As we approach the release date of my next book, “The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill,” I ask Hollywood to update its abortion scripts. (The link to the piece as it appeared in the Courant is here.)
November 24, 2023
By MARCIA BIEDERMAN. Marcia Biederman is the author of a forthcoming nonfiction book, “The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill,” to be released by Chicago Review Press in January 2024 and available for pre-order NOW via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.
What does the Republican Party have in common with its arch-nemesis, Hollywood? Both are woefully out of step with the widespread support of abortion rights demonstrated in Ohio and elsewhere in recent elections.
With Hollywood poised to go back to work after the settlement of the writers’ and actors’ strikes, studios should join the GOP in taking stock.
In 1972, television viewers watched a controversial two-part episode of “Maude,” in which a 47-year-old grandmother ended her surprise pregnancy with an abortion — legal in New York, where the character lived, but mostly criminal elsewhere.
Two months later, the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade. But under Roe, overturned last year, few movie or TV shows matched Maude’s chutzpah In the late 1990s. The word “abortion” was banned from scripts on at least one network soap opera. The 2007 hit movies “Knocked Up” and “Juno” dismissed abortion as a choice for characters confronted with unplanned pregnancies.
Yet, in the late 19th century, when abortion was strictly illegal in every state, many American newspapers wrote frankly about it. Defending a Yale-educated doctor charged with procuring an abortion on a New Haven woman, the doctor’s lawyer said in 1883 that “there was not a father in New Haven who would not be willing that an abortion should be performed on his daughter to save her from shame and trouble and that he would have no difficulty in finding physicians to perform the operation.”
Fifteen years later, New Haven was dubbed a “hotbed of abortion” at a city hearing on the licensing of Gertrude Vaughan, a boarding house operator seeking to move her establishment closer to Yale, near faculty homes and the headquarters of a collegiate secret society.
Vaughan’s facility was widely known to be a brothel that also provided post-abortion care. Her loudest opponent was the New Haven chapter of the Law & Order League, whose objections to the lax enforcement of Connecticut abortion laws had put several abortion practitioners behind bars.
Among them was Dr. Henry Gill, the alias of a former Massachusetts shoe salesman, Henry Guilford. In Massachusetts he’d been tried for procuring abortions on two women, one of whom had died in the care of his wife, Nancy Alice Guilford. Nancy was sentenced to 6 1/2 years, and Henry was banished from the Bay State. Covering their trial, the Daily Evening Item of Lynn avoided sensationalism.
The same couldn’t be said of the New York journalists who descended on Bridgeport in September of 1898, when the dismembered body of a young woman was found under a bridge. A medical examination found the woman had had an abortion, dying from a consequent infection. Suspicion immediately fell on Nancy Guilford, who’d joined Henry in Connecticut after her release from a Massachusetts prison.
To tie the death to Nancy, police needed an identification of the victim. With fingerprint identification not yet available, an appeal went out to the public. The woman’s severed head went into a glass-topped bucket and was put on display.
For days, hundreds of adults and children filed past this spectacle. No one recognized the face looking up through the glass. However, mailbags full of tips poured into the police station. There seemed to be no one in Connecticut without a wife, neighbor or daughter who’d been absent for a while and who, the tipsters thought, would have likely sought an abortion.
The dead woman was finally identified as Emma Gill of Southington, but not before Bridgeport authorities released the body to the wrong family (whose daughter returned to stop her own funeral) and allowed Nancy Guilford to flee to London, where Scotland Yard found her. A grand jury indicted her for second-degree murder and President McKinley ordered her extradition.
As Guilford’s ship landed in New York, she was swarmed by the big-city press, eager to revive memories of the mutilated body. But in Bridgeport, the shock had subsided, and the mood had changed.
A New Haven paper wrote of Bridgeport, “There is a wishy-washy sentiment that is surrounding ‘Dr.’ Nancy Guilford … with a halo of glory.” A Boston paper echoed with complaints about a local “circle of sympathy.”
Guilford pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 10 years. A local paper speculated that most people in Connecticut thought she “simply was unfortunate in getting caught in an unlawful act which is being repeated weekly in every city in this state.”
That was written in 1898. Get with it, Hollywood.
@Copyright 2023 Marcia Biederman
Marcia Biederman is the author of a forthcoming nonfiction book, “The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill,” to be released by Chicago Review Press in January 2024.
