Virtuous Women

In Virtuous Women, Margaret Karlin splits open the innuendos and happenstance of life for women in the 1950s by providing a crystalline portrait of four young nurses, three of whom live at a home for recent graduates. Kenwood House is an old mansion in the heart of a transforming inner city neighborhood of Chicago. From the hospital in which they work and the neighborhood in which they live, readers catch glimpses of the very personal and ominous thoughts, dreams and realization of the women. Often feeling powerless and at the beck and call of the establishment, Kate, Rebecca, and Sue Ann work at a large medical complex where choices are few and the rewards are bittersweet. June, another nursing school friend, has chosen marriage only to find that the quintessential white-picket-fence-life has a myriad of issues of its own. Together they find themselves on very diverse yet parallel paths as they mature and grow in the exciting yet repressive Eisenhower era.