Emily Chan
During the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, a set of quintuplets were born two months premature in Ontario, Canada. The mother, Elzire Dionne, had suspected she was carrying twins.
So, it came as a shock when she gave birth to five identical female babies named Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Emilie, and Marie.
The Dionne quintuplets were a never-before-seen sensation. The chances of identical quintuplets occurring and surviving past birth were about one in 57 million.
When the girls were four months old, they were taken from their parents after the government deemed them unfit to raise the girls, even though the Dionnes had successfully brought up three boys before the girls were ever born.
So, under the care of the government, the girls’ every move was recorded for the sake of science. They were even used as a tourist attraction and spent a lot of time in a nursery that was essentially a “baby zoo.” The nursery contained an outdoor playground surrounded by one-way glass, which allowed visitors to observe them without being seen while they played.
The nursery was guarded by police and enclosed by a barbed wire fence that was seven feet tall. Overall, the quintuplets earned an estimated $51 million in tourist revenue for Ontario, drawing in more than three million tourists. They were even more popular than Niagara Falls.
Each day, the girls were forced to follow a rigid schedule, doing pretty much everything together. In the mornings, they dressed, had their hair curled, ate breakfast, and cleaned up their plates. Then, they were brought to the zoo-like area to be put on display. Afterward, they were poked and prodded by doctors monitoring their growth.
The girls were isolated from the outside world, but everyone knew them. They appeared in movies, parades, and advertisements, becoming the faces of many brands. Their parents lived across the street from them and opened a souvenir shop to capitalize on their daughters’ fame.
Nearly ten years later, the girls’ parents regained custody of them. Instead of being happy to have them back, their parents treated them poorly, making them feel unwanted.
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