A fresh contribution to women’s history.
A biography of the determined woman who battled misogyny to help women in need in 19th-century New York City.
Ann Trow (1812-1878) came to the U.S. from her native England in 1831 with her husband and young daughter, hoping to make a living as a seamstress. Two years later, her husband was dead, she and her daughter were living in a Manhattan slum, and she was desperate to earn enough to support them both. As Wright recounts in a sharp, lively biography, Ann soon managed not only to support herself, but to become one of the wealthiest women of her time. From a local apothecary, she learned how to create pills that would bring on a miscarriage; it’s likely that he taught her, as well, how to perform surgical abortions. In 1836, she remarried, and she and her new husband set out to bolster her business as an abortion and birth control provider. She styled herself the faintly aristocratic Madame Restell, claimed she had learned medicine from her French grandmother, and advertised widely. Praised as a “female physician to the human race” and widely profiled by journalists who found her charming, Restell took up residence in a respected part of town, where her business thrived. In narrating Restell’s story, Wright chronicles the history of abortion in America, which became increasingly criminalized during the 19th century, as physicians, religious leaders, and politicians demanded control over women’s bodies. Restell was first arrested in 1839, spent two months in the notorious Manhattan prison The Tombs in 1841, and six months in a penitentiary in 1848—where she was given unheard-of privileges, such as wearing her own fashionable clothing rather than prison garb. Several times she was falsely accused by women of having botched their abortions, and even though her own lawyers prevailed, Restell’s reputation became tarnished. Now, when once again women’s access to reproductive care is being impeded, Wright’s well-researched biography is not only interesting, but, sadly, timely.
A fresh contribution to women’s history.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780306826795
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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