I look forward to reading the book, The Girls Who Went Away, by Ann Fessler, and plan to write a review and opinion about it here. I’m on the waiting list now at our public library. Check back here in a couple of months for my full review!
But for now, I wish to shoot down a claim that Fessler makes in her interview article link below. I am also cc/pasting the article here, with my comments in bold italics within her article.
“A few of the older, college-age women did choose to go to the maternity homes, because they were supposed to be places that would shelter you and give you time to think about your decision.
“But the statistics reveal the truth: If women went into a home, 80 percent would surrender their baby, because once they were there, the pressure to do so was tremendous. The women were told, ‘This is absolutely the best option. If you love your baby, you will give it up for adoption, so it can have two parents.’”
In my own case it was absolutely UNTRUE that the Salvation Army home and hospital I was in gave no other options. I was given great counseling, plenty of opportunity to make my own decision. I chose to have the adoption handled/managed by the local County. The County social worker was great. My parents were very supportive, and offered to raise the child themselves. I was not going to allow them to do that, since I believed, and still do believe, that the way I was raised with brutal “spankings” was any way to treat a human being, let alone a child and teenager. My parents were great in most ways, but the words “discipline” (meaning “punish”) and “control your children” were the ethos of the day, particularly in the South of the United States, and still are today there if the information given at Project NoSpank is correct about that region. See http://www.nospank.net/
“If we are ever to turn toward a kindlier society and a safer world, a revulsion against the physical punishment of children would be a good place to start.” — Dr. Benjamin Spock
“<snip> So the first myth would be that the women made a choice, which implies having options — when, in fact, the women I interviewed saw no alternatives at all. If their parents weren’t going to help them — which was really the only way that any girls made it — then they didn’t have a choice.”
Fessler’s research figure, 80 percent, does not address the other 20 percent. I hope the book does talk about this 20 percent of the one and one half million birthmothers.
Here is an interview with the book’s author, herself an adoptee.
http://www.salon.com/2006/05/11/fessler_qa/
Here is the article in full, my comments [in bold italics].
The children they gave away
In the decades between World War II and Roe v. Wade, 1.5 million young women were secretly sent to homes for unwed mothers and coerced into giving their babies up for adoption. Now their stories are finally being told.
“Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to keep [my] baby, or explained the options. I went to a maternity home, I was going to have the baby, they were going to take it, and I was going to go home. I was not allowed to keep the baby. I would have been disowned.”
— Joyce
It was the 1960s and Joyce was going to beauty school in Florida when she realized she was pregnant. When her mother found out, Joyce says, she was “dumped” at a Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers in Alabama. “It was an old, old, old house with big rooms,” she remembers now. “[And] I had no control … It was like being in a car wreck or something. Once you start skidding, that’s it. [So] I kind of skidded through it.”
Joyce is just one of more than a million and a half women who were sent to maternity homes to surrender their children for adoption in the decades between World War II and the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973. They were college freshman working their way through school with two jobs. They were tomboys, sorority girls and valedictorians. They were mothers and they were invisible.
But now, artist and writer Ann Fessler has uncovered their hidden stories. The result of years of research and more than one hundred interviews, Fessler’s new book, “The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade,” is an astonishing oral history that brings to light the dark undercurrent of life in America’s postwar middle class. Denied adequate sex education, shamed by socially conformist parents and peers, and without legal access to abortion, Fessler’s subjects emerge as the victims of a double standard that labeled them promiscuous while condoning the sexual adventures of their male counterparts.
Spirited away under the pretense of an illness or a family vacation, the women — many of them teenagers — spent their pregnancies away from home and gave birth among strangers. While the maternity homes were billed as a quiet place for women to reflect on their futures, when it came time to sign adoption papers, most of the women Fessler interviewed said they felt intense pressure to relinquish their children. Persuaded by social workers who said they would never be able to provide as well for their babies as a stable couple would, ostracized by families who were shocked by their behavior, and insecure about their own strength and intelligence, most women did as they were told and tried to forget.
Decades later, though, the mothers say the repercussions of those decisions are still being felt, as they struggle with depression, fight to find their lost children, and make peace with their past. “The Girls Who Went Away” is both politically and emotionally charged. Intertwining her spare prose with the mothers’ own words, Fessler raises difficult questions about reproductive freedom, women’s rights and sex education that seem particularly relevant today as Roe v. Wade is threatened, pharmacists refuse to fill contraception prescriptions, and a conservative administration promotes an abstinence only agenda in America’s schools.
Salon spoke with Fessler from her home in Rhode Island about the meaning of choice, the long-term effects of living a lie, and myths about unwed mothers.
You’ve been working on the subject of adoption for years, first as a visual artist and now as a writer. Was it your own experience as an adoptee that inspired you to reach out to birth mothers?
It really all began in 1989, when a woman approached me at a gallery opening and said that she thought I was the daughter she had given up for adoption decades before. I wasn’t, but it was an amazing experience because at that point, I really hadn’t thought too much about trying to find my own mother.
The woman told me a little about her story as a surrendering mother. She was sent to a maternity home and said she never felt like she made the decision to surrender her child, but that it was made for her. She asked if I had tried to contact my mother and when I told her that I hadn’t, because I didn’t want to bother her after all those years, the woman said, “She probably worries every single day about what’s happened to you and whether you’ve had a good life.” And that thought had just never occurred to me.
That was the moment I decided that I wanted to start reflecting on my experiences as an adoptee. Through the years, in each of my projects — whether films or art installations — I tried to set up areas where other people could contribute their stories. I was trying to be inclusive and to raise awareness of what adoption is like from all different viewpoints. And each time, I was really impressed by the stories I heard — they started to give me an idea of the complexity of the situation. But what floored me were the stories from the surrendering moms, mostly because I kept hearing the same things again and again — that the mothers didn’t feel like they had a choice. And I just kept thinking, why have I not heard these stories before?
You obviously tried to collect interviews from a range of women, but it does seem like because they were not cheap, the maternity homes serviced a particularly white, middle-class clientele. Did you discover different kinds of stories when speaking with women of different races and classes?
The African-American women I interviewed, of course, were women who had surrendered their children; I didn’t interview people who kept them. So they actually had the same kind of experience as most of the white women I spoke with, in that their families had high hopes and aspirations for them and felt that given the time period, if they had a child it would be the end of their education and everything else. Their parents were well-intentioned, but they didn’t anticipate the long-term effects — though it’s hard to imagine how anyone who’s had a child could not anticipate that surrendering a child would have a lifelong impact.
You say again and again that these stories need to be understood within the context of their time. What was it about the postwar years that made it such a difficult time for young women?
There was a lot of social pressure in the 1950s and 1960s — [so true!] the time period I focus on — and that pressure was partly due to the tremendous rise in economic and social stability in many families after the war. The U.S had a booming economy, so families that had previously been thought of as working-class poor had moved up into the middle class and they didn’t want to go back. Having a daughter who was pregnant and not married was — and sometimes still is — seen as a reflection of parenting skills, and someone who had a daughter who was pregnant was considered low-class. [“low class” was a term bandied about in my family for all sorts of things, throughout my childhood and adolescence.] It was just thought that didn’t happen in “good” families, though of course that was because the “good” families were the ones who could afford to cover it up by sending their daughters out of town.
Many of the women I spoke with talked about feeling betrayed because their mothers seemed more concerned about what the neighbors thought than about how they were coping, or what was going to happen to their grandchild.
I was surprised, reading the women’s stories, how often it was the mothers who were hardest on the daughters, and it was the fathers who visited them and cared for them when they were sent away.
Isn’t that interesting? I think that partly that was because at the time, raising children was really seen as the mother’s role, and the father’s influence was not considered as central. The idea was that if you were a solid middle-class family, the mom stayed home and spent her whole life with the kids, raising them and shaping them — so if something went wrong, it was her failure.
You write that the historical silence about maternity homes has helped perpetrate myths about what the mothers were like and what they wanted. What are those myths?
The biggest one is that any baby surrendered for adoption was willingly and perhaps even eagerly given up by the mother. And so the implication is that the women considered all their options — that they had options — and made a decision. When, in fact, most of the women I interviewed felt they didn’t really make the decision at all. If they were high school age, their parents made the arrangements and said this is what is going to happen, we’ll help you through this, but this is the only way. [I think it was the main way, if not the only way. High school girls who were pregnant were not allowed to continue in their school. The belief was that no man would marry a girl who had had a child out of wedlock. How would the girl support herself? Who would look after her and a child? Would the parents have been willing or able — financially or otherwise — to raise the child of their own unwed pregnant daughter?]
A few of the older, college-age women did choose to go to the maternity homes, because they were supposed to be places that would shelter you and give you time to think about your decision. But the statistics reveal the truth: If women went into a home, 80 percent would surrender their baby, because once they were there, the pressure to do so was tremendous. The women were told, “This is absolutely the best option. If you love your baby, you will give it up for adoption, so it can have two parents.”
There was just no room for imagining other solutions at the time, [This is an excellent point — “no room for imagining.” The culture had no idea/s of what else to do. And of course we know that abortions were illegal. In my own case, the man who I had sex with asked me, “What would you do if a guy got you pregnant?” I said, “I would expect him to help me find a good abortionist.” He said, “I would marry her.” I said, “I can’t imagine a worse way to marry someone — just because they were pregnant.” Of course, the rogue had no intention of marrying me or any of the other girls he screwed.] at least in the middle class. I’m the same age as many of the women in the book — I came of age in the late ’50s and early ’60s — and I can tell you that growing up, I didn’t even know anyone who was divorced. [I knew three kids who lived with a single parent. One’s dad was divorced, and he lived with his dad. For the other two, girls who lived with their mothers, the whereabouts of their fathers was never mentioned.] It was just such a homogeneous world if you were white and middle-class that you didn’t have any other examples to follow as a parent. [And in my case, I had no role models or example of how to raise a child, other than the way I was raised, and I had no intention of raising a child that way.] So the first myth would be that the women made a choice, which implies having options — when, in fact, the women I interviewed saw no alternatives at all. [Yes, that was definitely true in my case.] If their parents weren’t going to help them — which was really the only way that any girls made it — then they didn’t have a choice.
The second myth was that during the time period the book covers, anyone who got pregnant and sent away was considered a slut. [I still carry that stigma inside my mind. When it got around in my extended family — without my permission, I might add — that a birth daughter had found me when I was in my 40s and she was in her 20s, at least one of my aunts told me she could never tell my uncle! “He just wouldn’t understand,” she said.] It was an extremely hypocritical time sexually, because by the end of the 1960s something like 68 percent of women were having sex before age 20, but everybody lied about it. [I myself believed girls DIDN’T have sex, and that I was unusual to have such a high sex drive.] So all the girls who were having sex but didn’t get caught could claim they were virgins, [And wear white wedding dresses. To wear any other color implied the girl was not a virgin.] but the ones who got pregnant couldn’t deny what they had done. [Exposed! She had sex! She’s one of those girls who did, and none of the other girls do!] So it was assumed they were either promiscuous or more sexually advanced than their peers, when most weren’t. It turns out, actually, that among the women I interviewed, most became pregnant with their first sexual partner, some with their very first sexual experience, and many within only five sexual experiences. So most likely they got pregnant not because they were promiscuous, but because they were naive. They didn’t know anything about sex; some didn’t even know how babies were born. People just didn’t talk about sex during the era; [To “experience” what the ambience was in those days, I highly recommend the movie “Separate Tables” with Deborah Kerr and David Niven playing the roles of two sexually repressed adults. They play the part to a “T.” I have shared this movie several times in our current era, and younger people just don’t “get it” at all. They can’t feel it, I think.] there was no sexual education, and in some families it simply never came up.
The third myth is that a woman who surrenders her child doesn’t suffer a loss. The families and the people who ran the maternity homes told the women that they’d go to the hospital and have the baby and the baby would be taken away and life would go back to normal — as though they just had their appendix removed. The idea was that they could make up a lie about where they’d been for the past four months and no one in the community would be the wiser — it would be like it never happened. [I was given many opportunities and encouragement to change my mind about the adoption option. But in the end, I was told, “Once you sign those papers, you are no longer a mother. Only a court order will allow the adoptive family to contact you, or you to contact them.]
