A Woman of Limited Means is an attempt to chronicle the life of a woman who was denied the most basic human rights. The right to freedom, and the right to live at home and raise her children was taken away by her husband. Locked in his own addiction to alcohol, he was not capable of recognizing the devastation he caused his family when he had his wife, needlessly, put in a mental institution. The book is written by the daughter of the woman in question, and is written through her eyes in the first person point of view. The author remains as the narrator throughout the book. Her information was limited to her own experience with a mother who was taken from her at four years of age. From 1948 - 1962, a patient at Helmuth, Irene Stewart Sandquist remained hospitalized while her two daughters struggled in a motherless home, having to cope with their father’s alcoholic behavior on their own.
