Other women saw the need for greater freedom as well, but acknowledged a continuing need for sexual restraint and more often saw the state as performing at least part of the patriarchal duties formerly the responsibility of families and local communities. In their attempts to seek equality, many young women demanded sexual freedom as well and tested the limits of constraints. Families and communities had removed much of their control over young men's sexuality, but they attempted to control young women. Her story deserves to be heard.For middle-class white women and male officials, it seemed easier to restrain women than men. Beasley's memoir is one of the most brutally honest coming-of-age historical memoirs ever written. My First Thirty Years reveals the story of a woman who grew up in abject poverty in rural Texas during the early 1900s, where she battled ongoing internal wars with herself concerning her family, faith, sexual reckoning, and quest for education at a time when women were not supposed to discuss those things. She never left, dying there of pancreatic cancer in 1955. and was committed to a psychiatric center on Long Island. A few months later, she returned to the U.S. While living in London, she had been thrown out of her lodgings-for reasons that remain unclear-arrested and placed in a mental ward. Her fate remained a mystery until researchers began digging into her story. In 1927, Beasley-a self-proclaimed socialist and staunch feminist who fought for women's rights-disappeared. Only five-hundred copies were printed, very few of which made it into readers' hands, having been confiscated by customs inspectors or removed from bookshelves by Texas law enforcement. This is the searing opening to Edna "Gertrude" Beasley's raw and scathing memoir, originally published in Paris in 1925 but ultimately suppressed and lost to history as a banned book-until now. "Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen."
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