Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, child sexual abuse, and rape. 

“Margaret Roach had told them about the homes. They were run by nuns who beat the girls, made them work in industrial laundries, and sold their babies, and Margaret Roach was a Catholic so she would know. The homes were for poor girls, trashy girls, fast girls. They were for sluts.”

This novel is designed to depict the real but hidden history of American maternity homes: institutions that were often church-run and were built to house young women who became pregnant outside of marriage. As the deliberately derogatory, judgmental language of this passage indicates, the girls were blamed for their pregnancies, shamed, and stigmatized. Rather than receiving assistance, counseling, or parenting classes, the girls were shut away from society until their babies were born. Their children were often forcibly adopted out to “intact” families. By beginning his novel with a description of maternity homes, Hendrix grounds his work of fiction in the lived experience of countless young women.

“‘Young lady,’” Miss Wellwood said, ‘look at me when I am speaking to you. Are you capable of having a productive conversation?’”

As her abrupt form of address suggests, Miss Wellwood is a stern, sour, and disrespectful person who does not treat the girls with respect. Instead, she judges them harshly for having gotten pregnant outside of marriage. Her blatant contempt represents the scorn that society as a whole heaped upon unwed mothers during the first half of the 20th century, and it is evident in her first meeting with Neva that she is meant to be an antagonistic figure.