Smart and inquisitive audience members kept me on my toes as I presented slide talks based on my book, The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill, in two New England cities where illegal abortion flourished in the 1880s and 1890s.
On March 15, I had the pleasure of sitting among the artwork at the Lynn Museum/LynnArts in Massachusetts while showing slides of Lynn in the 1880s, when Henry and Nancy Guilford practiced “the criminal operation,” as the papers called it, at their home and a downtown office.
I particularly loved the audience’s reaction to a slide of residential Lewis Street, where horse-drawn streetcars brought a steady stream of customers to the Guilfords’ home. As historians then and now have written, abortion was criminal in every state, yet it was a social reality, visible in the rapidly declining size of the average American family.
Lewis Street in Lynn, MA, where Henry and Nancy Guilford provided abortions in the 1880s.
Then, on March 20, I spoke at the New Haven Free Public Library in Connecticut.
It was the perfect setting for my slide show, titled “Illegal Abortion in New Haven in the 1890s,” because Nancy Guilford advertised for abortion patients in an edition of the library bulletin printed in 1897:
While avoiding the word “abortion,” Nancy Alice Guilford nonetheless made her meaning clear in this October 1897 ad in the library bulletin. Historians of the era said that even a schoolgirl would have understood the thinly coded language of ads like this.
I couldn’t have asked for more engaged audiences in either New England city. Many thanks to the attendees and to all the staff members who welcomed me. Special thanks to Allison Botelho, reference librarian at the New Haven Free Public Library, and Doneeca Thurston-Chavez, executive director of the Lynn Museum/LynnArts.
