Like Hickok, the investigators belonged to – or had become part of – middle class America, and like her they were not free of prejudice. Not one of them failed at some point to remark on the ‘unworthy’, the ‘chisellers’, the ‘derelict’, those who were basically ‘unemployable’ and for whom no amount of work projects could help. Gellhorn raged against lack of birth control, families of 14 or more where mothers and daughters were pregnant at the same time and in which children were growing up ‘in terrible surroundings: dirt, disease, over-crowding, undernourishment’. ‘You have to fight
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