How This Writer Got a Book Deal From Her Narratively Story about the Socialite who Sterilized Her Daughter

Audrey Clare Farley always wanted to write a book about eugenics, and her essay on Ann Cooper Hewitt opened the door.

Photo courtesy AP Photo/RJF

Last September, a whistleblower complaint revealed that immigrants at an ICE detention center in Georgia were being forcibly sterilized. While this news was shocking to many, there is in fact a long history in the U.S. of people – mainly women and people of color – being sterilized without their consent.

One of these people was Ann Cooper Hewitt, a socialite whose mother ordered her fallopian tubes to be removed in the 1930s. Audrey Clare Farley first wrote about Ann  in a Hidden History story for Narratively, which was a huge viral hit when we published it in 2019.

Her book The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt tells Ann’s story in the context of the eugenics movement prior to World War II. The Unfit Heiress will be released on April 20.

Farley talked to Narratively about writing on eugenics, the journey from her Narratively article to a completed book and her advice for archival research.