Burns’s improbable, fantastically scandalous trajectory took her from humble beginnings in a San Francisco slum to a Pittsburgh pickle packing plant, a fateful manicurist job at the ritzy Palace Hotel, and then onto her lifelong career as the West Coast grande dame who - assisted by her team of nurses in crisp white uniforms - provided safe, hygienic abortions on demand to WWI war widows, rape survivors, scorned lovers, Hollywood stars, and the Gilded Age elite alike.
He couldn’t have picked a tougher nut to crack - San Francisco’s “Queen of Abortions” was as tough as the steel needles she used to perform her services on thousands upon thousands of women. “Pat” Brown, who aimed to launch his political career out of the ashes of her empire. What had for so long been purely business had become a crusade for her, and when she got out of prison, she went right back to work.īurns never met a man she couldn’t charm until she crossed paths with pathologically ambitious attorney Edmund G.
In her eyes, the church was adding generations of misery around the world for the pleasure of men, and making slaves of half of the population by giving men unchecked control over the reproductive systems of their wives, girlfriends, and daughters. She saw the church and its second class treatment of women as complicit in women’s suffering all those years of watching Catholic women enter her clinic, trailing six children and desperate to prevent a seventh, left a sour taste in Burns’ mouth, even more so than their legislative efforts to put her out of business.
More important than making money (and she loved making money), her work helped women to take charge of their bodies in a world controlled almost entirely by men - men who wanted to have their cake, eat it, and then moralize about the wickedness of baking in between visits to their mistresses. It was there, in the relative tranquility of her little cottage in the Women's Department at San Quentin at Tehachapi and later at the federal prison at Alderson, in the twilight of her sixties, that notorious abortionist Inez Burns had her feminist awakening.
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