I wrote a blog last week that mentioned that teen mothers who place their babies for adoption are more likely to stay in school and remain off welfare than teens who choose to parent. I said that today, the peer pressure among teens is along the lines of “how could someone be so unnatural and irresponsible as to give up her own baby?” My writing probably showed that I wish more teens knew about adoption and thought of it as a positive solution.
This blog reviews a book about the other side of the story. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of the Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade tells the story of women who surrendered their children for adoption between 1945 and 1973, when societal pressure was in quite the opposite direction.
Note: Many adoption workers and triad members (triad meaning birthparents, adoptee and adoptive parents) today do not consider “surrendered” to be Positive Adoption Language. Yet it really seems to describe the experience of the women interviewed. I was shocked to hear how many of the mothers (of course not all) reported similar experiences with their families, maternity homes, and/or social workers. Some experienced outright coercion, being told they couldn’t come home with a baby or being told they couldn’t take the baby home until or unless they reimbursed “the state”, the hospital or the home for their stay and for the baby’s care.
Author Ann Fessler is an adoptee herself. She teaches photography, art and video courses. The first and last chapters of the book tell a bit about Ann’s story. Ann described meeting a woman who initially thought Ann might be her daughter. She was not, but Ann listened to the woman’s story. The woman asked Ann if she had ever thought of searching for her mother. Ann replied that she didn’t want to intrude, but the woman replied, “You should find her. She probably worries every day about what happened to you and if you’ve had a good life.”
Ann shows the ambivalence of many adoptees, adoptive families and birth parents toward search and reunion when she waits a year after this conversation before looking for her original birth certificate. She researches a bit about her birth mother’s past, but doesn’t attempt to contact her for another dozen years.
During these years she is involved, as a writer and photographer, with exhibitions relating to adoption. She begins to collect oral histories from women who surrendered a child for adoption. She conducted well over one hundred interviews. These women speak to us through the pages of this book.
The author tried to interview a mix of women who had searched for their child, who had not searched but hoped to be found (seemingly a majority here), who did not want contact initially but later were glad to be found, or who did not wish contact. However, she rightly acknowledges that her sample is biased because often a reunion with their child was what made women publicly acknowledge their experience, and women who do not wish to be found are less likely to tell their story to the author of an adoption book, even if confidentiality is promised. She does include a mix of women from working-class, middle and upper socioeconomic groups, a couple of African-American women, and a couple of women whose families were angry with them because they DID place their child for adoption.
Fessler has organized the book into chapters which speak of different parts of the birthmother experience of that era. She sets the stage with some background on social norms and events happening in America.
An piece of that hisory that was interesting to me was that in the early part of the 20th century maternity homes were focused on helping single mothers care for their babies. By the middle of the century, most women report that the maternity home staff talked only about adoption.
Fessler’s chapter titles include Discovery and Shame, The Family’s Fears, Going Away, Birth and Surrender, The Aftermath, Search and Reunion. Each chapter intersperses background information from the author with comments from twelve to twenty other birthmothers. In most chapters, two stories are focused on for several pages each. The other mothers’ comments range from one to four paragraphs.
Fessler felt that, despite important differences, there were enough similarities in the women’s stories to organize the book this way, moving the reader through a collaborative story of a shared experience. She does include all of the first names she uses for the women in the index with the pages their comments appear on. I spent a fair amount of time looking up names and then reading all the comments by that birthmother so I would get more of a sense of their story.
I will leave the concluding of Fessler’s own story for her to tell when you read the book.
Please see this related blog:
I Wish for You a Beautiful Life: Letters from the Korean Birthmothers of Ae Ran Won