Her letters home show a young girl struggling to get it right. Over the next nine years, she attended five different schools. At age 11, Rosemary was sent to boarding school. But Rosemary's disability was a challenge her mother couldn't face alone. Even for the wealthy, hospitals for people with disabilities were houses of horror-filthy, staffed with under-qualified caregivers and criminals, with patients often chained to walls and subjected to physical and sexual abuse and medical experiments. Sending Rosemary to an institution was too extreme for Rose and Joe Sr. And then, of course, the Kennedys were devout Catholics, whose church deemed disability the result of sin-a punishment from God. Rockefeller, believed in eugenics, a pseudoscience that advocated for forced sterilization of the "defective," a group that included the mental and physically disabled. Many Americans, including prominent members of society like Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D.
In the 1920s, the stigma associated with mental disability could ruin a family.
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