Before I jump into my thoughts about the only book I read in September, I remind you that this is Banned Books Week.
Unfortunately, there are some people in the United States who take it upon themselves to try to dictate what the rest of us can read. Therefore, the American Library Association sets aside a week every October for us to pause and consider the books that some people try to get banned from school and public library shelves.
Stay alert to this in your community.
Women of a Promiscuous Nature, by Donna Everhart
This is the first novel I’ve read by fellow North Carolinian Donna Everhart. The subject matter of Women of a Promiscuous Nature is a difficult one, so kudos to Everhart for tackling it.
It is obvious that she did extensive research and the book is well-written; however, the combination of the difficult subject matter and everything I had going on were not a good match at this time.
This novel shines a light on the “American Plan,” which was a government program to regulate women’s bodies in the first half of (and some years beyond) the 20th century. Everhart’s book is set in North Carolina.
I read much of the book and became increasingly depressed about the way women – especially unmarried women – were often assumed to be “loose women.” Apparently, if you were unmarried and dared to hold down a job and live by yourself, you were suspect. Girls and women were picked up at their homes or as they went to work. They disappeared without their employers or family knowing what had happened to them.
In this novel, they were taken by sheriff’s departments to the Samarcand Juvenile Detention Center (for girls) in Eagle Springs, North Carolina and to the The State Industrial Farm Colony For Women in Kinston, North Carolina where they were sterilized, put to work in hard labor in the fields, and put in solitary confinement when guilty of regulatory infractions, etc.
The story is set in the 1930s and 1940s. The “justification” was that male soldiers in the First World War got sexually-transmitted diseases and it was, of course, blamed on unmarried women. When World War II broke out, it was assumed the same thing was going to happen, so unmarried women had to be “fixed” in more ways than one so they could be paroled back into society to be good citizens.
North Carolina has a horrible eugenics history. Before the 1960s, poor white girls and young women were sterilized under the direction of the state. Sadly, many of them had been sexually-abused by family members and they were then labeled as “troubled” or “feebleminded.” With the coming of the 1960s, black girls and women became the state’s target for this hideous process.
This history made me sick! It serves as a reminder that even in the United States of America the government can turn against segments of its citizens and do horrible things to them.
If we don’t learn from our history, we are bound to repeat it.
Janet
Never take your right to read whatever you want to read – or your right to control what is done to your body – for granted.
Southern states were not the only.bad actors. Lots of others were equally guilty.
Yes, it was widespread, but apparently NC was among the worst. Makes some of what is happening today less surprising.
You got that right, Sister.
Lately Janet, it seems like a lot of people either haven’t learned or disregarded critical parts of our history. Thanks for sharing the reality about how horrible women again were blamed for shit men got a free get out of jail card for. Spaying but no neutering eh? Unreal! 🤬
That sounds like it would be hard to read. Thankful that the writer did the research and put it out there.
Yes, Kym. It is sickening to read about it. Some things never change… like what’s happened at Cornell. Their punishment was to write an essay????? Give me a break!
It was difficult to read, Alison. I wanted to know what happened to the main characters in the end, but I just couldn’t keep reading it.
Rare for you to DNF isn’t it?
Not as rare as it used to be. The older I get, the more I think, “Life is too short” and I move on to the next book. September involved an allergic reaction to seven fire ant bites and a respiratory infection that has lapped over into October. Zero energy, so even reading has been a chore.
Wow! I’m so sorry. Never heard of that before with the fire ants. There’s an allegory in there somewhere.
I had five bites spread over my forearm. I broke out in puffy whelps. By the next day the five whelps had merged into one gigantic itchy puff. My forearm looked like Popeye’s! It matched my left knee where one of the other two bites was. Two days later, the respiratory infection and sore throat started. I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia. Anything like this knocks me for a loop and takes me longer than normal to snap back. A round of Prednisone and a z-pack later… I’m still coughing and dragging. On the bright side, at least I don’t resemble Popeye any more.
Popeye was a looker though. Hope you contort feel better.
LOL!
Janaet, this was a pretty depressing book to read in such a beautiful month. I’m glad I didn’t live back in those days. Women weren’t the only ones that were sterilized by the states. Indiana was one of the first states that practiced Eugenics. They sterilized men who were in prison as well. My great-grandfather was sterilized for bootlegging. The thinking was that their children would become criminals. Fortunately for me,my great-grandmother had already birthed my grandmother, but she was only 15 when she did so. They never had another child. While my great-grandfather was not a paragon of virtue, my great-grandmother and my grand-mother were wonderful.
Girl Janet, the insanity is mind-blowing! It irritates me to see how money can buy you out of a crime! Un-freaking real! 😖
That’s quite a family history you have, Marsha. Thank goodness your grandmother had already been born! The assumptions sometimes made by decision makers certainly can have forever-lasting ramifications. Thank you for reading my blog and taking the time to leave a comment about your own family’s experience.
Kym, every time we think it can’t possibly get any worse…. I try not to even think that anymore because before the day is over, something unimaginable comes out… like live streaming an execution? The outrageousness of this administration has been normalized!
I sometimes write too much, and I’m not proud of my great-grandfather. He was a great embarrassment to my grandmother, and my great-grandmother stopped having migraines daily when he passed, but no laws are perfect, and people apply them unjustly sometimes. Not to mention they don’t always fit the crime.
We’re not responsible for anything our ancestors did, Marsha, so don’t ever let it drag you down.
Isn’t that fortunate? Thanks for a great conversation. We don’t have a very big family, so a few black sheep are to be expected, right? I don’t remember too much about him, really. 🙂 xxx
The only one of my grandparents still living when I was born was my father’s father. He died when I was three years old, so I have just a couple of snippets of memories of him. I think every family has a black sheep. When I was growing up, I thought our family was normal. Now that I’m 73, I know that no one’s family is normal. LOL!
haha, isn’t that the truth? I had both sets of grandparents, 2 great-grandmothers and 1 great-grandfather until I was 5. What I lacked were aunts, uncles, cousins, and later nieces, nephews and children of my own. So in spite of all the grandparents, my family was very small. But at 2 I was VERY wise being around all that wisdom. Than my brother was born. LOL:)
I didn’t have generations of ancestors to know, but I had many aunts and uncles and cousins.
We are exact opposites. LOL. My grandparents all had siblings except my maternal grandmother, so when we were young we had lots of “gray” aunts and lots of second cousins on my dad’s side of the family. Mom only had one cousin, and I have written a lot about him. I didn’t meet him until about ten years ago. But this is way TMI. LOL! I’m sharing my whole family history.
Wow! Evil has no bounds. I’ve read a lot of history on the US and never read that. Sickening enough that I won’t be reading this book. But kudos for the author putting history out there! 😋
Eugenics is a very dark piece of U.S. History. It’s not included in any textbooks I ever had. The men running the government have had a pattern of going after women’s fertility. First, it was single white women for we all know (cough! cough) that there wouldn’t have been any sexually-transmitted disease in the U.S. Army during either World War if not for unmarried women. Then, they turned on black women and any female thought to be “feeble-minded.” Men have such a stellar record of knowing what’s best for women! Although I couldn’t finish it, that book is going to stay in my head for a long time. It reminds me of how the white men decided they could beat the Indian-ness out of Native Americans by forcing their children to go to those horrendous boarding schools! Lots of history we cannot be proud of but, unlike the Republicans, we Democrats believe we need to know our history and learn from it. Trump and his ilk are erasing our history as fast as they can. More on that in next week’s blog post about our precious national parks.
You hit the nail on the head Janet. Now that we’re in early voting, you know what you got to do girlfriend! I’ll be at the polls tomorrow! 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
You go girl! I have always felt a sense of excitement to vote on election day, so that’s still my plan this year. Last night I said, “I better not be sick on November 3.” My sister said, “I will drag you there!” Met a 91-year-old friend for supper last night. She had voted yesterday… and I know how she voted. Yay!