Kathryn Stockett

And she's come to Oxford to ask her sister.

For money, which, you know, nobody wants to ask anybody for money, much less your little sister.

But, you know, it's the Great Depression.

It's 1933, and times are getting harder and harder for really everyone in America.

And these two stories intertwine.

It was so much research, you know, and I...

I don't know why I don't like to write a contemporary novel.

and see it through the perspective of my characters.

I picked this time in history because it was such a trying time for not only America, but for women.

You know, women hadn't really even had the vote for that long by 1933.

And as you will find out in part two because of the plot, I didn't want penicillin to be widely used.

if you are a woman and you happen to pick up a certain, you know,

from a certain profession, I will say, it was terrifying.

If you picked up syphilis or gonorrhea, it could kill you.

And there were no options, especially for women who were essentially poor and didn't have jobs and didn't have families that had money, didn't have husbands.

And that's what this story is about, a group of women coming together and looking after themselves.

I did.

The first couple of drafts I went through, you know, they were just sort of lacking that luster that, you know, as a writer, I guess you would call it the heart.

And then I stumbled upon a law that was passed in Mississippi in 1928 that legalized the sterilization of

of anyone deemed feeble-minded or an imbecile, so-called imbecile was the word they used in the law, or had epilepsy or what we now know today as autism.