A great expose about the perils of gonorrhoea -- estimated that at the time, 70-90% of men had it (even the doctor who provided that estimate had it). Women were kept in the dark -- didn't want to corrupt their innocence. Women were to be subservient to their husbands -- but with the help of an older woman, a suffragette who worked to eliminate child labor, Sylvia fought against society's norms. A great book that demonstrates how far women have come in 100 years! A good quick read, and as most Upton Sinclair, ahead of its time. The story of naïveté, marriage, enlightenment, and the drama that comes with knowledge of good and evil. A story of inequality of the sexes. (goodreads)
Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American author who wrote nearly 100 books and other works across a number of genres. Sinclair's work was well-known and popular in the first half of the twentieth century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle, which exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." He is remembered for writing the famous line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon him not understanding it."