Our Whole Civil Polity: Marriage and the Public Order in the Late Nineteenth Century," in Kerber, Kessler-Harris, and Sklar, U.S. History as Women's History, 107-121; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth; Marylynne Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property, in Nineteenth-century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); D. Kelly Weisberg, Property, Family, and the Legal Profession , vol. z of Women and the Law: A Social Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing, 1982). On women and crime, see D. Kelly Weisberg, Women and the Criminal Law , vol. 1 of Women and the Law: A Social Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing, 1982); Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Anna Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845 (New York: Pandora Press, 1987). [BACK]

9. James C. Mohr, Doctors and the Law: Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Mohr, Abortion in America; Charles E. Rosenberg, The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Michael Clark and Catherine Crawford, eds., Legal Medicine in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). [BACK]

10. James Willard Hurst, The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1950). For overviews of American legal history, see Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law , 2d ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985); Kermit L. Hall, The Magic Mirror: Law in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). [BACK]

11. Histories of courts in action include Stanton Wheeler et al., "Do the 'Haves' Come out Ahead? Winning and Losing in State Supreme Courts, 1870-1970," Law and Society Review 21 (1987): 403-445; Robert A. Silverman, Law and Urban Growth: Civil Litigation in the Boston Trial Courts, 1880-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Hendrik Hartog, "The Public Law of a County Court; Judicial Government in Eighteenth Century Massachusetts," The American Journal of Legal History 20 (1976): 282-329. [BACK]

12. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , translated by Alan Sheridan (1975; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1979), III, 108. [BACK]

13. The state criminal abortion laws did not change at all or only in non-substantive ways for a century; Mohr, Abortion in America, 224-225. In Illinois, the legislature amended the law to prohibit advertising of abortion in 1919 and, in 1961, clarified that an attempted abortion, even if the woman was not pregnant, would be considered abortion. Illinois, Laws of Illinois , 1919, pp. 427-428, sec. 6; Illinois, Laws of Illinois , 1961, p. 2027. [BACK]

14. Kristin Luker argues that there was medical consensus on therapeutic abortion for a century. until about 1960 when new technology broke that consensus apart and disagreement erupted within the medical profession and, then, the public. I disagree with this interpretation. Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood , 54-91. [BACK]

15. Addison Niles, ''Criminal Abortion," in Transactions of the Twenty-First Anniversary Meeting of the Illinois State Medical Society (Chicago: Fergus Printing, 1872), 99; James Foster Scott, "Criminal Abortion," American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children (hereafter cited as AJO ) 35 (January 1896): 77. On the pluralism and ambiguity of American law, see Hendrik Hartog, "Pigs and Positivism," Wisconsin Law Review 1985, no. 4 (1985): 899-935. [BACK]

16. John T. Noonan Jr., "An Almost Absolute Value in History," in The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives , edited by John T. Noonan Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 1-59. [BACK]

17. A survey of the guides to religious periodicals shows this to be true. The small number of articles on abortion published in religious magazines were overwhelmed by those on birth control. The Catholic Periodicals Index , for example, lists 155 citations to articles on birth control and only 6 on abortion in 1930-1933. In 1961-1962, there were III articles on birth control and 28 on abortion. The Index to Religious Periodical Literature lists in one ten-year period, 1949-1959, only 6 articles on birth control and 3 on abortion. Not until 1971-1972 did the index cite more articles on abortion than on birth control. I am grateful to Rose Holz and Lynne Curry for collecting and tabulating this data. [BACK]

18. On religious opinion in response to the birth control movement, see David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 136-171. [BACK]

19. Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right , 5-10; Glanville Williams, The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law (New York: Knopf, 1957), 148-152, 192-197; Ronald L. Numbers and Darrel W. Amundsen, Caring and Curing: Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 31, 50, 87, 156-157. Most of the essays in Caring and Curing address only current attitudes toward abortion, suggesting that until recently, most sects showed little interest in abortion. [BACK]

20. Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood , chap. 3. [BACK]

21. For a helpful discussion of Foucault, poststructural analysis, and feminist critiques, see Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight , 1-13. Michel Foucault, An Introduction , vol. 1 in The History of Sexuality , translated by Robert Hurley (1976; reprint, New York: Random House, 1978). Joan Wallach Scott has become known as the strongest advocate for poststructural analysis of women's history; see Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). For a debate, see Linda Gordon and Joan Scott in Signs 15 (summer 1990): 848-860. For another critique of the emphasis on linguistics, see\

bell hooks, Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black (Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1989), 35-41. [BACK]

22. My discussion of abortion in common law and its criminalization relies most on Mohr, Abortion in America . [BACK]

22. My discussion of abortion in common law and its criminalization relies most on Mohr, Abortion in America .

23. Ibid., 10, chap. 1; Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1984), 102-103, 108-109, 188 n. 98. [BACK]

24. McLaren, Reproductive Rituals , 188 n. 98; Williams, The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law , 149-152, 197. [BACK]

25. Mohr, Abortion in America , 3-45; Charles E. Rosenberg, "The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America," in The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine , edited by Morris J. Vogel and Charles E. Rosenberg (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1970), 3-26. [BACK]

26. Quotation as cited in Julia Cherry Spruill, Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (1938; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 325-326. Mohr, Abortion in America , chap. 1, 58-66; McLaren, Reproductive Rituals , 103-105. On abortion methods worldwide, see Edward Shorter, A History of Women's Bodies (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 177-224. [BACK]

27. Cornelia Hughes Dayton uncovered this case and the phrase, "Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village," William and Mary Quarterly 48 (January 1991): 1, 24-25; McLaren, Reproductive Rituals , 106-107. [BACK]

28. Mohr, Abortion in America , 20-25; Illinois, Revised Code , 1827, sec. 46, p. 131. [BACK]

29. Mohr, Abortion in America , 22, 24. [BACK]

29. Mohr, Abortion in America , 22, 24.

30. Ibid., 47-59, 70-71; Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct , 225-227. [BACK]

31. Mohr, Abortion in America , 86-94. [BACK]

31. Mohr, Abortion in America , 86-94.

32. Ibid., 147-225. On the Jacksonian period, the status of the regular profession, and Irregulars, see Richard Harrison Shryock, Medical Licensing in America, 1650-1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); Ronald L. Numbers, "The Fall and Rise of the Medical Profession," in Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health , edited by Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers, 2d ed., rev. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 185-205; William G. Rothstein, American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century: From Sects to Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); Norman Gevitz, ed., Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Regulars presented abortion as an Irregular practice, but Homeopaths essentially shared their antiabortion position. See, for example, Edwin M. Hale, The Great Crime of the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: C.S. Halsey, 1867). [BACK]

33. Daniel Scott Smith, "Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America," Feminist Studies 1 (winter-spring 1973): 40-57; Robert V. Wells, "Family History and Demographic Transition," Journal of Social History 9 (fall 1975): 1-9. [BACK]

34. Mohr, Abortion in America , 166-168. Quotation from Horatio Robinson Storer, Why Not? A Book for Every Woman (Boston: Lee and Shepard,

1868); reprinted as A Proper Bostonian on Sex and Birth Control (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 85. [BACK]

35. Quotation from Horatio Robinson Storer, Is It I? A Book for Every Man (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1868); reprinted as A Proper Bostonian on Sex and Birth Control , 134; Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct , 224-228, 236-239; Mohr, Abortion in America , 107-108, 168-170. [BACK]

36. Mary Roth Walsh, "Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply": Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835-1975 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 109-118; Virginia G. Drachman, Hospital with a Heart: Women Doctors and the Paradox of Separatism at the New England Hospital, 1862-1969 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). [BACK]

37. On the anxieties about sexuality woven into the use of anesthesia and obstetrics, see Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 24-50; Martin S. Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 6l-62. On the expectation that female physicians would care for female patients and treat them differently, see M. Walsh, Doctors Wanted , 95-95, 115-116; Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). [BACK]

38. On medical concern about the morality of obstetrics and gynecology, see M. Walsh, Doctors Wanted , 113; Virginia G. Drachman, "The Loomis Trial: Social Mores and Obstetrics in the Nineteenth Century," in Childbirth: The Beginning of Motherhood, Proceedings of the Second Motherhood Symposium (Madison, Wis.: Women's Studies Research Center, 1982), reprint in Leavitt, Women and Health in America , 166-174. [BACK]

39. On prostitution, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America," American Quarterly 23 (1971): 562-584, reprint in Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct , 109-128; Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). On antislavery, see Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Anti-Slavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967). On temperance, see Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981). On voluntary motherhood, see Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right , chap. 5. On ninteenth-century women's sense of moral superiority as a source of activism, see Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). On the women's movement as a whole, see Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States , rev. ed. (1959; reprint Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975). [BACK]

40. Storer, Why Not? , 76, 83. [BACK]

40. Storer, Why Not? , 76, 83.

41. Ibid., 32. [BACK]

40. Storer, Why Not? , 76, 83.

42. Ibid., 34-35, 69-70, 84. [BACK]

43. Mohr, Abortion in America , 200-225. [BACK]

44. On Comstockery, see Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right , 24, 164-166, 208-209; Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America , 257-258, 263-266, 281-288. [BACK]

46. Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). The time it took for physicians to accept their own role in spreading infection via their hands and to change their own behavior is the classic example of the sometimes slow pace of change in medicine; Erwin H. Ackerknecht, A Short History of Medicine , rev. ed. (1955; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 187-191. [BACK]

47. Research included examining every issue of the Journal of the National Medical Association , vol. 1 (1901) to vol. 65 (1973); a survey of African American periodical literature, indexed in Index to Periodical Articles by and about Negroes , 1943-1972 and Index to Periodical Articles by and about Blacks , 1973; and research in archival collections. [BACK]

48. James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago's Utopias of 1893 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade, with the assistance of Glen E. Holt, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Bessie Louise Pierce, The Rise of a Modern City, 1871-1893 , vol. 3 of A History of Chicago (New York: Knopf, 1957); Emmett Dedmon, Fabulous Chicago (New York: Random House, 1953); Thomas N. Bonner, Medicine in Chicago, 1850-1950: A Chapter in the Social and Scientific Development of a City , 2d ed. (1957; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois, 1991). [BACK]

49. Records that would give precise quantitative answers to questions about the practice of abortion do not exist. We will never know exactly how many abortions were performed or how many women died as a result of their abortions; nor will we ever be able to determine the proportion of the female population who had abortions or the proportion of practitioners who performed them. Social surveys and aggregate data that became available in medical literature in the 1930s help make it possible to estimate answers to these types of questions. Sources are discussed further in the text and in the note on sources. [BACK]

50. On the related history of pregnancy, childbirth, and contraception, see Leavitt, Brought to Bed; Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1979); Gordon,

Woman's Body, Woman's Right; Kennedy, Birth Control in America; James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830 (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). On the centrality of reproduction to society and history, see Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884; reprint, New York: International Publishers, 1972); Mary O'Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston: Routledge, 1981). [BACK]