Exeter Girls Volume II: More Letters from a Feeble-Minded School (Paperback or Softback)

In 1929 the Massachusetts State Police spent a week combing cranberry bogs for a young woman whose offense was slipping away from the Ladd School and getting married. On the drive back Francesca said, "I was living happy with my husband," and the school's social worker answered, "You had no business to have a husband."

Exeter Girls Volume II tells her story and two more through the women's own letters and the letters written about them. Lisa was eleven, and the school's own admission card called her "Not Feeble-Minded." From a locked room she wrote to her parents, "please come out to see me as soon as you can and take me home." Hope was eight, crippled by polio and abandoned by her mother, and one of the officials writing about her called her "a long, expensive burden to Rhode Island."

The letters are printed just as they were written, and you don't need to have read Volume I to follow them.