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A Grandmother’s Job Inspires a Story About Asylums That Denied Motherhood to Fertile Women
In "The Foundling," Ann Leary explores the moral conundrum behind eugenics practised by psychiatrists in the 1920s at an American "home for the feeble-minded" / BY Rosemary Counter / May 26th, 2022
American writer Ann Leary was digging through her family tree when she stumbled on a very interesting, albeit uncomfortable, fact about her grandmother: Although she was gainfully employed, an impressive feat for a teenaged orphan in the 1930s, the gig was as a stenographer at Pennsylvania’s Laurelton State Village for Feeble-Minded Women of Childbearing Age.
History books would love to ignore it, but not long ago many such asylums existed across North America to lock up “mentally or morally defective” girls and women who were considered unfit to be mothers. Worse still, the institutions were championed by famous feminist suffragettes who supported eugenics with the same enthusiasm they had for the women’s vote. And if you’re shocked and disturbed right now, just imagine how Leary must have felt to discover a personal connection, which she channelled into her fascinating new book, The Foundling, about two girls raised in an orphanage who meet again as young women in 1927, one as an inmate and the other as an employee of an institution for intellectually disabled women, run by the supposedly admirable Dr. Vogel. Zoomer called Leary in Connecticut to discuss fact versus fiction, hidden histories and how she feels about her grandma now.
Rosemary Counter: I just finished your book about 30 seconds ago and absolutely loved it! Not because of this, but I so enjoyed that it has not one but two Rosemarys in it.
Ann Leary: I love your name and wanted to name my daughter Rosemary, but the nun thing stuck too much for my husband. The book starts in a Catholic orphanage, so obviously there’s a lot of Marys. Mary Anns, Mary Agneses, Mary Catherines, Rosemarys.
RC: I didn’t learn about eugenics until first-year women’s studies at university. This is one of those topics nobody tells you or talks about.
AL: I’m in the States, and I’m about to turn 60, so I didn’t learn about eugenics until my daughter was in college writing a paper on it. I didn’t know anything about it at all. I find Canadians and the British are a little bit more aware, and I actually learned a lot from Canadian scholars while researching this book, but it’s still a very specific time and topic that you need to dig for. But once I started researching, I was absolutely hooked.
RC: What do people not know about eugenics that you’d want them to know?
AL: It wasn’t some fringe movement or hate group; it was the law of the land, it was widely accepted, it was considered a progressive science that would improve humanity by bettering the human race and preventing inferior stock from breeding. Famous feminists like Margaret Sanger are now taking lots of heat for this, but the ideology was everywhere. Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Alexander Graham Bell [are] all people who did lots of good things but [were] also avid eugenicists.
RC: Your main character, Mary, who’s based on your grandmother, kind of wavers in her support of the asylum’s work. Talk to me about exploring this grey area.
AL: It’s easy to make people either all good or evil, but that’s not real life. When I found out that my grandmother worked at the Laurelton State Village, my first thought was I was offended by the term “feeble-minded,” then I learned that was a clinical term, as was “idiot” and “moron.” I added an author’s note afterwards to explain this, because it can feel jarring to come across these words in this context, but those were the official words she’d have used every day.
RC: I suppose it’s a lot harder to just write someone off as purely bad when it’s your family.
AL: Yes, exactly, and I had to put her in context, too. My grandmother was an orphan who, at age 17, had a great job as a secretary in a place that she probably truly believed helped women who were better off there than elsewhere. Some were criminals or prostitutes. Others were sent when they accused someone of rape or molestation. But some were sent just because they were difficult and their husbands were sick of them. I came across someone admitted because they were “actively seeking sex.” These were so-called “loose women,” or basically me in college.
RC: It really describes everyone I know. We’d be sent away for sure.
AL: It is a very scary thought. We see depictions of the Jazz Age and Daisy Buchanan and Zelda Fitzgerald and we like to imagine it was this fun time of freedom and decadence. The truth is it was a great time … if you were rich. If you had no money or status, if you were poor and did all the exact same things that the rich girls did, you were a menace to society. And because my grandmother was an orphan, I like to think she’d be keenly aware that she could have just as easily been an inmate as an employee.
RC: Did you ever consider writing this book in non-fiction form?
AL: Oh yes, of course. I became very fascinated with the woman who led the asylum, a suffragette and one of the first female psychiatrists in the country. I thought [the psychiatrist] was amazing, at first, which I’m sure my grandmother would have, too. But like everyone, the doctor was of her time, and she was very flawed. I’m aware this was a real person, with a family and descendants, and I tried to be sensitive to them by fictionalizing a character instead.
RC: Creative liberty is pretty fun, too, I must say.
AL: I got to reimagine her as sleek and glamorous, more of a villain and hypocrite. I actually visited the facility, too, which is abandoned now but oddly beautiful, with a ballroom and a gymnasium and an indoor pool. It looks kind of like a college campus, or a health spa, which, like my doctor character or eugenics itself, looks pretty on the outside until you dig a little deeper.