This well written book has definitely touched my mind. It tells the story of Jane, a newly married woman who enters her first job as a social worker in North Carolina in the early sixties. She is married to Robert, a young pediatrician, who has finally managed to escape his lower class environment. He wants an attractive wife who keeps house and raises children and mingles with upperclass ladies charity. Jane, HOWEVER, starts work in a rural area, looking after colored people as well as white people who are Considered as trash. She meets the Hart family, Consisting of a diabetic old grandmother, looking after her two grandchildren, Mary Ann and Ivy and baby William, Mary Ann's toddler.Jane is supposed to have 14 year old Ivy sterilized, just like her elder sister who is feebleminded , Although Ivy Seems brighter than her sister, she is suffering from epileptic fits slightly. THUS the Eugenics Board wants to have her sterilized too. Jane, HOWEVER, does not agree with such "Nazi Methods" and wants to help Ivy, who is pregnant by then. The more Jane struggles, the more she is isolated by her husband, her colleagues and friends and she is getting into serious troubles. This book gives a vivid picture of the segregated South and the women at unimancipated That Time. And it casts an eye on the bleak methods of the welfare people. The characters are authentic and it is very difficult to put the book aside.
