A new exhibit celebrating the rebellious women of 19th-century New York is now on display at the Museum of the City of New York. Rebel Women: Defying Victorianism, features ephemera, photographs, and the stories of 15 women who challenged the Victorian-era social norms of the 19th-century.
The women featured in the exhibit include Elizabeth Jennings Graham, an African American New Yorker who refused to get off a segregated trolley in 1854, Victoria Woodhull, who ran for president in 1872, and Anne Trow Lohman, alias Madame Restel, who provided abortions and birth control to women during her 40-year career. She became "a hero to desperate patients and 'the Wickedest Woman in New York' to nearly everyone else."
Clients arrived at her Greenwich Street office from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., and if they couldn’t seek treatment in person, Restell responded by mail, sending Preventative Powder at $5 per package or Female Monthly Pills, $1 apiece. Her pills (as well as those of her competitors) simply commercialized traditional folk remedies that had been around for centuries, and were occasionally effective. Restell counted on clients returning for surgical abortions if the abortifacients failed—$20 for poor women, $100 for the rich.
The MCNY's Instagram has more from the show:
The exhibit will also feature artifacts from notable women like investigative journalist Nellie Bly, and suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And you'll also see parasols, corsets, and leather gloves from the era, all illustrating how even the fashions at the time were restrictive.
Rebel Women will be on display at the Museum of the City of New York (1220 5th Ave & 103rd Street) from now until January 6, 2019
