Female Physicians in American Literature: Abortion in 19th-Century Literature and Culture

In Edith Wharton’s 1917 novel Summer, Charity visits an abortionist in the city closest to her sleepy hometown in order to confirm her suspicion that she’s pregnant after an illicit summer love affair. Dr. Merkle, the woman who examines her, fulfills every early twentieth-century stereotype of an abortionist: she’s wealthy and crass; she has a foreign accent; and she tries to swindle Charity for as much money as possible during a brief visit that only results in a pregnancy confirmation and not an abortion. In her biography of Wharton, Hermione Lee supposes that Dr. Merkle might be Jewish. Dale Bauer links Dr. Merkle to stereotypes of German immigrants in the United States. Jennie Kassanoff furthers that analysis to observe that Merkle’s name is drawn from the Latin root that means “to decay,” and marks the character as “an agent of race suicide” (145). As Kassanoff also notes, the young woman who greets Charity at the door of Dr. Merkle’s clinic is described as a “mulatto girl,” another indication that the space of the abortion clinic is one characterized by racial mixing that threatens whiteness. Each of these critics observes that Dr. Merkle’s representation was likely influenced by Wharton’s experiences during World War I because she wrote the novel in Europe while taking a break from supporting wartime efforts. At the same time, Summer very much takes place in an Americansetting—more so than many other Wharton stories—and Merkle’s characterization reflected how abortionists were often portrayed in the United States during this era.Margaret Jay Jessee’s Female Physicians in American Literature: Abortion in 19th-Century Literature and Culture builds on this Wharton scholarship to argue that this negative characterization of Dr. Merkle represents a “general sentiment toward all women who practiced gynecology without a degree or license and helped to end unwanted pregnancies” (26). And while there are similarities between Dr. Merkle and Madame Restell, the infamous nineteenth-century New York City abortionist who became wealthy through her practice, Jessee sees Dr. Merkle as representing a “much more widely conceived-of woman abortionist” (26). For Wharton scholars, Jessee’s new book provides important new context for how women physicians—and particularly abortionists—were perceived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how this imagining of the abortionist might have impacted Wharton’s own depiction of a female physician. These representations of the abortionist, Jessee argues, are key to understanding the affective response to abortion during the era when it was outlawed, and show how writers and journalists contributed to making Americans believe that abortion was an unsavory and dangerous practice.As Jessee explains in her introduction, the villainization of the female physician began in the nineteenth century by linking her to the abortionist: the female physician was a threat because she undermined male authority in a profession that was just beginning to regulate its members. By conflating female physicians with abortionists, the American medical profession—overwhelmingly dominated by male doctors in this era—delegitimized female physicians to suggest that the medicine they practiced wasn’t supported by the American Medical Association, and that female physicians couldn’t be trusted. Jesseedemonstrates how American popular culture, including dime novels, helped circulate and perpetuate these negative stereotypes of women doctors alongside the sensationalized news press. As Jessee shows, many of these sensational novels conflated the abortionist with the female physician to present this figure as “evil, greedy, and swarthy” (17), a description that also applies to Wharton’s Dr. Merkle. The abortionist was also often portrayed as a threat to white American nationalism because she preyed on young, white women for her trade—and she was entirely motivated by profit, according to this narrative. To further this narrative, it was also common to racialize the abortionist by depicting her as foreign with darker skin and an accent. In other words, she was often visually described as ambiguously nonwhite, even as most of her victims were described by the press and by popular novels as white women.In works like Ned Buntline’s 1849 dime novel The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life, George Lippard’s New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million from 1854, and an anonymous novel with a long title from 1859 that Jessee shortens to Anna, Louisa, and Nannie, which the book’s first two chapters cover, the female abortionist tries to swindle and hurt a young, innocent woman, who is often harmed or killed by the physician. Some of these novels also conflate abortion with infant killing. There’s no evidence that Wharton read these novels, and they don’t appear in the online database of Wharton’s library that Sheila Liming has been putting together. However, even if Wharton had read these books in her youth, it’s likely she would not have considered these cheaply printed texts as worthy of a space in her library. (At the same time, Charity in Summer uses a fraying copy of the sentimental novel The Lamplighter by Maria Susanna Cummins to spool her yarn, so popular novels do figure in Wharton’s imagination.) Still, even if Wharton didn’t read these dime novels, the stereotype of the sinister German Jewish woman abortionist would have been familiar to her as she was widely represented this way in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York City newspapers. Jessee cites the abortion historian James C. Mohr, who found that the association between German Jewish immigrants, abortionists, and woman physicians originated in New York City starting in the 1840s and continuing through the early twentieth century.The last two chapters of Female Physicians in American Literature focus on more positive representations of the woman doctor in late nineteenth-century literature. These are novels that consciously pushed against the stereotypes that made it difficult for women to enter the profession. Chapter 3 also covers the relationship between sentiment and reform fiction, and here Jessee reads mentions of carbolic acid and iodoform as possible references to abortion. I would have been interested in seeing Jessee develop this argument more to explain why she believes these were references to their use as abortifacients. Both carbolic acid and iodoform were commonly used by doctors in the nineteenth century as antiseptic agents, although for that reason they were probably also seen as effective (if dangerous) abortifacients, too. However, doctors did use these chemicals for reasons not related to abortion. The final chapter demonstrates how writers like Sarah Orne Jewett in A Country Doctor and William Dean Howells in Dr. Breen’s Practice intentionally depicted female physicians in a positive light, and Jessee argues that part of this intentionality consisted in severing the link between the abortionist and the woman doctor.Female Physicians in American Literature is a timely book, as Jessee notes in her preface. As I write this, the U.S. Supreme Court just overturned Roe v. Wade, which means that soon in more than half of American states abortion will either be outlawed or severely curtailed. While Jessee’s book was published before the Supreme Court decision, she foresaw that Roe would be threatened because of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement with the conservative Amy Coney Barrett. While this book turns its attention to a much earlier time period, Jessee wants her readers to see a connection between the anti-abortion laws of the nineteenth century and what will now happen with Roe overturned. In the era she studies, she recognizes that the representation of abortion in literature and in the popular media of the time impacted how abortion—and the abortionist—was viewed. If anything, I think in the chapters after the introduction Jessee could have done more to show how some of the texts she discusses shaped the emotional tenor of abortion discourse. Jessee’s book spends only a short time in the early twentieth century, and therefore even Summer receives just a brief mention. However, for Wharton scholars interested in learning more about the history of abortion and the context for Dr. Merkle’s representation, this slim book offers a helpful introduction to the affective legacy of abortion and its American literary representation.