What Every Girl Should Know
Innocence.
Rebellion.
Awakening.
In a Catholic reformatory in 1914, three teenage girls — Anne, Theresa, and Lucy — pass the time with masturbation rituals, innocent of the “sinful” nature adults would assign to their acts.
Then Joan arrives. Belligerent, guarded, and carrying illegal contraband: birth control materials distributed by women’s-rights activist Margaret Sanger.
What begins as curiosity becomes something far more powerful.
The girls begin reading the material and jokingly pretend to venerate Sanger as a saint. Soon, their curiosity develops into a profound conversion experience.
They follow Sanger’s life in the newspaper while imagining lives of their own — traveling freely, assassinating enemies, taking lovers, and controlling their own destinies.
Through letters to one another, the girls reveal pasts marked by abuse. Their shared fantasy grows increasingly real until objects from the world they have imagined begin appearing in their actual lives — including a baby.
