The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

by Ann Fessler Narrated by Coleen Marlo

Overview

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.

Editorial Reviews

In what many remember as dark distant days, 1.5 million single American women surrendered their out-of-wedlock babies rather than suffer shame or controversy. In some cases, they didn't even receive the chance to make the decision: Their parents or maternity home caregivers hastily shunted the newborn infants off to adoption. Girls Who Went Away recreates this aspect of the pre-Roe v. Wade era with compelling, often deeply moving oral histories of birth mothers who lost their offspring.

Michael Mewshaw

While striving for diversity of age, race and social background, Fessler discovered that her sources spoke with one voice about the early trauma that continues, in their telling, to blight their lives, scar their psyches and undermine their marriages and their relationships with their parents. Open the book to any page, and sad refrains repeat themselves with the plangency of a ballad.
— The Washinton Post

Kirkus Reviews

Oral history featuring the voices of women who gave up their babies for adoption from 1945 to 1973, put into context by the author's exposition on the mood of the times. Fessler (Photography/Rhode Island School of Design), a video-installation artist and adoptee who has created a number of autobiographical works on adoption, recorded some one hundred women. Narratives from 18 of them appear here, with shorter selections from many others. Drawing on government statistics, sociology, history, medical and legal texts, as well as personal journals and the popular press, she surrounds their stories with descriptions of social mores during the three postwar decades. In an era when sex education was meager and birth control difficult to obtain, more than 1.5 million babies were given up for adoption. The notion that these children were simply not wanted by their mothers is quickly dispelled by the stories told here, which make it immediately clear that the unwed women, many still teenagers, had little choice. Adoption was presented as the only route that would preserve a girl's reputation. She was told to surrender the baby, forget what had happened and move on with her life. Fessler's transcripts reveal that forgetting was impossible and moving on not easily done. Although the stories are at times repetitious, individual voices speak clearly of guilt, abandonment, loneliness, helplessness, fear and coercion. For many, shame and secrecy shaped their lives for years afterward, affecting their relationships with husbands and subsequent offspring, even the ability to form healthy marriages or bear children. The author brackets these oral histories with the story of her own long-delayed search forher birth mother and their eventual meeting. By giving voice to these women, Fessler has enabled adoptees to view the circumstances of their birth with greater understanding. A valuable contribution to the literature on adoption.

From the Publisher

Journalism of the first order, moving and informative in equal measure.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A remarkably well-researched and accomplished book.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A wrenching, riveting book.” —Chicago Tribune

“Haunting.” —People

“It would take a heart of stone not to be moved by the oral histories of these women and by the courage and candor with which they express themselves.” —The Washington Post
 
“Compelling, heartrending reading.” —Portland Tribune
 
“An astonishing oral history.” —Salon.com

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"Fessler recounts her own journey to find and reunite with her birth mother in this heartrending look at the untold story of American women compelled to surrender their children." —Booklist Starred Review

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170657704
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	03/08/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Contents
1. My Own Story as an Adoptee 1

2. Breaking the Silence 7
Dorothy II 14
Annie 24

3. Good Girls v. Bad Girls 29
Nancy I 47
Claudia 54

4. Discovery and Shame 67
Marge 79
Yvonne 85

5. The Family’s Fears 10 1
Jeanette 120
Ruth 127

6. Going Away 133
Karen I 155
Pam 16 4

7. Birth and Surrender 175
Margaret 19 0
Leslie 197

8. The Aftermath 207
Susan III 228
Madeline 237

9. Search and Reunion 247
Susan II 273
Jennifer 279

10. Talking and Listening 287
Lydia 302
Linda I 312

11. Every Mother but My Own 319


1. My Own Story as an Adoptee

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 at 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 that wanted to adopt were carefully screened and represented a kind of model family—one with a mother and a father who 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 that I was not the sum of their parts. I was the product of two young people who had themselves, perhaps, been too young to fully understand the char acteristics 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 nineteen 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 for them to just move on with their lives. 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.
Then something happened that forever changed my understanding of adoption. In 1989, I was attending the opening of an exhibition at the Mary land Institute College of Art, where I had been teaching for seven years. Not long after I arrived, I noticed a woman who looked very familiar. I had a distinct and clear memory of having recently talked to her but I couldn’t remember where or when. I asked several people if they knew who she was, but no one did, so I continued to look at the exhibition.

Later, this woman walked toward me from across the room and with no introduction said, “You could be my long-lost daughter. You look like the perfect combination of myself and the father of my child.” I said, “You don’t know what you’re saying to me. I could be your daughter—I was adopted.” There was a long silence and I saw her start to react as I had. Eventually we compared dates, but they were one year and one month apart. She kept asking, “Are you sure about your birth date? Sometimes records are changed.” But I was sure.

We continued to talk. She asked me if I had looked for my mother and I responded that I didn’t know if I wanted to invade her privacy. I said, “When you gave up a child for adoption in 1949, you didn’t expect her to come knocking on your door forty years later.” And she said, “You should find her. She probably worries every day about what happened to you and whether you’ve had a good life.” I could see in her eyes that she was speaking from her own experience, and the thought that my mother might feel the same sense of loss was shocking to me. I felt guilty and empathetic and naïve all at once. Why had I never considered this possibility? How could I not know? How could everyone not know?

I continued to listen, realizing that I had never heard the story of adoption from the perspective of a mother who had surrendered her child. It seemed incredible to me that after forty years of life as an adoptee I was hearing the other side of the story for the first time. As I listened I finally understood why this woman seemed so familiar to me: the image of the two of us talking had been in my dream the night before we met. I went home and wrote down every word of our conversation. I started to wonder if my mother’s worrying had caused the dream.

A year later, the woman I had met in the gallery had separated from her husband and was living down the block from me. I began to wonder if she really was my mother but had not told me because I seemed ambivalent about a reunion. Had she left her husband and home to be near me?

My parents had always been very open about any information they had surrounding my adoption. There was a file in my father’s cabinet with “Ann” neatly printed in my mother’s hand that contained all of my original paperwork. As a child, I periodically opened that file drawer as slowly and quietly as I could to look at the papers containing my original name, a carbon copy of a letter on tissue-thin paper from the minister of our church congratulating my parents on their recent adoption, and records of what I had been fed during the three-month waiting period before my parents could take me home. Now I returned to that file for the name of the adoption agency. I needed to know what information I was entitled to. I needed to know if this woman was my mother.

The man at the agency informed me that because I was born in Ohio before 1964, all I had to do was fill out a form, send it to the Department of Vital Statistics, State of Ohio, and the department would send me a copy of my original birth certificate. After all the stories I had heard about sealed records and professional searchers, it never occurred to me that I might be able to get a copy of my records with just a phone call, a notarized piece of paper, and two forms of identification.

When the envelope from the Department of Vital Statistics arrived, I was in the middle of making travel arrangements for a lecture I was to give about my artwork in an exhibition entitled “Parents.” I unfolded the single sheet of paper and saw my mother’s full name, her place of birth, and her permanent residence in 1949. The right side of the form, where information about my father should be noted, was blank.

I located my Ohio map. The trip I was planning would take me within an hour of the rural community where she was born. So I allowed an extra day and set off through a landscape of corn and bean fields, and an occasional white house and barn, in search of a yearbook picture. I wanted to see what she looked like. I wanted to see if I looked like my mother.

When I arrived I couldn’t find the public library, so I went to the school. The halls were empty; students had left for the day, but teachers were still in their classrooms. I could hear the rustle of papers and blackboards being wiped clean. The door to the library was locked, but the teacher in the next room offered to help. He said the yearbooks in the library did not go back that far but there was a chance one could be found down in the main office. We entered the office and he announced that I was looking for a year book from 1948, and the secretaries, principals, and vice principals all went to work rooting through their office bookcases. No one asked any questions.

This is the rural Midwest. When they couldn’t find the right yearbook they wrote down names of people who graduated that year so I could call them, maybe go to their house and look at their yearbook. I felt sick. Things had gone too far—I just wanted to look at a picture.

I tried to leave but a man came through the door and they all turned toward him and said in unison, “Do you have a yearbook from 1948?” The man said, “Who are you looking for?” And they all turned back toward me. I had to say a last name. I acted as if I were asking for somebody else. I tried to sound unsure, but he knew the name and he said her whole name out loud. And then he said, “She doesn’t live around here anymore, but there’s a house with a business out on Route 30 with that same last name. They might know where you can find her.”

I cleared out and started driving. I didn’t know where I was headed other than away from that school. I hadn’t wanted her name to get out. I just wanted to look at a picture. Then I realized I was on Route 30, the road with the business and the people with the same last name.

As I got closer I passed a road with the family name, the farm where I must have been before I was born. Then I saw the house and the barn and the sign for the business and I thought, I’ll just go in and buy something. I don’t know what. I pulled in, past buildings, past tractors, past corncribs, and reached the end of the driveway. But there was no business, just a sign out front, a number to call, and then a man came out of the barn waving. I had driven too far back into his driveway to pretend I was just turning around, so I rolled down my window and heard myself say, “I see your name up there on the barn. You wouldn’t happen to know someone by the name of Eleanor, would you?” And he said, “Yeah, that’s my sister.”

Then he started talking. He talked for an hour. He told me about her life, her husband, two boys, and a girl. But what he didn’t know was—there was another girl: two boys and two girls. He talked about growing up on the farm, the old Victorian house, and the banister they loved to slide down. Then he talked about her and how she was different from her sisters. He said, “She would much rather spend time in the barn than help in the house.” And he told other stories that sounded familiar.

Finally, he asked how I knew her and I told him my mother had lived around there when she was young and had moved away. She wondered whatever happened to Eleanor. So he went into the house and brought out her address and phone number. And when I left, I drove to the town where she had lived all these years, just to drive by, to make sure she was okay. I had always worried that her family had disowned her and she had lived in miserable conditions. Maybe I thought I might catch a glimpse of her. It occurred to me afterward that she might get suspicious when her brother told her the story of a woman who had been asking about her.
Maybe she had not told her children. She might be living in fear that I would show up on her doorstep next. I couldn’t decide whether I should contact her right away or wait. I waited fourteen years.

During the years that followed, I created several autobiographical installations about adoption. Whenever possible I offered space in my exhibitions for members of the community to display their stories of adoption along with mine. I was overwhelmed by what I read. The writings left behind by women in New York, California, Texas, and Maryland were the same. What the mothers had been assured when they signed the papers giving up all rights to their children turned out to be a lie: they did not move on and forget. I think my adoptive mother knew this when she lit those candles. I think three years was all that she could bear. She needed to move on and forget.

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