Exeter Girls: Letters from a Feeble-Minded School

At the turn of the last century, it was widely accepted by conventional science that feeble-mindedness was one of the greatest threats to society in the modern era. But while hereditary diseases or defects of the mind and body were most commonly associated with feeble-mindedness, it was not defined by disability alone - morality and sexuality were traits equally as culprit in its diagnosis, and believed to be just as inheritable by birth.

For this reason, from 1913 through the Great Depression, hundreds of disadvantaged and uneducated young girls and women from broken homes, orphanages, jail cells, psychiatric hospitals, convents, and maternity wards across Rhode Island were legally declared feeble-minded and sentenced indefinitely to an institution for the mentally retarded.

Exeter Girls is an epistolary novel telling the first-hand accounts and true life stories of three women - Evelyn, Cora, and Dorothy - branded by the scarlet letters of waywardness and sexual delinquency, and committed to Rhode Island's School for the Feeble-Minded nearly a century ago.

Expertly researched and transcribed from previously sealed documents, this rare collection of personal letters exposes the shocking reality and untold tragedy of a dark age in social services, and reveals the truth behind the State's most notorious public institution, better known today as The Ladd School.