History of Reproductive Rights in New York City - Exhibit

This week, the Department of Records and Information Services opened a ‘pop-up’ exhibit on the history of reproductive rights in New York. It begins in 1828, when providing an abortion after quickening first became illegal, and traces the story to the present day, highlighting the city’s current reputation as a national leader in the fight to protect women’s reproductive rights.

1916 handbill in English, Yiddish, and Italian advertising Margaret Sanger’s first birth control clinic at 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Margaret Sanger, My Fight for Birth Control, NYC Municipal Library.

The new exhibit uses historical documents, photographs, and ephemera to depict the evolution of the laws governing abortion from criminality to full access. It begins with the 1828 New York State law that made it a misdemeanor for a provider to induce abortion after “quickening.”

March held during Abortion Action Week, May 6, 1972. New York Police Department Special Investigations Unit Photograph Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Bottle with cork. Exhibit in case: People vs. Elizabeth Klurk (Abortion), April 29, 1878. This bottle with its unknown residue, contained a solution intended to induce abortion. NY DA Indictment Papers, NYC Municipal Archives.

Items from Municipal Archives collections created by the criminal justice system illustrate how New York criminalized women who obtained abortions. The 1871 indictment against Jacob Rosenzweig is on view. The City prosecuted Rosenzweig, a former saloonkeeper, for murder after performing a botched abortion on Alice Augusta Bowlsby and stuffing the woman in a trunk, where she died. Other items in the display focus on the former seamstress Caroline Ann Trow Lohman, aka Madame Restell, also prosecuted for performing abortions. Documents about Margaret Sanger and her sister document her journey through the criminal justice system for sharing birth control information illustrate her story. 

Inquisition into the death of Alice Augusta Bowlsby, 1871. Jacob Rosenzweig, a former saloonkeeper, was prosecuted by the City for murder after performing a botched abortion on Bowlsby and stuffing her body in a trunk. NY DA Indictment Papers, NYC Municipal Archives.

The exhibit also includes photographs from the New York Police Department Crime Scene Photograph collection in the Municipal Archives that graphically illustrate the un-hygienic locations where illegal abortions were performed.

Scene of bedroom where a 20 year old woman received an illegal abortion and later died in Manhattan General Hospital, July 14, 1932. NYPD Photograph Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Charts from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene track how thousands of women from across the country relied on City health providers for safe, legal reproductive health care after 1970 when New York State decriminalized abortion and before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

The exhibit uses pamphlets, buttons, and items from the mayoral collections to tell the story through the last decades of the 20th century as the City fought to protect women’s reproductive rights. The show concludes with a copy of the 2024 Sexual and Reproductive Health Bill of Rights further enshrined New York City’s commitment to protecting reproductive rights.

The exhibit is free to the public. It is located at the Municipal Archives, 31 Chambers Street, Manhattan, Room 103, New York, NY 10007. It is open from 9 a.m. to noon, and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday.

Historic District Attorney Records Capture Policewomen’s Undercover Exploits

Amongst the historical records of the New York (Manhattan) District Attorney’s office held at the Municipal Archives are the indictment files from 1916 to 1925 relating to a range of felonies; abandonment, assault, burglary, forgery, murder, rape, and numerous other criminal offenses. Some files hold only an affidavit, listing the circumstances of the case and demographics of the arrestee on bright blue card. Others consist of hundreds of pages of typed witness testimony, handwritten letters from the accused, postmarked lawyerly correspondence, notes scrawled by the district attorney, and—in one case I encountered—physical evidence from the crime scene. As such, the collection captures the work of a variety of public and private organizations, in addition to the voices of New Yorkers from all sections of society.

Curious about the history of gender and healthcare, I consulted files relating to abortion, which was illegal in New York State between 1829 and 1970. I had hoped that these records might tell me about the lives of the women that sought abortions one hundred years ago and how they came to be entangled in the criminal justice system.  

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Affidavit listing the “deponent” as police officer Brady and the circumstances of the investigation, Ada Brady v Mollie Weiser. NYDA Closed Case Files, 1917. NYC Municipal Archives.

When scrutinizing these affidavits, I noticed the same name—“Ada Brady”—repeated as the “deponent” in a number of cases in the Spring of 1917. This surprised me. We might expect the same “defendant,” accused of performing an abortion, to reappear as practitioners were arrested, released, and then rearrested. However, it seemed unusual for a woman to give evidence for having abortions on multiple occasions within a matter of months. Upon closer inspection, it emerged that Ada Brady was in fact a police officer, a member of the New York Police Department’s first generation of female investigators. Officer Brady approached suspected practitioners and pretended to be pregnant in order to furnish the evidence for prosecution.

Abortionists office, 1927, NYPD Photograph Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Women entered the New York City police force in the 1890s to work as ‘matrons,’ assigned to manage female arrestees and maintain the stationhouse environment. These women worked long shifts during the day and overnight completing this laborious work. Because of this, matrons tended to be working-class women and often widows. By the 1910s, a number of ambitious matrons—including Ada Brady and Isabella Goodwin, who would later become the first female detective in the United States—had begun to assist male colleagues on investigations by going undercover. They specialized in cases affecting women, such as fortune tellers, irregular medical practitioners, and confidence tricksters.

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Defendant Mollie Wieser’s plea statement. Ada Brady v. Mollie Wieser. NYDA Closed Case Files, 1917. NYC Municipal Archives.

In 1913, a team of matrons-turned-detectives formed “Special Squad Number Two” to investigate vice, under the direction of Lieutenant “Honest Dan” Costigan. For these female officers, abortion cases led to newspaper renown, promotions, and honor roll commendations. But policewomen were also vulnerable to exploitation within the male world of policing. To reach the evidentiary bar of intent, plainclothes policewoman underwent a pelvic exam, as the affidavit reported “[the defendant] then inserted into the deponent’s private parts a speculum.” File after file relayed this same practice. In abortion investigations a female police officer submitted to this intimate, invasive procedure in the line of duty.

Not only did abortion investigations implicate their bodies, but lawyers and judges in the Court of General Sessions trials questioned policewomen’s personal reputations; whether they were married, how many children they had, and their character. The first woman to serve as Deputy Police Commissioner, Ellen O’Grady, described the practice as “dangerous and…degrading,” as “the female representing the Police Department was forced to voluntarily participate in the commission of a crime, and became, consequently, an accessory.” 

Policewomen’s work also affected more marginalized women. Few abortion investigations targeted the affluent white doctors and their elite clientele, but rather, police focused on midwives from central, southern, and eastern Europe. Practitioners like Mollie Wieser are typical; an Austrian midwife, she provided crucial healthcare for New York’s working-class, immigrant populations. Even though most midwives avoided prison, they endured lengthy investigations, fines, equipment seizures, and news of their arrest splashed across the thriving daily press.

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Letter from defendant Elizabeth Bayer to District Attorney Edward Swann, NYDA Closed Case Files, 1917. NYC Municipal Archives

Midwives did not accept the state’s efforts to criminalize their practice, however. Elizabeth Bayer, a sixty-nine-year-old German midwife accused of abortion by Ada Brady, wrote to the District Attorney protesting her innocence. She explained that she was “33 years a midwife with a perfect record and could not have possibly committed the crime.” Attempting to use the legal system to her advantage, she offered to “waive immunity” to appear before the grand jury and “tell them my story.” Alongside narratives of police control, we hear the voices of resistance. 

As part of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the Municipal Archives indexed and re-housed more than 41,000 indictment files dating from 1916 to 1925. The histories of policewomen’s undercover abortion investigations were captured in just 34 of these files. Without a doubt, the collection contains further lessons about how power, policing, and punishment operated in the early-twentieth-century metropole. The importance of these perspectives is evident in Dr. Mara Keire’s current research project, Under the Boardwalk: Rape in New York, 1900-1930, that draws upon an examination of more than two-thousand rape indictments. These files record the lives of marginalized populations, often silenced in the historical record. Poor New Yorkers, women, immigrants, queer residents, and people of color, whose lives might have evaded contemporary published material but whose voices appear—albeit refracted through the judicial system—in these archives.

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Elizabeth Evens is a PhD candidate at University College London, U.K., where she researches the regulatory work of the first women in medicine and law enforcement.

The Municipal Archives collections of records pertaining to the administration of criminal justice constitute one of the most extensive research resources on the subject in North America. They currently total more than 20,000 cubic feet, and date from 1684 through 1980s. Major series include: Minutes of the New York Court of General Sessions, 1684-1920; Felony (a.k.a. New York District Attorney) indictments, 1790-1895; Dismissed New York felony indictments, 1844-1900; New York District Attorney Closed Case files, 1896-1984; Police and Magistrate Court docket books (all Boroughs), 1790-1949; New York District Attorney’s newspaper clipping scrapbooks, 1881-1937; New York District Attorney's official correspondence (letter press volumes), 1881-1937.