Women of a Promiscuous Nature

Women of a Promiscuous Nature by Donna Everhart, 368 pages

In 1940s North Carolina, Ruth was walking to work at a local diner when the local deputy picked her up, accused her of "promiscuity" and drove her to the health clinic. And from there, he took her to the State Industrial Farm Community for Women, which is full of dozens of other young women who are unmarried and living alone, or have the audacity to argue with their husbands, or were impregnated by an abusive family member. All of them institutionalized, drugged, and forced to work against their will and with no way out. Based on a very real group of such institutions, this book follows Ruth, 15-year-old Stella, entrepreneur Josephine, hard-living Maude, and the possibly-not-as-crazy-as-she-pretends-to-be Frances as they deal with the harsh realities forced upon them by superintendent Dorothy Baker.

It's sometimes horrifying to read this book, especially when you stop to think that this is what was happening to young women while "the boys" were off at war. There were a few times in the book where the writing got a bit clunky, but all in all, this was an interesting, if at times hard, book to read.

A Fortune of Sand

 A Fortune of Sand by Ruta Sepetys, 320 pages.

Detroit in 1927 is a city of astounding wealth, but also more than its fair share of the crime and corruption that comes along with it. Marjorie Lennox is the youngest daughter of a family who made their fortune in the glass business, but they also have more than their fair share of secrets and corruption. Marjorie is something of an innocent, and she dreams of fashion design. So when she has the opportunity for an artist's residency for women, she jumps on it. And so what if something seems a little off about it, with the buildings strict rules and obsession with security? But although Marjorie has left home, she can't get away from her family's secrets nearly so easily. 

Ruta Sepetys is the master of exquisitely researched historical fiction, and this detail rich book is no exception. Prohibition-era Detroit is an interesting setting, and Sepetys uses a wealth of primary sources to make it fully textured. Unfortunately, I don't know that the story quite holds up to her usual standards. The many, many threads of this book never quite come together to a satisfying conclusion, and instead it feels like it peters out to an anticlimax. I also found that although this is Sepetys' adult debut, it does in many ways still read like a YA novel. That being said, I really loved Marjorie as a character, and found the prose very solid, so I still really enjoyed most of my experience reading this book. I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the setting, but I'm not sure I would recommend it purely on it's own merits. 

This book is scheduled to be released on May 26th, 2026. 

The Fallen

 The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence by Louise Brangan, 368 pages.

The Magdalene Laundries were the last stop for so-called "fallen" women in 20th century Ireland. Any number of things could get a woman committed to a Magdalene Laundry; the most common in the public imagination was becoming pregnant out of wedlock, but in practice many women were committed for cutting school too much, wearing skirts that were too short, aging out of state institutions, or just generally being too "high-spirited." Once a woman entered the laundry they were forced to do hard industrial labor for no wages under conditions that were intensely emotionally abusive, and was not allowed to leave until someone came to claim her or the nuns felt she was reformed. For many of these women, forgotten and hidden away, that time never came. And the Laundries were only one part of Ireland's carcel system, which even as it boasted about its low prison population held around 1% of its population institutionalized. 

After independence, Ireland started on the endeavor of nation building, and hung much of its modern national identity on the purity of its people, and especially its women and girls. This fear that girls could cause the corruption of the nation led to a culture of shame and silence, and droves of young women immigrating or being institutionalized. Brangan does and excellent job tracing not only the full history of the laundries, but also their context in both the past and present. She delves into a history of injustice  that had been intentionally repressed, and attempts to create a more complete record of the truth.

This is, overall, a very approachable work of nonfiction. It highlights several girls who spent time in the laundries through the decades, and uses this human element for both primary source material and a narrative that is easy to digest. Her dedication to context also means that the reader does not need much knowledge of Irish history at all to understand the information being presented. My only major complaint is that Brangan is often not very clear about when events are happening. She will transpose the stories of girls who were in the laundries decades apart on the same page, sometimes making it difficult to trace the evolution of the institution. That being said, I do consider this a very solid history of the Magdalene Laundries, and would recommend it for people interested in Irish history, or women's history.

This book will be published 5/5/2026.