Set in rural Pennsylvania in 1927, Mary Engle sets off for her first job after clerical school to work for Agnes Vogel, a physician and director of Nettleton Village - A Home for Feeble Minded Women. This fictional institution is based on real institutions such as this one https://susquehannavalley.blogspot.com/2023/03/laurelton-village-home-for-feeble... that existed at the time to keep non-conformist women from having children based on the theories of the eugenics movement.

At 17 and having grown up in an orphanage, Mary is naive and awestruck by the glamour and power of Dr. Vogel. Then she sees an inmate of the village that she grew up with in the orphanage. Lillian is characterized as a mental defective by the home, but Mary knows from experience that is far from the truth.

Part of the narrative illustrates how Mary is torn between what she knows is right and the gas-lighting by the powerful Dr. Vogel. There are also graphic descriptions of how the institutionalized women were abused and forced into labor for the powerful people in the community as well as for the institution. All while being characterized as being "for the good of the women and society".

The story starts out slow as Mary's character is slow to develop. I almost gave up until I hit the 6th chapter. There is a bit of suspense in Part 4 of the book, with a surprise ending. ( )

Not really a suspense, although the cover makes it seem gothic, but this historical fiction novel is definitely fascinating and keeps the pages turning. ( )

The author of this book can’t have many nice things to say about the American Dream and how it was constructed for anybody but whites in a society of conformity and obedience at the turn of the 20th century.

In this story a young woman comes of age to discover that her benefactors operate a grizzly factory for exploiting female labour for “the public good.” It is based on the very real history of asylums for non-conforming women, women considered “feebleminded” by eugenicists and sanctioned by male-dominated institutions.

At a time when the first fruit of economic success, suburban growth, public health, and scientific breakthroughs were easing the difficult life of women, America found a way to punish the non-conformists.

Unlike the native populations they had wiped out, unlike the blacks they chained to ignorance and poverty, and unlike the immigrants who fed the belching factories of Pittsburgh and mines of the west, women were given the vote and in this interpretation, a Pyrrhic victory.

Many women who didn’t conform were sent to institutions catering to theories of white supremacy, essentially eugenics labs for the unfortunate.

This story indicts white society as complicit in Jim Crow, in the tyranny of men over women’s lives, and of long discredited scientific principles.

This story really is about a terrible chapter in American medicine, but in the context of the time, not a terribly unique one for the American experiment.

It is worth remembering that the same as the events in this story, Southern legislators were finding ways to entrap black youth in a prison system to benefit white businesses.

This was America at the frontier.

Worse still, and although it us not part of this story, there is plenty of evidence to believe that Germany’s Nazis used American methods as a template for their own racial purification campaigns. ( )

A fascination historical fiction about an institute where women of feebleminded women of child bearing ages lived in the 1920's. ( )

This book moved so slowly at first that I almost gave up on it - I'm glad I didn't. The story takes place in 1927 - Mary Engle works at an institution in rural Pennsylvania where young women who've made "mistakes" (gotten pregnant) or who are alleged to have low mental capabilities are placed, and they are not released until they are too old to bear children or perhaps ever. These young women are mistreated, some far more horribly than others. Mary is extremely naive and trusting of her employer, Dr. Vogel, but eventually comes to realize that Dr. Vogel is not the paragon of virtue she first thought. The story is based on historical fact, and it's really horrifying to realize that things like this actually took place in our country. ( )