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NY State will not release records of feminist suspected of being silenced by wrongful commitment to Islip Psychiatric Center on Long Island in 1927

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  • NY State will not release records of feminist suspected of being silenced by wrongful commitment to Islip Psychiatric Center on Long Island in 1927


    Banned in the 1920s, a University of Chicago grad’s fiery feminist memoir has been reissued, making it widely available for the 1st time

    By Nara Schoenberg
    Chicago Tribune |
    Oct 07, 2021 at 10:49 AM

    Once described as able to “fight her weight in wildcat,” University of Chicago graduate Gertrude Beasley came out swinging in her 1925 memoir, “My First Thirty Years.”

    In the first sentence, she accused her father of raping her mother. By page 2, she was relating her first real memory: a sexual assault by her eldest brother when she was only about 4 years old.

    Beasley’s blistering account of poverty and abuse on the Texas frontier was banned for “obscenity” in the 1920s, despite an admiring review in the New Yorker. Within two years, Beasley, a journalist with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, was committed to a Long Island psychiatric hospital where she would remain for the rest of her life.

    ...

    Q. How much do we know about her time in the psychiatric hospital?

    Nina: What we know is that she was (committed) within 10 days of her ship docking in Manhattan (in 1927). We know that she was sent to the Central Islip Psychiatric Center on Long Island. We know that she died there because copies of her death certificate were obtained and her burial plot was found on the site. We do not know anything about her records while in the hospital. My understanding is that those may exist, but the state of New York has not released them and will not release them, even to kin. In the Texas Monthly article that came out a couple weeks ago, the author made a compelling case (that) we don’t know. Maybe she had a total psychiatric breakdown. We just don’t know. There’s a lot of really compelling reasons to assume that (her hospitalization) was absolutely unwarranted, but we don’t actually know.

    Q. What do you think happened?

    Marie: I think she was silenced. Yes, she could have had a psychiatric break but if you look at everything she went through in her life (while managing to) keep a very good hold on herself, I just see it as less likely that finally, after everything, that’s what happened.


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