suffrage

WILL MEN LET THE LADIES VOTE?

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

It was good news, bad news for California women in 1911: There would finally be a vote on changing the state constitution so they would no longer be second-class citizens. The bad news was that the suffrage movement had eight months to convince male voters that allowing women these basic rights was not a radical thing. It would be an uphill battle all the way; only three other states had given women full suffrage, and those were in much smaller states and their campaigns had been ramping up for years. In 1911 broadcast media did not yet exist and state roads were still little more than unpaved wagon trails, so simply reaching voters would be an accomplishment itself. And opposing them was a well-funded, national coalition of social conservatives, the liquor industry – which feared women would vote in prohibition – and old-timers (male and female alike) who plainly didn’t like uppity women.

Not since the Civil War had California been so divided on an issue. Some newspapers remained neutral, but they were few; it was more about how strongly the paper was “for” or “anti.” The most supportive daily was the San Francisco Call and the most hostile was the Los Angeles Times. Within their pages, war raged daily.

Two of the most prominent fighters were in the North Bay. In Santa Rosa was Frances McG. Martin, a lawyer who countered anti-suffrage letters and editorials with crushing rebuttals. (In her 19th century history, Gaye LeBaron has quite a nice profile of Frances and her two equally remarkable sisters, one a pharmacist and the other a physician – their maiden name was “McGaughey” and it was never explained why all three abbreviated it to “McG.”). in the other corner was state Senator John Bunyan Sanford (D-Ukiah), who said he held women in such high regard that they should not be allowed to enjoy the same rights he had – and damn them for even asking: “I have a new definition for a suffragette,” he quoted from a letter on the Senate floor, “a suffragette is a woman who wants to raise hell, but no children.”

California suffrage had already failed to pass in 1896, and Senator Sanford tried everything he could to keep it off the ballot in 1911. He proposed there should first be a special election where only women could vote on whether they wanted the right to vote, and only if that passed would the legislature consider an amendment. Such a pre-vote had taken place in Massachusetts, and amazingly, women there voted 3 to 1 against placing suffrage on the ballot. Sanford’s proposal failed to pass, although he brought in witnesses to testify that women didn’t really want to vote and suffrage would end up denying them of privileges “written and unwritten.”

When it finally passed the California legislature, “Constitutional Amendment No. 8” did not mention women at all. It only stated “every native citizen of the United States” who was over 21 and a citizen could vote. It specified instead who could not cast a ballot: “No native of China, no idiot, no insane person, no person convicted of any infamous crime, no person hereafter convicted of the embezzlement or misappropriation of public money, and no person who shall not be able to read the Constitution in the English language and write his or her name.” That pesky “educational qualification” didn’t apply to current voters, of course, or anyone with some physical disability that kept him from being able to write or read, or anyone sixty years or older. With that established, the race to the voting booth was on.

To the dismay of suffragists, former president Teddy Roosevelt didn’t help, giving a speech a month later at the UC/Berkeley Greek Theater where he remarked, “Personally I’m very tepidly in favor of woman suffrage, but it seems to me it is infinitely less important than innumerable other questions which are worthy of our thought and effort.” This was a painful reminder to the public about the hissing flapdoodle a few months earlier, when President Taft told a convention of suffragists it could be dangerous to allow women to vote and then dressed down the audience when someone hissed at the condescending remark.

The legislature’s approval caught the suffrage movement by some surprise. Fortunately, in the dormant previous five years, Mabel Craft Deering, a prolific writer whose articles appeared in some of the best magazines of the day, had taken on the work of being State Press Correspondent – we might call her the “PR director” today. She sent a query letter to all 700 newspapers in the state asking if they would be interested in receiving regular updates concerning “suffrage matter.” Most were agreeable, and soon there were little items in the papers about women happily voting in Colorado and cheering that Norway had embraced gender equality. (Deering’s history of the movement is quite interesting, but seems to be mostly overlooked by researchers.)

Once the special election was approved by the legislature, Deering quickly appointed a press manager in every county to pepper the editors with local news as well as reporting back to her about local coverage. (There was only a single county where she could not claim a foothold – she identified it only as “a very remote, sparsely populated mountain county” – but in the end it voted for suffrage, anyway.)  Deering mentioned specifically seven women she relied upon, including Frances Martin. But at the top of Deering’s list of effective county chairmen was Sarah Latimer Finley, whose son, Ernest, happened to be editor and publisher of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

Ernest Finley seemed an unlikely champion of women’s rights. As discussed here earlier, he was virulently opposed to the progressive movement of the day, using the PD to denounce those who wanted reforms in Santa Rosa as agitators stirring up “hard feelings” in town using “cowardly and un-American” tactics.” Now, the paper was praising those same progressives because they were speaking out for suffrage. Finley had attacked civic groups seeking to rid the town of its underground economy based on gambling and prostitution, charging they were secretly prohibitionists who wanted to turn the county “dry.” Now, he was aligned with a cause strongly supported the temperance movement. But whether Ernest Finley was stirred by filial devotion or a sudden bout of ethics, Mrs. Finley’s suffrage columns were featured in the PD, and pro-suffrage letters began appearing regularly in both Santa Rosa papers; a typical example is excerpted below, written by William Keith, a Berkeley landscape architect and husband of a veteran leader of the movement.

Also in Deering’s campaign arsenal was the “Blue Liner,” a seven-seat touring car that rattled over the pre-highway roads in Northern California for the six months prior to the vote, bringing the suffrage message to every town and every gathering they could find. And instead of trying to badger men into supporting the cause by appealing to better nature and higher principles, the troupe that arrived in the big auto sought “to conquer prejudice with laughter,” according to Louise Herrick Wall, (who also penned a memorable first-hand description of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, by the way):

A mock debate, parody songs and a suffrage monologue made up the program. For the debate we put up a man of straw, as an anti-suffrage advocate. He discoursed, in throaty tones, on the horrors of the woman movement–a movement that would destroy society so completely that all that would be left would be an effigy in some National Museum of History of a Home, done in wax, representing “a father, a mother and rosy, healthy, happy children of some perfectly definite sex.”

To the dismay of Wall and the others, they found a portion of the audiences were so anti-suffrage that their satirical arguments against women’s rights were applauded and not considered absurd at all. “From that hour the Blue Liner was dedicated to ‘straight talk,'” she wrote.

(RIGHT: “Girls wanted” drawing by Henry Glintenkamp of Triangle Shirtwaist Factory ruins. Image courtesy Library of Congress)

And while it’s horrible to contemplate, it has to be recognized that the California suffrage campaign received a boost from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which occurred in New York City just as the Deering’s publicity machine was shifting to higher gears. There were 146 young women killed in that sweatshop tragedy, most of them teenagers, working in a ten story firetrap when a careless cigarette ignited a pile of cuttings; in the fast-moving fire they found themselves trapped with doors locked (to prevent pilfering) and other exits useless because the doors only opened inward. Many jumped to their deaths.

Details of the Triangle fire unrolled in newspapers nationwide over the course of several days like a serialized horror story. It was reported instead of jumping, some were pushed out of the windows by the press of panicked women behind them; dismembered bodies were found closest to the exit doors; 50 people crowded into the single working elevator meant to carry no more than a dozen. Most terrible of all was the account of a a United Press reporter who happened to be on the scene: “I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building. I learned a new sound–a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk.” And that is one of the least nightmarish passages in his report. Not everything that appeared in print was true, but you can bet every new horrific detail was being chewed over in every saloon, every fraternal clubroom, every parlor.

The Triangle fire was the antidote to claims by obstructionists such as Senator Sanford. It was hard to still argue “men could be counted upon to protect women” when even the weak safety laws weren’t being enforced. It also put the public’s focus on working women which helped dispel the sentimental, lace-bordered fantasy of every woman (well, every good woman) being a domestic goddess and mother; women also worked hard jobs and sometimes died in the workplace – in the fire the Maltese family, for example, lost their mother and two daughters, including a 14 year-old. And finally, it deflected attention from the concern that once suffrage passed, women would likely vote for prohibition laws.

Newspapers reflected the public’s outrage mostly through editorial cartoons, but the angriest – and most eloquent – op/ed to be found anywhere appeared in the Press Democrat (and apparently, only in the PD). Most often identifying the victims as girls, the writer bitterly remarked, “this is a free country, and it has women to burn.” If the impoverished young women didn’t want to work in dangerous conditions they could quit like any other worker, because under the law, “all are equal.” The editorial was unsigned, but dripped with the irony that flowed from the righteous pen of one Frances McG. Martin.

“PLENTY OF WOMEN”

The frightful catastrophe in New York less than two weeks ago was even more frightful than was told by the telegraphic news. The most outrageous feature, as told by the New York papers, was that of the causes of the tragedy wherein 150 women and girls were roasted to death or smothered in smoke, or dashed to pieces on the pavement. The sacrifice was caused by oppression, greed and tyranny– by inadequate laws for protection of the poor; by rich men’s defiance of the law and by compliance of weak officials when rich men deemed it inexpedient to observe the law.

That towering building, ten stories tall and crowded with 2,000 working women, had previously been on fire six times within twelve months. Each fire was a warning and a prophecy of the terrible disaster that was to come.

That is not the full measure of the of the iniquity. To make sure that none of these girls could steal a yard of cloth [illegible microfilm] the Triangle Shirtwaist Company locked them behind an iron-barred door at the foot of a narrow stairway, and each evening when their work was done the company had them subjected to personal search–such search as policemen subject a sneak-thief to when they take him to jail. This door opened inward when opened at all and could not be opened when the door keeper fled with the key. When the lock was broken the door could not be opened because of the pile of dead bodies that weighed against it–about 80 girls piled on top one another.

When the girls went on strike because of the closed doors and the lack of sanitary appliances and the lack of fire escapes, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company’s directors did not miss a meal. They calmly waited for starvation to drive the girls back again. They broke the strike, and the girls, driven by poverty and hunger, went back to work, those of them who could get back. Those who could not get back, went on the streets or went to work in other places probably equally dangerous. Fire Chief Croker say there are scores of them in New York City. Not many weeks ago twenty girls went to death in the same way in the same sort of building in New Jersey. The girls had their choice. They could either go to work in such places, or they could starve, or they could go on the streets.

This is a free country, and it has women to burn. There is the brutal essence of the industrial condition that “protect” a factory-owner’s profits with a benevolent tariff, but deny protection to the lives of young women who toil and moil to earn their bread, and to make dividends for the mill-owners. Most of the girls in those factories work for starvation wages. Some of them who were killed in New York were earning only $3.50 a week, and only 22 among 2,000 wer earning as much as $18 a week apiece.

Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” fits New York as well today as it fitted London when it was written:

“O, men with sisters, dear!
O, men with mothers and wives!
It is not linen you’re wearing out,
But human creatures’ lives.”

Apostle of things as they are tell us that laws are made for rich and poor alike. Of course they are! The law forbids the rich as well as the poor, to steal milk from doorsteps, to beg in the streets, or to sleep in box-cars. This is a free country, and if girls object to working in ten-story firetraps for $3.50 a week, the law, before which all are equal, allows them the privilege of “quitting the job.”

– Press Democrat editorial, April 7, 1911
LARGE CROWD ATTENDS THE SUFFRAGE MEETING

At the meeting of the Woman’s Suffrage League, held Saturday in Judge Emmet Seawell’s court room, there was a large attendance of the ladies interested in the movement. Attorney F. McG. Martin made a splendid opening address and resided at the meeting. In her address she took up the suffrage movement point by point and explained them. Rev. C. Augustus Turner, formerly of New Zealand, made the principal address of the afternoon and gave his audience a talented presentation of the question.

– Santa Rosa Republican,  April 21, 1911
VOTES FOR WOMEN

Santa Rosa, Cal., May 26, 1911

Editor REPUBLICAN: The women of California decidedly object to being called “suffragettes,” a name that was first applied to the women of Great Britain, when they felt that they must actually fight to win the vote. Our women feel that no such procedure is necessary for, nor would it be becoming to, the women of America. They feel that the justice of their cause should appeal to every man who has mother, wife, sister or sweetheart, and that no coercion will be necessary to induce the men to roll up an overwhelming majority for women suffrage next October…

…A great many say, “But the women will not vote, if they should be given the right.” The best women will vote, however, for when a duty is imposed upon a good woman, she never shirks her responsibility. On an average, about twenty per cent of the men do not vote, but is that any argument for disfranchising all men?

[..]

Count me on the right side of the woman suffrage question. – William Keith.

– Santa Rosa Republican,  May 27, 1911
SUFFRAGE AND THE NEWSPAPER
Mrs. Mabel Craft Deering, State Chairman, and Mrs. W. A. Finley, County Press Chairman

Mrs. Mabel Craft Deering, who as Mabel Craft was widely known as one of California’s brightest writers, has been chosen State Press Correspondent of the Woman’s Suffrage movement. Mrs. Deering has returned to California and is now in San Francisco, where she will take active interest in the coming campaign. Attorney Frances McG. Martin, President of the Santa Rosa Political Equality Association, has received word from Mrs. Deering regarding her acceptance of the appointment as State Press Correspondent.

Mrs. W. A. Finley of this city has been asked to act as County Press Chairman and has accepted the position.

– Press Democrat, June 21, 1911

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SURPRISING NEWS: WOMEN SHOP

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

Another big change in 1910 Santa Rosa: Newspaper advertisers suddenly discovered women buy things and even spend money on themselves.

Newspaper display ads had changed little since the end of the 19th century. In small town daily papers like the Press Democrat and Santa Rosa Republican, an ad with a photograph or drawing usually promoted the same national brands of patent medicines, goop like Danderine shampoo, whiskey, pianos, automobiles and the like, year after year. Local businesses sometimes offered generic cartoon clip art, although it was occasionally used in ways that were tangent or simply inappropriate, such as the Santa Rosa grocer who thought he could sell more meat by showing a cartoon of a pedestrian being run down with a car. What clothing ads that appeared were aimed at dressing men (overcoats! shoes!) with an occasional promotion of the latest engineering in wasp-waisted corsets to inflict organ damage on mature women.

But my, oh my, did things start to change in 1910. Mixed among the usual drab lot there sometimes appeared an illustration with beautiful artwork and elegant composition, such as the first one shown below. It probably took away everyone’s breath at the time; encountering it today still has that effect because it looks so damned modern compared to everything else around it. The laundry soap ad below it was equally compelling. Although not at all artistic, it was guaranteed to be the first thing a reader noticed on that page. Whomever designed its layout was no less brilliant than the creator of the fashion ad.

What all these ads have in common is that they were all aimed at women who made purchasing decisions for themselves without permission from a husband or parent. Buying a new hat in the latest style is an easy example, but nothing here so demonstrates women managing money independently than the luxury of discreetly having your painful corns plastered and bunions scraped by an “expert chiropodist” while at the hairdresser.

Why the change in 1910? For starters, the economy had greatly stabilized after the 1907 bank panic, which nearly plunged America into a great depression. Santa Rosa had mostly finished rebuilding from the 1906 earthquake and there seemed to be more disposable income available, as demonstrated by there being four downtown movie theaters. Or maybe the Press Democrat – where all the ads below appeared – started listening to Oscar E. Binner, one of the leading figures in commercial illustration and advertising in the world. In 1910 he was living in Santa Rosa at least part time, trying to build a business empire around Luther Burbank.

It’s also possible American society was becoming slightly less paternalistic, as hinted in the Santa Rosa Republican reprinting a little magazine essay on the travails of being a housewife. “The wonder to me is that in this ceaseless grind of petty, monotonous cares, the majority of the women do not go insane. Most men would.” It’s not exactly a manifesto for gender equality, but nonetheless surprising to find in the one of the local papers.

But if Santa Rosa women were enjoying greater purchasing power, it wasn’t because there were recently great strides made in the American suffrage movement; a two-year effort to collect one million signatures on a petition for a suffrage Constitutional amendment failed to get even half that number. Most of the front page coverage of the movement concerned the huge demonstrations taking place in London which cumulated in Black Friday that November, when hundreds of women were assaulted or arrested by police while protesting outside Parliament.

The majority of 1910 newspaper coverage of the U.S. suffrage movement concerned the hissing flapdoodle: Suffragists warmly welcomed President Taft for speaking at their annual convention – the first president to do so – but the mood soured during his speech when he warned that it could be dangerous to allow women to vote because it would be “exercised by that part of the class which is less desirable.” He also suggested women first “must be intelligent enough to know their own interests” ‘lest they be on the par of “Hottentots” (an ugly slur meaning a primitive, even savage, group). When someone hissed, Taft doubled-down on the condescending attitude: “Now my dear ladies, you must show yourselves capable of suffrage by exercising that degree of restraint which is necessary in the conduct of government affairs by not hissing.” Amazingly, Taft often stuck his foot into his enormous mouth like this; a wag later wrote, “His capacity for saying the wrong thing, or for being understood to say the wrong thing, amounts almost to genius.”

YOUR OCCUPATIONLESS WIFE

You took upon yourself a wife, and it is your duty to support her as best you may; also, in due season there came struggling along certain very small and absurd travelers from Noman’s Land, and it is your duty to support them. Consequently you must dig; you must be at the office when you would greatly prefer to go fishing; you must earn the bread, not only for yourself, but for from two to a dozen others, by the sweat of your brow and by keeping your nose faithfully on the ever whirring grindstone. Tough, isn’t it? Oh, you bet, one has to pay the price for being a man! And then to add to the sting, the average woman has nothing to do except keep house.

Yes, it really is a fact that many women have nothing to do–except, of course, to keep house, and as the United States census bureau so happily states the case, that is not an occupation. For a light and enjoyable form of entertainment commend me to keeping house, although the women do make such an immortal row over it. Consider for a moment what a snap it is. All the housewife has to do every day without intermission is: Get the breakfast, wash and wipe the dishes, make the beds, straighten the rooms, get lunch, wash and wipe the dishes, mend the kid’s clothing, spank the baby, make a new gown for Susie, get the dinner, wash and wipe the dishes, look neat and cheerful so she will attract her husband, improve her intel–

Oh, see here! I haven’t the heart to continue the list.  The wonder to me is that in this ceaseless grind of petty, monotonous cares, the majority of the women do not go insane. Most men would; ours may be the stronger sex, but we would.

And we do not wish our wives to seek some occupation that, strangely enough, suits them better, and hire a housekeeper, because we are so tenderly considerate of them you know! John, Henry or Adolph, don’t you make yourself tired when you think about yourself and you self considering regard for you wife! Just between ourselves, I do.–California Weekly.

– Santa Rosa Republican, November 16, 1910

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THE CRIMINAL OPERATION

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

Almost everything could be printed in turn-of-the-century newspapers except vulgar words, and high on that forbidden wordlist was “abortion.” Search all of the digitized 1909 California papers and you’ll find the a-word only ten times, and then just referring to terminated pregnancy in farm animals. At the same time, editors needed to write about women having abortions because newspapers obsessively covered crime stories, and at the time anyone who performed an abortion was charged with second-degree murder. Thus a vocabulary of euphemisms was born: It was the “criminal operation” or the “malpractice,” sometimes a “treatment.” Thus readers of the Santa Rosa Republican learned that a San Francisco doctor had performed “the operation” that resulted in the death of a local girl, 18 year-old Leora Henderson.

Abortion was far more common in America 100+ years ago than it is today, thanks in great part to the 1873 Comstock Act (no relation to Santa Rosa’s Comstock family), which was a federal law outlawing use of the mails to send contraceptives or information about contraception. Although there are no national surveys for this time period, medical experts have estimated that between one-sixth and one-third of all pregnancies were terminated. While looking through the Register of Deaths for Santa Rosa for possible 1906 earthquake victims, I stumbled across a young woman who died of self-induced abortion just a few weeks after the quake – unusual only because abortions were almost always secretly performed by a physician or midwife. As far is known, none of the local medics performed abortions but it is statistically likely that one or more did.*

Miss Henderson probably found her abortionist through San Francisco newspaper classifieds. The “Medical” column in the SF Call was almost entirely advertisements from “ladies’ specialists” including Dr. West, whose ad read, “Ladies’ specialist and women’s friend for many years. Immediate relief for the most obstinate cases at one visit. No pain, no delay from home. Low fees.” Why she picked him is unknown; others claimed to be cheap or guaranteed “instant relief.” Maybe she liked the promise that there would be “no delay from home,” which sounded like a quick turnaround. Informed of her death, her parents, who had a farm near Santa Rosa, said they didn’t realize she had even gone to San Francisco (or for that matter, was pregnant).

The inquest found Leora complained of pains in her sides and Dr. West referred her to another doctor, with instructions to go to a particular hospital if she worsened. He called a Doctor Boyd and said he should expect to see her at the hospital, “but it was nothing serious.” Boyd was called out of town for the day and forgot, but late that night the head nurse at the hospital contacted him about the case. Dr. Boyd said he would check on her in the morning. By morning she had died of peritonitis.

The coroner’s jury found that yes, “a criminal operation caused death,” yet made no charges against Dr. West. And that was that.

Without knowing more, it’s unclear what conclusions we can draw from the jury’s decision. It appears they narrowly held that she died of medical complications, ignoring that the event leading to her death was considered murder in the eyes of the law. Maybe the jury (all male, as all juries were at the time) viewed death following abortion as a woman’s misfortune, the same as death following childbirth.

From an article in the SF Call the following year, we do know even when “malpractitioners” were prosecuted, just one in four was convicted. Judging by the San Francisco newspapers, it seems that the only time that abortion doctors risked facing jail time is when patients died in their office and they went to great lengths to make sure they weren’t caught with the corpus delicti.

Warning: What follows is not for the squeamish.

A few months after Miss Henderson died, 24 year-old Eva Swan sought an abortion from Dr. James Grant. (In a bizarre coincidence, Grant’s San Francisco office used to belong to Dr. West, who had recently moved his practice to a better location downtown.) In the days that followed, Eva became gravely ill and Grant took care of her at his home. When she fell unconscious Dr. Grant realized she would not live, and after she died ten days later he was prepared to act. He sawed off her legs to fit the body into a trunk, poured gallons of acid over the remains, and hauled it to a house he had rented for the purpose of burying her in the basement. There’s much more to the whole story that you can read here, but as you can imagine, every new revelation in this horrific tale made front page headlines. Such great public outrage was spurred that it was even proposed that abortionists could be prosecuted under the Comstock Act, apparently because they advertised in newspapers which were mailed to distant subscribers. Yet despite the strength of the prosecution’s case, Doctor Grant still got off with a twenty year sentence, of which he served nine.

Incredibly, the Eva Swan case was not unprecedented. Seventeen years before, another San Francisco abortion doctor sawed up the body of a patient who died under his care. And in a Ripley’s Believe-it-or-Not twist, the man charged with that murder was none other than Dr. West.

Dr. West went on trial two years later, in 1895. (Trial coverage in the San Francisco Call was quite good for its day.) His defense was that he had not performed an abortion on Addie Gilmour, but had only been asked to look after her by another doctor (who denied it under oath). She died a week later. While strolling down to the Coroner’s office to report her death, West met with Dr. Tuchler who suggested medical students would pay a good price for a female cadaver. Dr. West testified he agreed and when he returned to his office the body was gone. The judge instructed the jury that they were only to decide on whether Dr. West had performed an abortion on the woman. In less than an hour the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

It might have gone differently, however, if Dr. Tuchler had testified; afterwards, he told reporters that he had been called out of town on a medical emergency and wanted to tell the court he believed West was innocent, but he was now angry because West had lied about his role in the matter. According to Tuchler, West dismembered the body and packed sections of it in oil cans which the two of them dropped into San Francisco Bay on the ferry to Oakland. Anatomy students did that all the time to dispose of dissected body parts, Tuchler said. For his role in the dumping, Tuchler asked for Gilmour’s head, the skull of which would complete a skeleton he was assembling. Dr. Tuchler wrapped her head in chicken wire and hung it underwater near Sausalito, telling reporters it was also the custom of anatomy students to leave body parts in the Bay like that to reduce them to bones. Unfortunately for him the encaged head was prematurely found, causing understandable commotion.

Today, West and Grant would probably be prosecuted for murder with depraved indifference. Both hid seriously ill women in their backrooms, not consulting with specialists or seeking a higher quality of care as their condition worsened. While waiting for the women to slowly die, they plotted how to chop ’em up and throw away their parts. They were furtive men; Dr. West said at his 1895 trial that he disguised himself sometimes and it came out that Grant’s real name was Robert Thompson. How typical were they of the army of male “ladies’ specialists” that practiced abortion medicine at the time? That history’s unwritten. (An overview of abortion in turn-of-the-century America can be read on-line: “When Abortion Was a Crime“.)

As for Dr. Grant/Thompson, he moved to Boston when he was paroled and started another abortion practice, this time under the alias “Stanton A. Hudson.” In 1911 Dr. West was again in jail because of a botched abortion and yet again escaped charges (that young woman sought help at an emergency hospital and lived).

Leora E. Henderson’s parents buried her in the Rural Cemetery, adding an inscription to her tombstone: “Budded on earth to bloom in her soul.” I’m not sure what that means, but it certainly sounds very nice.


*It is possible that Madam Preston, who made and sold all manner of nostrums, offered an under-the-counter abortifacient. Among the Preston papers is a 1907 letter from the wife of a Sebastopol farmer who wrote, “I’ve heard you have a preparation that is good to cause a miscarriage…” 
DOCTORS ARRESTED
Complicated in Death of Miss Leora G. Henderson

Dr. E. S. West and Dr. Winfield Bynres of San Francisco are under arrest in that city for their complicity in the death of the Santa Rosa girl, Miss Leora G. Henderson. They were arrested Friday by the police of San Francisco, who say they have information that Dr. West performed the criminal operation on the young lady that resulted in her death. Dr. S. G. Boyd, who is wanted by the police in this matter, did not show up at his office yesterday. Peritonitis followed the girl’s criminal operation and that was the cause of her death.

John Henderson, the girl’s father, when asked about his daughter in San Francisco, stated that he neither knew of the girl’s condition, nor of her presence in San Francisco.

– Santa Rosa Republican, October 23, 1909
WEST FACES MURDER CHARGE
Believed Responsible for Death of Girl

The police of San Francisco are convinced that Dr. E. F. West of 115 McAllister street, performed the operation that resulted in the death of 18 year old Leora Henderson of this city at St. Thomas’ Hospital on Thursday morning. West is in the city prison and will probably be charged with murder after the coroner’s inquest.

West steadfastly denies that he was connected with the case and declares that he never saw the girl, but the  statement to the police of Dr. Winifred Byrne of 894 Eddy street, and Dr. Samuel G. Boyd of 1334 Van Ness avenue contradict his assertions.

Dr. Winifred Byrne, who was questioned by the detectives Friday evening and later placed in custody at the city prison, was released Saturday morning. The police are assured that she was in no way criminally connected with the girl’s death.

In a written statement made by Dr. Byrne Saturday she said that the girl told her a few days after she visited her office on Eddy street that she had been operated on by Dr. West the first day she arrived in San Francisco and that he had advised her to go to Dr. Byrne’s place for care, and if she became worse to go to St. Thomas’ hospital, where Dr. Boyd would attend her.

Dr. Boyd arrived yesterday from Redwood City, where he had been called to perform an operation. He told the police that Dr. West called him up several days before the girl’s death and said he had a patient whom he would sent to St. Thomas’s hospital and wished he, Dr. Boyd, would attend her. Dr. Boyd was busy and forgot about the girl and did not, in fact, at any time see or attend her.

– Santa Rosa Republican, October 25, 1909

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