You ever read some shit so evil it kinda pumps the brakes on the rest of your day?
Are you fucking ready for this knowledge? To my exasperated followers, give me a break, I haven’t given a good historical rant about her in a few months. Also who the hell uses the word ‘vegetable’ anymore? Yeah, I’m taking over this post. Here we go:
Rosemary Kennedy was JFK’s sister. Joseph Kennedy manipulated his children for years, always wanting them to be the picturesque family to help gain political traction. “Oh, they’re so pretty, oh, they’re so well-behaved, oh, they’re the definition of family ideals” that stuff.
For the most part, the rest of the Kennedy children obliged.
Rosemary?
Rosemary left her boarding school to go on dates.
…Yeah. Yeah, that was it. Rosemary left the boarding school and went on dates. That was her “rebellious nature”. She was a tad bit clumsy, she might have actually had borderline Asperger’s due to her inability to pick up on social cues, and she left her boarding school to go on dates with boys. That last one pissed off Joseph so that, by the time Rosemary was twenty-three (the above cruce post makes it seem like she was a teenager but no, she was twenty-three, I’m not saying this to diminish anything, I’m saying that she was a fully-grown adult and still under her father’s manipulations), he took her to Walter Jackson Freeman without consulting his wife. If you haven’t been privy to any of my rants, Walter Jackson Freeman was a man who used icepicks and knives to cut into people’s heads, chopping off pieces of their brain, a process known as the frontal lobotomy. Icepicks. The things you used to chip ice. Icepicks. Although I’m pretty sure he used a kitchen knife on Rosemary because, you know, that’s so much better. Anywho, not only was she forced into the operation, not only was she forced to sing God Bless America, but she was forced to say The Lord’s Prayer. The. Lord’s. Prayer. Until. She. Couldn’t. Because. They. Paralyzed. Her.
Joseph was so disgusted by her new state (you know, because she was paralyzed) that he sent her to a far-off asylum where she remained for decades. When JFK ran for his presidency and was asked about the whereabouts of his sister, he said that she was away, teaching and/or studying.
Nobody visited Rosemary for decades.
Nobody visited Rosemary for decades.
When her mother finally visited, Rosemary lunged at her in anger and had to be sedated. Her mother’s response? You ready for this? I mean, seriously, are you ready? Like I know what you’re thinking: “Mate, you just went into a rant by memory (yeah, I’m typing this all by memory) about a woman whose brain was hacked up using a butter knife so that she wouldn’t embarrass her family during their political campaign, only for that woman to become paralyzed and institutionalized without visitors for decades, what the fuck can be worse than that?” Seriously though, brace yourselves.
When Rose Kennedy saw her daughter for the first time in decades (after Rosemary was institutionalized as a result of Joseph’s severe medical abuse), when Rose saw her…her first concern…was that she was fat.
Like I said, I wrote this all from memory, but have a bundle of sources confirming everything:
Lobotomies to “correct” misbehaving children weren’t isolated to this family. This was considered a parent’s right. This family isn’t specially cursed, this was fucking “normal” at one point.
Even now, there’s disabled kids who have to fight their parents about invasive and detrimental surgeries and “medical treatments” like this.
It’s part the abuse culture that surrounds parenting – that parents can do what they want to their kids and nobody can tell them otherwise – and part more standard bigotry. The lines between sexism, racism, and ableism tend to blur when it comes to parental abuse culture.
And shit like this is happening in everyday homes,
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 