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1960s: A newlywed in search of a career discovers a shocking secret..
1960s: A newlywed in search of a career discovers a shocking secret..
North Carolina, 1960. Newlywed Jane Forrester, fresh out of university, is seeking what most other women have shunned: a career.
But life as a social worker is far from what she expected. Out amongst the rural Tobacco fields of Grace County, Jane encounters a world of extreme poverty that is far removed from the middle-class life she has grown up with.
But worse is still to come. Working with the Hart family and their fifteen-year-old daughter Ivy, it’s not long before Jane uncovers a shocking secret, and is thrust into a moral dilemma that puts her career on the line, threatens to dissolve her marriage, and ultimately, determines the fate of Ivy and her family forever.
Soon Jane is forced to take drastic action, and before long, there is no turning back.
Although the characters are fictional the horrors of the Eugenics Sterilization program was not.
The author writes:
From 1929 until 1975, North Carolina, sterilized over seven thousand of its citizens. The program targeted the “mentally defective,” the “feeble minded,” inmates in mental institutions and training schools….
Whilst other states had similar programs, most of them stopped performing state-mandated sterilizations after WW2, uncomfortable over comparisons to the eugenics experiments in Nazi Germany
Places to visit in the city – North Carolina Museum of History and the Capitol to see the real history of the city
Author/Guide: Diane Chamberlain Destination: North Carolina, Departure Time: 2000s
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