Exeter Girls: Letters from a Feeble-Minded School

A hundred years ago Rhode Island could lock a girl in the Ladd School for having a baby without a husband, or because a judge called her feeble-minded, and keep her there, in the superintendent's own words, "at least as long as she is capable of bearing children."

Exeter Girls is the case files of three of those women. Evelyn, sent from Newport as a teenager while her mother wrote letter after letter asking for her back. Cora, a mother of three whose family hired a lawyer and lost anyway. Dorothy, who arrived with one dress and one pair of shoes. Their letters, their families' letters, and Dr. Ladd's replies are printed as they were written.

This isn't a history written about them. It's the record they left, and the state's answer to it.

Volume I of two.