Those scientific-minded reformers of the progressive period called it eugenics the Nazis took their lead to a horrific extreme. Every era seems to find its own way to regulate females so they don’t reproduce all over the place - and you will often find women at the forefront of such plans, fencing their vexingly fertile sisters from the menfolk. Leary was inspired by the experience of her own grandmother who, in the 1930s, at the age of 17, worked as a stenographer for the director of a similarly named institution in rural Pennsylvania.įear of wombs is nothing new. If that description rings of dystopian satire, it’s not. Sanger doesn’t appear in “The Foundling,” but her ghost haunts its moral landscape as the fictional Agnes Vogel, a psychiatrist whose crusade for women’s rights and social reform propels her to the directorship of the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age, a public asylum founded to sequester “unfit” women so they don’t breed others like them. How could an “early feminist” like Margaret Sanger - a pioneer of reproductive freedom, a tireless activist for progressive reform - proclaim in 1922 that “every feebleminded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period” and expect modern-thinking people to agree with her?
In the introductory note to “The Foundling,” Ann Leary suggests a conundrum.
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