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 20^th 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.