Excerpt: 'The Girls Who Went Away'
July 26, 2006 — -- In "The Girls Who Went Away," Ann Fessler interviews dozens of women who were forced to give their babies up for adoption in the 1950s and 1960s.
They were mostly unmarried, middle-class teenagers who had gotten pregnant with their first sexual partner. They were all scared into submission.
Their mortified and humiliated parents sent these women away -- for many it was the first time they'd left their towns -- to maternity houses where they lived with strangers until it was time to deliver their babies.
They were then driven to hospitals where they were dropped off and left to have their babies alone. Many of them never got a chance to hold their babies.
Some didn't even get to see them.
Four days later, they were released from the hospital and sent home to families who told them to never speak of the matter again.
Now, 50 years later, these women describe what it was like to go through that experience as a teenager -- and how it has affected their lives.
Read an excerpt from Fessler's book below.
My mother told me that on my first three birthdays she lit a special candle on my cake for the young woman who had given birth to me. She never explained why she did this for three years, no more no less. I don't remember this private ceremony but I do remember that there were times in my childhood when she looked at me in a particular way and I knew she was thinking about this young woman, my mother.
Three generations of women from my family have been brought together by adoption. Neither my maternal grandmother, nor my mother, nor I, have given birth to a child. I am the first for whom this was a conscious choice.
My mother was never told that she was adopted. For my grandmother to admit this would have been a public declaration of her own inadequacy, her inability to bear children for her husband. But my mother knew. She had found her birth certificate taped to the back of a painting at her aunt's house. Her name had been Baby Helene before it was Hazel, and when she brought me home she named me Ann Helene.
My mother suffered her own private insecurity over not being able to bring a child to full term. But by the time she and my father turned to adoption, there was no public stigma attaching to those who chose to adopt. In post-World-War-II America, families who wanted to adopt were carefully screened and represented a kind of model family, one with a mother and father that really wanted to raise a child.
Although it is doubtful that families vetted through this process were actually any better or worse than other families, I was lucky enough to have parents who were loving and supportive and mindful of my development as an individual. They knew that they could guide me, but they also understood I was not the sum of their parts. I was the product of two young people who were themselves, perhaps, too young to fully understand the characteristics they had inherited from their own parents and passed on to me.
My adoptive mother and father were offered very little information about my biological parents. She was 19 and from a big farm family of English and German descent. He was athletic, a college football player from a family of means. Their parents felt that this was no way to start a family.
My mother cried whenever she told me this story. She knew it could not be so simple. I did not. The story of that young couple sounded like the plot of a movie to me. I liked being part of this soulful story of ill-fated love, of having a mysterious past, of not being related to my family, of being my own person.
When I became sexually active I imagined that if the worst happened I would do as my mother had done: go off to another town to a home for unwed mothers, and return with a story about a kidney infection, or about an Aunt Betty in Sandusky who needed my care.
This is what young women who got caught in this unfortunate situation did. Almost every graduating class had a girl who disappeared. Everyone knew where she had gone and that she had most likely been told: "If you love your child you must give it up, move on with your life, and forget."
It never occurred to me that those girls may not have forgotten, that it might not have been so easy to just move on with your life. But then I had never gone through pregnancy and childbirth myself. And I had never heard the story from a woman who had surrendered her child.
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