The Fields Foundation’s mission to aid women

The Fields Foundation’s mission is to aid women by providing resources and a place where they can gather themselves and live independently. Established through Jenny Fields’s estate and based at her large coastal house at Dog’s Head Harbor, the Foundation makes her example of unconventional choices into an ongoing institution. Its work combines refuge, recovery, creative space, and practical advice, while its eligibility decisions expose Garp to the complexities Jenny’s bequest asks him to confront.

Purpose and Founding

After Jenny’s death, Garp learned that her estate was substantial and that she had named him executor of her wishes, including the use of her mansion for women in need. The bequest did not arrive as a detailed program: Garp spent weeks puzzling over the single sentence in which Jenny described what she wanted the money and house to accomplish. Her stated aim was to leave a place where women deemed worthy could collect themselves and be themselves, by themselves.

That formulation gives the Foundation both a clear purpose and an unresolved question. Jenny’s emphasis falls on space, self-possession, and the ability to recover without having to conform to someone else’s expectations. But the word “worthy” leaves a practical boundary to be drawn: the institution must decide which women receive its limited assistance, even though Jenny’s declaration does not specify a test.

From Private Example to Public Support

The Foundation extends the influence Jenny had already acquired through her writing and life. In Garp’s view, she never stopped being a nurse: she cared for him when he was young, became a figure of strength to women facing problems, and offered advice to those who sought her out. After the success of A Sexual Suspect, women across the country felt encouraged by her example of making unpopular decisions about how to live. The Foundation gives that encouragement a material form rather than leaving it at the level of reputation or counsel.

Jenny’s earlier care also provides a personal background for the work without reducing the Foundation to an extension of family life. At the infirmary, she understood that the young Garp needed companionship and distraction as well as nursing. Later, at Dog’s Head Harbor, she helped care for Helen and the family during their recovery. These episodes establish care as practical, attentive work; the Foundation broadens that impulse into support for women beyond Jenny’s immediate circle.

Services at Dog’s Head Harbor

Under Roberta Muldoon, who became the Foundation’s in-residence administrator, the house took on several functions at once. It became a writers’ colony, a recovery center, and a birth-advisory clinic. A few well-lit attic rooms offered painters a place to work in solitude. The range of uses makes the house more than a shelter: it supports physical recovery, reproductive advice, and artistic work, while giving residents room to be apart from others when they need it.

The Foundation’s arrangement also depends on a division of responsibility. Women seeking aid wrote to Roberta, who organized a small staff. The staff did not simply transmit applications to Garp; they discussed them, and the people involved could disagree with him. The house’s varied services thus rested on ongoing decisions and administration, not on the bequest alone.

Eligibility and Governance

The question of who counted as worthy became Garp’s most immediate difficulty as executor. He asked what the grants would fund and who had the authority to judge a woman’s worthiness. His protests reveal the gap between Jenny’s concise statement of purpose and the choices required to carry it out. The estate gives him responsibility, but her intention does not supply a ready-made rule for allocating support.

Roberta insisted that the Foundation mattered precisely because Garp would have to deal with these problems. She offered to work with him: he would remain in charge, while she advised him and challenged decisions she considered mistaken. Twice each month, she and the board of trustees gathered with Garp to choose among applicants. His role therefore involved more than managing money or property; he had to take part in judgments that Jenny’s legacy made unavoidable, under the scrutiny of colleagues who could argue back.

Significance

The Fields Foundation translates Jenny’s independence into institutional form, but it does not make her ideal simple to administer. Its work offers women a place for recovery, advice, solitude, and creative activity; its admission process, in turn, asks how such help can be allocated without turning a wish for autonomy into a rigid test of deservingness. Garp’s initial resistance and continuing participation keep that tension visible. The Foundation preserves Jenny’s purpose not as a finished answer but as a responsibility carried out through collective work and repeated decisions.