This week, the Department of History at Queen's continues its 2023-24 Seminar Series with a lecture by Dr. Nicholas L. Syrett (University of Kansas) entitled "Madame Restell, Female Physician: Struggles over Abortion and Reproductive Medicine in the Antebellum United States." Dr. Syrett's talk will focus on Ann Trow Summers Lohman (alias Madame Restell), a female physician best known for providing abortions in New York City between 1839 and 1878. Narrowing in on her experience will allow Dr. Syrett to explore just how illegitimacy, abortion, and changing sexual mores combined in antebellum New York City and show that objections to abortion originated in class-based concerns about sex outside of marriage prior to the intervention of the medical community. In advance of his lecture, Dr. Syrett agreed to sit down and discuss some of his background in this field as well as the world of Madame Restell and what it has been like to write on this topic in the wake of the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Thanks so much for sitting down with me to discuss your work ahead of your upcoming Seminar Series lecture! I was wondering if you could just start by telling me a little bit about how exactly you came to work on Women’s and Gender Studies going back to your undergraduate days at Columbia?
Sure! So I grew up in Peterborough, Ontario and in high school I became interested in feminism. I think I had just grown up as a sort of gender non-conforming boy and I was always very aware of what gender was and that I wasn’t doing it “the right way,” but at the same time I wasn’t really willing to fix myself.
Coupled with the personal experience of that, there was also this moment toward the very end of high school when we (my parents, who are both American, and I) were following the news surrounding Anita Hill’s accusations of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1992. It’s the only time I remember eating dinner in front of the television with my parents because the Senate confirmation hearings were going on and we just couldn’t look away. For me, that entire conflagration became a sort of galvanizing moment in my feminist consciousness/awakening.
So I knew I was interested in studying gender one way or another when I went to university. I don’t know if I knew exactly what was just called “women’s studies” back then was when I arrived at Columbia, but I knew I wanted to take some classes in it. I took “Intro to Women’s Studies” first semester of my freshman year and at that point, I just found that I liked talking about it and engaging with issues of gender. This, of course, was still long before I started thinking of this as a potential career path and long before I got interested in studying gender through the lens of history, but that’s how it came about initially at least.
Speaking of your particular approach, maybe you can comment a little bit on how you see relationship between the two departments you’re a part of KU—those being Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and History—evolving in recent years.
Well, I don’t know how much unique insight I have here, but I can certainly offer some thoughts. I’ll start off by saying that when women’s studies came into being, it was mostly just people at university who studied gender but were already in the sociology or psychology or English departments, and they sort of…well, they really invented a field and then invented a version of that field at their individual universities. And over the course of the last forty or fifty years since it first came around in the ‘70s, I think it’s really become its own field. It’s no longer just the conglomeration of people from different disciplines approaching gender in different ways.
I think I am, though, more of the former version of that; I am a historian—though I have no degrees in history—who studies gender and sexuality and women. But I think increasingly many Women’s and Gender Studies departments don’t have many people who you could identify disciplinarily at all: they just have PhDs in Women’s and Gender Studies and they just so interdisciplinary that they’re not really identifiable as part of one tradition or another.
I don’t think I’m that and the department that I teach in mostly has people who are identifiable as an anthropologist or a political scientist or something like that, but we may be becoming something of an outlier as some departments have moved in a different direction. When I first joined Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies here at the University of Kansas as an external chair hire, I had already been teaching for eleven years in the History Department at the University of Northern Colorado. But they didn’t need a historian, per se, they just needed someone to be chair who studied gender and I did…but the past.
That’s really interesting! Talking a little bit about the past, then, I also wanted to ask you about the framing of your talk as an antebellum history. Given that Madame Restell’s practice continues right up to 1878, are there distinct ways in the antebellum world—that particularly polarized climate of New York City in the 1840s and 1850s—is part of the story you’re trying to tell?
You know, as historians we’re used to attaching our topics in relation to a geographic region and time period, but one of the things that I think is so interesting about women’s and gender history is how little the periodization matters. The Civil War occurs in the book from which this talk is drawn, but only in the sense that Madame Restell’s son-in-law serves as a soldier; otherwise, it has very little impact on what’s going on in her story. Not that there isn’t impact in New York, but—as it turns out—the demand for abortion continues regardless of whether people are fighting a horrible civil war or not.
Abortion also, I should note, was not deeply political at the time in terms of political parties. It didn’t enter into politics; it was not an issue that major political parties talked about and so, in that sense, it’s sort of irrelevant to antebellum politicians and they don’t play any role in the story I tell.
Sometimes, of course, people ask what my period is, and I tell them mostly nineteenth and early twentieth century, but I’ve taught colonial to the present. I will often follow a story post-WWII or farther into the past, in part because I find that there is far more similarity than stark difference at these points. Periodization often comes from things like political leaders and wars and so forth, but often when it comes to women and gender, those things are not as consequential as they are for the political apparatus or government. So, this story is less tied to those traditional markers.
Perhaps, then, turning to our own polarized moment, I wanted to know how your work on abortion, politics, reproductive rights been affected by the overturn of Roe v. Wade, if at all?
Yeah, one thing I have found funny is the number of people who say, “Your book is so timely!” That’s true, but also, I can’t imagine a point in the last twenty years in which it wouldn’t have appeared timely in one way or another, just because the Supreme Court was in on this issue over and over and over again, mostly to narrow the grounds on which a woman could access abortion. But yes, I didn’t know that Roe would be overturned while I was writing the book.
It's interesting—obvious in some states, everything has changed and in other states, not as much has changed. Where I live in Kansas, which is fairly conservative, our Supreme Court ruled a few years ago that our constitution protects the right to an abortion, and we then had a referendum a year and a half ago in which Kansas voters affirmed that decision. And so we’re now an abortion destination.
I also recently got to participate in a case that is trying to overturn some of the regulations on Kansas law about waiting periods, warning women, and that sort of thing. So, part of what’s happened with writing this book is that it has made me able to participate in the sort of debates that I would not have otherwise been able to do, and not just in a reporter way but actually in the legal process, which has been exciting.
Right now, I’m not teaching because I’m serving as the Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, so I can’t say I’ve been able to have lots of conversations with students about it, but they’re definitely happening on campus. I think there would be even more of them had Kansas not been in the somewhat surprising position of actually reinforcing women’s right to choose an abortion—which, again, for red-state Kansas, is a bit of a shock—but it would be wholly different right now if I were in a conservative southern state like Mississippi or Texas.
Finally, I’d be remiss not to mention your position as co-editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality, by which you get to work alongside two faces familiar to us here at Queen’s, Dr. Ishita Pande (Co-Editor) and Dr. Steven Maynard (Book Review Editor). What are some of the exciting directions you see this field heading in right now?
Absolutely! It’s really a story of some new things and then some constants. I’ve been doing this for about two and a half years now and there is still an exceedingly persistent interest in publishing on sexology, on the history of sexology. We get so many submissions about that, we just published a special issue this month on the history of debates surrounding sexual science. It’s not my particular area of expertise, but that’s definitely a constant.
One new trend that is both about sexuality and also, in some ways, more about gender is trans history which, in historical perspectives, people understood to be about sex (that is, sex the act as opposed to sex the gendered embodiment) even as trans people might not have seen it that way. But there’s also a lot of exciting work about the sexuality of trans people, and we’re getting submissions about that too.
By and large, the field grew up among Americanists, Canadianists, and Europeanists, but we are getting increasing numbers—and this is a plug—from people who study the world outside of Western Europe and North America. Most of our submissions come from historians living and working in North America which means that, most often, they write about North America; we don’t see many submissions from South Asianists, for example, or Africanists, or Latin Americanists. But we are getting increasing numbers of those and we’d really love to see more of that as well.
If one of the central lessons of the history of sexuality is that something we take to be normal, and natural, and intrinsic to us is actually just as socially constructed as everything else, learning lessons from other periods and other regions of the world just reinforces that in a way that makes the field feel more exciting.
Please join us for Dr. Syrett's lecture this Thursday, February 1st at 11:30 am in Watson Hall, Room 517. Light refreshments and coffee will be provided.
The book from which this lecture is drawn is entitled The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America's Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime, published in 2023 through The New Press.
(Interview edited for clarity and concision)
