Welcome back! It’s the 9th week of First Sentence Friday/Free Book Friday!

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About the Book

Accused of “promiscuity” in 1940s North Carolina, a young woman unjustly incarcerated and subjected to involuntary medical treatment at The State Industrial Farm Colony for Women decides to fight back in this powerful, shockingly timely novel based on the long-buried history of the American Plan, the government program designed to regulate women’s bodies and sexuality throughout the first half of the 20th century.

The day Ruth Foster’s life changes begins the same way as many others—with a walk through her North Carolina hometown toward the diner where she works. But on this day, Ruth is stopped by the local sheriff, who insists that she accompany him to a health clinic. Women like Ruth—young, unmarried, living alone—must undergo testing in order to preserve decency and prevent the spread of sexual disease.

Though Ruth has never shared more than a chaste kiss with a man, by day’s end she is one of dozens of women held at the State Industrial Farm Colony for Women. Some, like 15-year-old Stella Temple, are brought in at their family’s request. For Stella, even the Colony’s hardships seem like a respite from her nightmarish home life.

Superintendent Dorothy Baker, convinced that she’s transforming degenerate souls into upstanding members of society, oversees the women’s medical treatment and “training” until they’re deemed ready for parole. Sooner or later, everyone at the Colony learns to abide by Mrs. Baker’s rule book or face the consequences—solitary confinement, grueling work assignments, and worse.

But some refuse to be cowed. Against Mrs. Baker’s dogged efforts and the punishing weight of authority, Ruth and other inmates find ways to fight back, resolved to regain their freedom at any cost . . .

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First Sentence Friday Thoughts

Fifteen-year-old Stella is an outlier at the Colony in that she’s glad to be there. Her home life was so dysfunctional, so traumatizing, coming to this place allows her to escape what she’s endured for the past three years, not only at home, but at school, because despite the fact that she’s very smart, she never belonged there, either.

I mentioned in an earlier post how I’d used several resources, and one I leaned on heavily and mentioned before is Bad Girls at Samarcand, Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory by Karen Zipf.

The idea of reform was meant to straighten out the individual who entered into one of these facilities, those who were viewed as delinquents, and this could be a boy or girl, or maybe they were viewed as “fallen,” which seemed to apply to females only. (A.k.a., “problem girls.” Side note: One of the original titles was Fallen Women.)

Zipf writes of one young girl who ended up at Samarcand named Margaret Abernathy. Margaret’s parents were separated and her father took her from her mother at the age of four. Her mother died soon after and her father remarried. When Margaret turned ten, her father began to come into her room when her stepmother wasn’t home. At some point, he was caught by her stepmother, and later charged with incest and Margaret was eventually sent to Samarcand, where she would make repeated attempts to run away. This resulted in beatings.

Runaways from middle-class families created great consternation. Margaret’s background was different, but I found this part of history interesting. For instance, running away was viewed as more of a reaction to being “emotionally maladjusted.” It was a personality dysfunction. Girls from these middle class families shouldn’t act this way, and parents were unable to understand what was wrong, or what was going through their daughter’s heads. They would often resort to a kidnapping theory to save face. It was impossible their little “Suzy Q” could have done such a thing! On the other hand, if the girl was from a “mill” family, i.e. part of the poor, working class level in society, it was to be expected. Their home life was subject to one parent or another being gone, drunks, a lot of family fighting in one fashion or another, resulting in them running away, which then resulted in classifications like immoral and disobedient. In either case, if parents from a middle-class family couldn’t reconcile with their daughter’s behavior (or rebellion), off to reform school they went, although this was usually a last resort. With the poor working class, reform school populations, while sketchy in records, seemed to show most individuals came from this background.

A tiny part of Margaret’s background represents Stella’s story, except Stella had no wish to run away from the Colony. She’d never run away from home, either. Stella seeks approval, a connection, and she finds it in the most unlikely of places, and with the most unlikely person.

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Chapter 9
Stella

Mrs. Baker thinks she’s a person of worth, one who can reclaim herself, and because of this, she takes the special job ever so seriously, memorizing names with ease, the same way she did the handbook.

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Question of the Week!

Runaways. I sort of ran away once. 😐

When you were coming of age, what was your most rebellious moment? What did you do and even more important, what did you parents do? What were the repercussions of your downfall from grace? (I was usually grounded or my curfew cut short.😏)

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Free Read!

I’ll choose one individual who answers the question/s to win a signed copy of one of the backlist books.  It’s reader’s choice out of the following: The Education of Dixie Dupree, The Road to Bittersweet, The Forgiving Kind (with the original cover versus what’s shown here), The Moonshiner’s Daughter, The Saints of Swallow Hill, or When the Jessamine Grows.

The winner is selected and announced here by Monday a.m. 

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PRE-ORDER Information

Pre-orders gauge the interest and signal to the publisher readers are eager for an author’s next work. If you’re holding out because you might win an ARC or a finished copy from First Sentence Friday, remember you can always give away the extra as a gift to a reader friend. 😉

Pre-order links for your convenience:

• Bookshop.org
• Kensington Publishing Corporation
• Barnes & Noble
• Books-A-Million
• Amazon
• Hudson Booksellers
• Target
• Walmart

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Social Media

Last, but not least, don’t forget to:

• Add Women of a Promiscuous Nature to your Goodreads “To Read” shelf
• Share this post with your reader friends
• Follow me on Goodreads, Twitter, Facebook, Bookbub, or my blog!

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