Sacrificing human rights for girls due to extreme economic hardship should be a thing of the past.

 "In 1932, Georgia native Erskine Caldwell wrote Tobacco Road, a raw, descriptive novel that shocked the conscience of the nation about the sharecropping system in Depression-era Georgia, a place he later described as somewhere people 'hungered in shacks miles deep in remote woods.' The novel’s protagonist, Jeeter Lester, becomes so desperate to feed his starving family that he offers to exchange his 12-year-old daughter’s virginity for a sack of turnips. Many sought to censor the novel at the time as vulgar and offensive, but Caldwell countered that he only wrote about 'the world as I knew it to be during that particular era for the white and Black people who lived difficult lives together in the rural South, and it told about the hard sharecropper system which was an often ignored though dominant element of Southern life.'"

~ Jim Barger, Jr.

"Jimmy Carter: Unwavering" — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER

https://bittersoutherner.com/feature/2024/jimmy-carter-unwavering-100