Scruples and Drams (Minnesota's Main Street Women)

Description: Clearwater provided a safe haven for Jennie Phillips, an apprenticing druggist in her father’s store in the late nineteenth century. While on a routine trip to deliver a prescription out in the country, she is alarmed when she encounters what may be the ghost of a murdered Irish girl. She becomes obsessed with the unsolved case. At the same time, she struggles with her responsibility to uphold her father’s ethical practices when she learns how some women are using their over-the-counter patent medicines. Yet when she learns that rape and burglary can take place even in her village, Jennie realizes Clearwater is not as idyllic as she once thought, and for many women, the art of living isn’t as exact as dispensing.

Review: “Nestle down into a satisfying journey as Cindy Stupnik takes you back to an earlier time with a young Midwestern woman who comes up against the limitations of gender, finding and defining herself in the process. Through the richly detailed narrative we come to care and, immersed in her world, we find new understandings for our own lives and times.”
–Sally Roesch Wagner, Ph.D. Founding Director, The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation

About the Author: A retired English instructor, Cynthia Frank-Stupnik holds a B.A. in English/Education and a M.A. in English. She has authored Steppes to Neu-Odessa: Germans from Russia Who Settled in Odessa Township, Dakota Territory, 1872-1876, a historical biography of Yankton, County, South Dakota, a memoir, Postcards from the Old Man and Other Correspondence from Clearwater, Minnesota, and Passages, a faith-based book of poetry. She has also written and published many poems, creative essays, and short stories, and been the recipient of a number of literary awards.

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