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In 1868 the State Medical Society pressured the New York legislature into passing the first antiabortion legislation in twenty-two years. The act banned all advertisements alluding either to abortion or birth control. The following year a still tougher law made the destruction of a fetus—at any stage—manslaughter in the second degree, a great victory for physicians. It made little dent, however, in the widespread belief than an early abortion was a woman’s right. City practitioners—notably Madame Restell—continued to thrive. Indeed the brazen Restell regularly turned up at afternoon carriage promenades in Central Park, in a coach pulled by a matchless team of Cuban horses.

The concatenation of Commune, Orange Riot, Tweed prosecution, and labor crackdown drastically changed the moral and political climate. In 1871 the New York Times launched a full-scale attack on abortions, at the same time, and in much the same spirit, as the paper’s assault on Tweed (whose regime, the Times was convinced, connived to keep the trade going). After undercover reporters visited and exposed some of the sleazier of the city’s practitioners, arrests were made, and prosecutors damned defendants in flaming language. One lawyer, referring to Restell’s mansion-office on Fifth Avenue, spoke of “that den of shame in our most crowded street, where every brick in that splendid mansion might represent a little skull.”

At the height of this whipped-up public indignation—concurrent with the October 1871 arrest of Tweed—a young girl, victim of a botched abortion, was found stuffed in a trunk that had been mailed to Chicago. It was traced back to one Rosenzweig, promptly labeled the Fiend of Second Avenue, who was tried, convicted, and almost lynched. Many abortionists fled the city, and many papers stopped carrying the ads of those (like Madame Restell) who remained.

It was in this context that Anthony Comstock not only joined the antiabortion crusade but declared war on contraception generally. He attacked those who advertised abortions on the grounds that references to female complaints and cures, however delicately phrased, were obscene and arrested those who manufactured or retailed “rubber goods for immoral purposes.”

Comstock’s job was made easier in April 1872, when, after the Rosenzweig affair, the state legislature made the abortion-related death of a fetus or woman a crime punishable by up to twenty years. It also banned advertisement, manufacture, or sale of abortion-inducing materials. The following year he made sure that the Comstock Law banned contraceptive devices from the mail, and in June 1873 he got Albany to make the mere possession of obscene matter, including “any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion,” punishable by three months to two years at hard labor. By the end of the year he had confiscated 3,150 boxes of pills and powders used by abortionists and 60,300 “articles made of rubber for immoral purposes” and had thrown several abortionists—though still not Madame Restell—into jail.

The response of New York’s bourgeois women to Comstock’s campaign was mixed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan 6. Anthony’s National Woman’s Suffrage Organization protested an initiative, spearheaded by male businessmen and male professionals, that sought to foreclose women’s access to abortions and information about sex, and muzzle feminist publications and periodicals. Others were intimidated into silence or actively supported Comstock’s crusade as the lesser of two evils. Middle- and upper-class women had been unhappy about the rampant commercialization of sex in New York City. The flagrant spread of concert saloons and brothels provided, in effect, an alternative sexual structure to the family. It facilitated husbandly philandering and freed many men from matrimony altogether. The feminist magazine Hearth and Home complained in 1871 that 125,000 young single men in New York City refused to marry, preferring