Jane's Cure
Jane Angier won't stop helping women, even if it kills her. And it might.
Trapped in a granite cell, a nineteenth century midwife awaits her trial for the crime of helping women time their pregnancies. Or is she guilty of something far worse?
A trapper's daughter, Jane Angier is a woman of the woods, a free spirit, and a misfit in the Loyalist colony of Queen's Bay, New Brunswick, a beautiful seaside town with ugly secrets. The community is suffering through a set of economic and social disasters. A boatload of Irish immigrants threatens the town with a typhoid epidemic, the bottom has fallen out of the timber trade, and cheap rum turns everyone mean. When Jane loses her family to typhoid, the Queen's Bay midwife takes her on as an apprentice. After Jane takes over the practice, she develops and sells "Jane's Cure for Female Irregularities," a very effective and popular remedy for late periods.
Jane's success threatens the poorly trained doctor trying to grow his practice. He is also threatened by Jane's very close relationship with his wife, a brilliant woman mired in a bad marriage. When Jane helps a rape victim abort, the community's powerful men unite to get her out of Queen's Bay, preferably at the end of a rope.
Jane's Cure is a harrowing tale of women who dare to exercise control over their bodies as they struggle against the first, but not the last, laws banning abortion.
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"We should all be in jail with Jane, the main character in Jane's Cure, if we believe in a woman's right to personal reproductive autonomy since we have states which now ban it. Jane's Cure takes us to the 1850's when it was outlawed in British Canada. Like an Outlander novel, the plot thickens and the main character may feel the hangman's noose around her neck. You read on to see if that will happen." - Cynthia Bittinger, Professor of History, author of Vermont Women, Native Americans and African Americans: Out of the Shadows of History
"Jane's Cure is about a young midwife who sells an effective 'term regulator' in the Canadian Maritimes in the 1850s-a time dominated by fatal diseases and men wielding dangerous power. Jane may pay the ultimate price for outperforming the crudely trained local doctor and for giving women control over their prescribed role of motherhood. D.K. Kennedy's many gifts in storytelling include vivid writing, great details and sense of place, a dynamic balance of action and lyrical moments, suspense to the very end, and a protagonist we cared about so much. Jane's Cure deepens our understanding of what women endured during this crucial time in history. Then, as now, we witness the courage that midwives summon to support women with their skilled and life-affirming care." - Jane Pincus and Wendy Sanford, co-authors of Our Bodies, Ourselves
