As activists are well aware, American women’s fight for bodily autonomy is ongoing. One of the most shameful battles in this war occurred in the 1920s, when eugenics — the study of breeding a better ...

Editor's note: This segment was rebroadcasted on Aug. 9, 2023. Find that audio here. Here & Now's Robin Young speaks with Ann Leary, whose new book, "The Foundling," centers around a young woman who ...

Find a book excerpt here. We revisit Robin Young's July 2022 conversation with author Ann Leary. Leary's book "The Foundling" centers around a young woman who gets a job at an institution where women ...

Today's fictional book is set in very non-fictional circumstances. Novelist Ann Leary was trying to learn about her grandmother's history as an orphan and found that she worked at a eugenics asylum in ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. From the New York Times bestselling author of The Good House, The Foundling is the story of two friends, raised in the same ...

Leary’s gripping latest (after The Children) chronicles a naïve young woman’s role in a eugenics program at a Pennsylvania asylum in 1927. Mary Engle grows up in an orphanage and, at 18, gets her ...

"The Foundling" takes on the embrace of eugenics, the ugly theory that certain people were unfit to have children. The theory was mainly directed... In 'The Foundling,' novelist Ann Leary explores a ...