Woman 99
When Charlotte Smith’s bipolar sister Phoebe is committed by their parents to the Goldengrove Home for the Curable Insane because of something Charlotte feels responsible for, she takes audacious action. Using a planned six-week trip to visit an aunt as cover, she feigns a suicide attempt which sends her to Goldengrove, where she becomes an inmate assigned the number 99.
Behind the asylum’s high stone walls, miles away from the Smith home in San Francisco, Charlotte quickly finds that many women have been shut away not because of mental illness, but because they no longer—or never did—comport with late 1800s familial or societal demands: one woman dared to have an affair; another tried simply to get an education.
Woman 99 reveals what little was known about mental illness; how treatments, such as immersion water therapy, the Darkness, and the Tranquility Box, often were misguided and indiscriminately performed; and how inmates were starved and forced to work in fields and soap-making to increase profits for investors.
Even more than the setting and the times, the book unmasks the strictures and attitudes toward women in American society: the narrow role they were allowed to play, the limited skills they could acquire, the path to a planned marriage that would secure financial security for a father’s failing business or the political success of an ambitious husband.
It creates a resilient and innovative character who learns from more experienced inmates how to navigate byzantine confines and bypass locked doors in the search for her sister, and who builds on core inner strength to challenge norms in- and outside Goldengrove. It also illustrates how little one can understand about another, even a sister, who has mental disease. Woman 99 is thrilling and thought-provoking.
