I knew I had to pick this one up just based on the title alone. As a Virginian, I know my state carries a hell of a lot of really bad shit tucked up into its secret attics, with eugenics being number two right behind enslavement. For such a mellow state in most ways, we’re also a real nasty one. And this is a book every Virginian needs to read. Or just every American.
Catte does not mess around and calls things like they are: these folks used asylums and social services to trap, capture, and sterilize people they thought less of so that they could ensure those people would be “good workers” and not go off having babies or anything silly like a life among people who loved them.
These Virginian eugenicists were mad when Hitler took their ideas and sterilized more people than they had. And now, these buildings where trauma and torture happened are condos.
Whew, boy. Read this book.
Bookish & Inked 