Audrey Clare Farley

This book is a well-researched history of a set of American quadruplets who grew up in Lansing, Michigan and were part of the burgeoning research into the origins of schizophrenia. Is it nature or nurture? What does the science of psychology gain from these studies? And most importantly, how has the care of the mentally disturbed become so abysmal?

The parents of these quadruplets married in the 1920's, with many warnings pre-marriage that the young bride, Sadie, failed to heed. One wonders what her life would have been had she not listened to her employer, a doctor, who decided that Carl was a "good man" even though her intuition told her differently. And as one can guess, the abuse started early with one bizarre twist: Carl was a biter.

They eventually have their quadruplet girls and like so many children they learned to perform on stage and were the family's breadwinners for several years. But as they began to enter school their differences became much more discernible: Helen became inert and would not finish school, Edna became a second spouse to Carl. Wilma discovered her own body, and Sarah just wanted to be able to have friends outside her family. But Carl would have none of it, and the abuse became more physical and sexual as the sisters entered puberty.

By the 1950's, their story included mental health institutions, which eventually brought all 4 sisters to the attention of a brilliant psychologist, David Rosenthal, and his new facility, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

The four sisters lived on the NIMH campus for several years, their parents were also studied, to see whether their schizophrenia was genetic or tied to their upbringing. The author shows how it could easily be both.

Also presented in the book's timeline are the strides that were made in the care of those suffering from mental illness that came to a crashing halt with 1980's Reaganomics. Once mental health facilities turned to profits for themselves instead of care for the mentally challenged, there was nowhere else to turn but the streets.… (plus d'informations)

I give this book three stars because there are parts that were good, parts that were excellent, and parts that I despised, and despised Farley for writing, I probably won't read any of her other books. One thing that I was a bit surprised to see that this book lacked was an index, especially since it hops backward and forward in time. I would also liked to point out something that is a pet peeve: carelessness with regard to referents when using pronouns. On page 239 of the 2023 Grand Central Published trade edition that I read, there appears that sentence "After learning of the action that she and Nabarette were organizing with Rosenfelt's help [...]" Given the "she" in this case is paired with [Charles] Nabarette. presumably it refers to Antonia Hernández, who hasn't been mentioned by name since page 236. Several other woman have been named in those pages, and if one followed the rule of going back to last person mentioned by name, it would be Fortuna Valencia. I'm not shaming Farley particularly here, I've called out other people in reviews who were worse, but I have read sentences where I was never entirely certain who the pronouns actually refer to.

I think that Farley wrote this book chiefly to express her disgust with the female roles of the late 19th and more than the first half of the 20th, and the eugenics movement. I can't argue with that. I imagine that using the rather bizarre story of Maryon Cooper Hewitt's decision to latch onto the eugenics movement to involuntarily sterilize her 20-year-old daughter, Ann Cooper Hewitt, before she reached her majority, captured more interest than basing it solely on Farley's political stances. I know that I pick it up after seeing something about this final act of what turned out to be a life-time of child abuse. This sterilization of an upper-class may have been unusual, but perhaps not as unusual as we would think. Joseph Kennedy, Sr., arranged a lobotomy for his difficult eldest daughter, Rosemary, and then institutionalized her to keep her from embarrassing her family. Farley doesn't address this, not that she needed to, but it used to be fairly easy for husbands and parents to institutionalize wives and children.

This is the best part of the book, and I give it five stars. I wasn't totally unaware of this, but eugenics is often described as having ended after World War II, and since Carrie Buck if often the only person mentioned as being wrongly sterilized, it doesn't sound as destructive as it was. Farley makes it clear that it affected thousands upon thousands of people, most institutionalized for some possibly flimsy reason. Ann Cooper Hewitt's case caused a lot of attention, but the failure to convict her doctors, and her later refusal to continue the case against her mother, also created the idea that it wasn't likely to be punished. It continued under other names, like "population control," at least into the 1970s.

From Farley's description of her, Maryon was a beautiful, intelligent, charming, and witty woman of the type that so often fascinates people: the courtesan: Phryne, Jane (actually Elizabeth) Shore, Madame de Pompadour, Lola Montez who become famous for their many affairs with wealthy and powerful men.

Outside of her charms, it is difficult to think of anything about Maryon that makes her more than a waste of space. She loved a good time, an extravagant lifestyle, gambling, and lovers. Only the third of her five marriages, to Peter Cooper Hewitt, ended in widowhood - most of her husbands seemed glad to get rid of her. She had two children. Pedar, Jr., or Peter Bruguière from her first marriage, in whom she seems to have taken minimal interest, and Ann Cooper Hewit, whom she apparently loathed too much to simply fob off on a governess and ignore. Although Peter Cooper Hewitt adored his daughter, he died when she was seven, and it doesn't seem to protected her from her mother when he wasn't around. One of Peter's nurses, incidentally, suspected that Maryon poisoned Peter after his illness became tedious. Maryon apparently hated Ann's dark hair, and made her bleach it for much of her childhood. She informed her daughter and everyone around her that Ann was stupid. When Ann was twenty, and about to get out from under Maryon's control when she turned twenty-one, she was eating with her mother when she suffered sharp abdominal pains. Farley suggests that perhaps Maryon gave Ann something to initiate the symptoms. Maryon diagnosed this as appendicitis, and the doctor's accepted this without examining Ann. Four days later, a long time for appendicitis, she underwent surgery and emerged irreversibly sterilized. The motive for this is usually laid to the fact that Ann's share of her father's estate reverted to Maryon if Ann died childless. As reporters noted, this seems odd, since Maryon who presumably would die before her daughter. Perhaps this was just Maryon's last torment of her hated daughter, or perhaps she had plans for Ann's early demise. Maryon didn't live very long after the trials, dying in 1939.

What disgusts me about this book is that Farley, for all that she relates, seems to have fallen under Maryon's charm and attempts to make her a subversive of society that Farley finds unjust, even though Maryon happily made used of the eugenics movement.

Farley also writes of Maryon, "By seeming to unbridle the scientist's passions, Maryon revealed that elites like Peter had a duty to uphold the virtues of the upper class, whether they wanted to or not."
I don't know about that - Peter kept Maryon as his mistress, often in Paris, for years. That was rather common. There is a saying that according to middle class morality, if something is wrong, you shouldn't do it; according to upper class morality, you shouldn't get caught doing it. If I recall correctly, as I said there is no index, Peter and his wife Lucy had been separated for years before he met Maryon. She was aware of his affair, and only initiated a divorce after Ann's birth, perhaps to allow her parents to marry. Indeed the affair seems to have been an open secret, they just weren't suppose to flaunt it. When they went out to dinner, they sat in a corner to be less inconspicuous. This sort of thing has been going on for millennia - it just became more discreet in some societies that had monogamy, and even so it varied. This is no subversion of traditional male-female roles.

Ann wept at her mother's graveside. Some people attribute this to the paradoxical emotional power that abusers have over the abused. Farley prefers to interpret it as Ann forgiving her mother.

On the last couple of pages, Farley wrote: "In maligning Maryon [...] Ann failed to appreciate the common wounds these women bore."
Like what?

"It never occurred to [Ann] to do what the Madrigal plaintiffs did decades later - uplift other women to resist those doing collective harm."
If Ann had won her case against the doctors, it might have helped other women avoid involuntary sterilization, but she lost.

"Ann may have intuited that there was something frightening about the public's eagerness to condemn Maryon as a monster, even if her mother had indeed acted monstrously and even if she had been the first to portray her as such." (emphasis added).
Or maybe not; I personally think that Maryon deserved condemnation.

"But perhaps, in this moment, Ann simply saw Maryon for what she was: a human being." (emphasis added)
Again, putting thoughts in Ann's head. Personally, I hate it when people say that someone is a human being, not a monster. There is no disconnect between being human and behaving monstrously that I am aware of. All the people that Farley condemns for sterilizing the "unfit" were human beings; she says nothing about forgiving them.

"Most of all, in forgiving Maryon, Ann implicitly acknowledged the dignity and worth of socially outcast women, including herself."
Supposing that she did forgive her, I'm having trouble grasping the connection between women who were involuntarily sterilized for being poor, or uneducated, or Latinas, or Black, or Indigenous Americans, or some other dubious reason, with Maryon, who embraced the eugenics movement to involuntarily sterilize Ann.… (plus d'informations)

Drawing on publications, newspaper articles, personal papers, medical records and interviews, Audrey Clare Farley exposes the tragic lives of the Morlok sisters in the context of the era’s cultural and social milieu in Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America.

Girls and Their Monsters tells the story of the pseudonymous ‘Genain’ quadruplets, Edna, Sarah, Wilma, and Helen, born in 1930 in midwestern USA to working class couple, Sadie and Carl Morlok. Named by way of a public competition, housed for free by city officials, and displayed in the front window of their home for crowds eager to marvel at their identical features, the girls became local celebrities. As they grew, the quadruplets continued to attract public attention, becoming regulars on the talent show circuit, and the subject of numerous newspaper features and articles.

Photographs show four blonde haired, blue eyed, demure little girls, and later teens, dressed alike, beaming for the camera, the picture of health and innocence, but behind closed doors, the girls were subject to horrifying abuse. Carl was a violent, misogynistic, drunkard who terrorised both his wife and the girls, while Sadie, unprepared for the challenges of mothering and desperate to maintain appearances, did little to protect them. Denied individualism and personal agency, Edna, Sarah, Wilma, and Helen, were treated as if living dolls, controlled, exploited and violated by both family and strangers alike.

Society by and large were complicit in their abuse, demanding a performance, ignoring the obvious signs of dysfunction, eager to blame any ills on anything except their own behaviour, all while maintaining an egregious double standard. Farley highlights how the socio-political norms of the time permitted the trauma, exploring the contributions of issues such as sexism, racism, political will, economics and religion.

By the time the sisters were 24, all four girls had been labeled as schizophrenic, and became subjects of study at the newly formed National Institute of Mental Health. Psychologists, like lead researcher David Rosenthal, were thrilled with the opportunity to prove a heredity link, but given the reality of the girls lives, it seems obvious the line between nature (genetics) and nurture (environment) in this case cannot be distinctly drawn. Farley examines the flaws in Rosenthal’s study, and, within the context of the history of mental health diagnosis, the field’s vulnerability to political and cultural influence.

I found the writing to be a little dense at times, particularly in the latter half, and the tone overall quite dry, but still I found the book to be fascinating as a whole. The story of Edna, Sarah, Wilma, and Helen Morlok is heartbreaking, and Farley makes some insightful connections between their experience and society that provide context I’d not really considered.… (plus d'informations)