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

  I feel that my mother was as much a victim of the times as I was. Later, when my daughter from my marriage was born, I saw a side of her that I didn’t remember from when I was young. It must have been very, very hard for her but she did what she had to do. She did what society dictated. Years later, she told me that she was very much afraid that if anyone at work had found out that I was pregnant she would have lost her job.

  She was a single parent before the term was coined. My father had abandoned the family when I was under four years old and he didn’t provide any support. She did not admit to being divorced because there was such a social stigma attached to being divorced then. She told people that she was a widow. My mother and aunt made their home together. They were both clerical workers at the Milwaukee Journal and if my mother had lost her job it would have been a horrible economic situation for us.

  She did what she had to do and it was hard for her, but she was from the generation that didn’t show their emotions and certainly didn’t talk. You don’t talk about feelings. What are feelings? You do what you have to do. She was not a cold, heartless person, but it was just a different time.

  —Annie

  Polls from the mid-1950s indicate that housewives were not nearly as content in their marriages as they were supposed to be. In studies from that time, researchers concluded, “Women were twice as likely as men to report they were dissatisfied or regretted their marriages.”41 But given few high-paying jobs for women, a 26 percent decline in women’s wages after the war,42 and the stigma of divorce and single motherhood, many wives stayed put even if they were dissatisfied. The social pressures experienced by the mothers of this generation come through powerfully in many of the interviews I conducted.

  From what I could figure, I don’t think my mother ever really wanted to have kids. She said that when the war came—World War II—she dropped out of college and went to work and she’s always resented that she didn’t finish college and have a career and do more with her life. She was a very intelligent woman. She resented being home, being the housewife. She didn’t like that role at all. She didn’t like the cleaning, the whole thing. She said she was dissatisfied even up to the time of her death. Having five children was just too much for her. That wasn’t what she wanted.

  At that time women stayed in the home, they were the housewife, they didn’t work outside of the home. There were no divorces at that time, either. It was a very rare thing when somebody got divorced, so a lot of families stayed together that shouldn’t have. Women would get together and have their coffee klatches and talk about somebody’s husband’s running around with somebody else, and how unhappy they are, and this one’s getting beat up. These days they never would have stayed together but they did at that time.

  I think the wives leaned on their women friends a whole lot. I think that’s why my mother didn’t want to have her friends find out. She had a circle of maybe eight to ten women who hung together and did the Girl Scout thing. They were troop leaders and they visited all the time and I think they depended on each other for support. I think she felt that she wouldn’t be accepted by them if they knew I was pregnant. She didn’t want their pity. She wanted to be the one they came to. She was a very proud woman.

  —Carol I

  My mom married my dad in California in ’42, and he shipped out overseas and he was gone until ’44 or ’45. During that time she worked in an airplane factory and lived by herself. She used to tell us how proud she was. They worked so hard—they wanted those airplanes to be the best for their boys, you know. She made friends. She was very happy. She saved her money. She had a good little nest egg by the time the war was over. Then my dad comes home from the war and they started their little farm. They farmed the land that my mom’s dad and mother had cleared. They used her folks’ barn and used her money to buy the land and the cows, but he told her what to do.

  She went from being an independent woman to being somebody who was absolutely dictated to. She had to live in a house with no electricity and wash diapers by hand. A few years later, she tried to get a job at the hospital doing a little laundry work and he had a fit. She worked for one week while his mother stayed with us, but it wasn’t good enough. He wouldn’t let her work.

  She had that independence and then all of a sudden it was all gone. Then he lost the farm and took the money that was left and bought a brand-new 1953 Oldsmobile with it. When she inherited more money from an aunt years later, that money bought a house and she lost that after the divorce because she couldn’t keep it up.

  It used to make me so angry that she was just like a lapdog. But it was the expectation of the fifties. You were supposed to be a good little housewife, you were to keep things clean, get the bed made, get snacks made for the kids—yet he could just tramp through the house with his muddy feet and that was okay. It had to have been a terrible shock for her to come back from her war job to that little dirt farm and try to make a go of it. She was absolutely stifled.

  —Glory

  My mom told me that she had been date-raped by my father and that’s the reason they were married. I was that child, I was the product. It was in February in the woods of Wisconsin, and she screamed and tried to get out of the car and he said, “Fine, I’ll just leave you here to freeze.” He date-raped her in the car, and then he dropped her off at her farm. Two months later, she discovered she was pregnant.

  She finally told her parents and her father tracked my dad down and then told my mom, “You are going to marry him because that’s what you do. You’re going to get married.” She stayed married because she was Catholic and that’s what you did. He was a savage drunk. We used to wake up in the middle of the night with him calling her unspeakable names. We just accepted that. He was our dad. He was nice to us and when he was sober he was fine. They even had some good times together.

  When he died, at the showing before the funeral the family was all sitting there and Mom went to his casket and knelt down and just sobbed hysterically. I thought, “My God, why is she doing that?” She came and sat down next to me and I said, “Mom, why are you crying?” She said, “For fifty wasted years.”

  —Joyce II

  One of the most compelling ways in which the image of the “perfect family” was established and reinforced was through the television shows of the time. Many of the most popular shows—Leave It to Beaver (1957–63), Father Knows Best (1954–63), The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet (1952–66), and The Donna Reed Show (1958–66)—featured perfect nuclear families with nurturing dads, and moms who deferred to their husbands and did the housework in perfectly coiffed hairdos. An especially revealing feature of television shows of the time was the popularity of shows featuring widowed fathers, including The Rifleman (1958–63), The Andy Griffith Show (1961–68) (though Andy had quite a bit of help from Aunt Bea), My Three Sons (1960–72), and Bonanza (1959–73). Two programs featured father figures who raised orphans, a boy in Fury (1955–66) and a girl in Bachelor Father (1957–62). And in Sky King (1951–54) a fatherly uncle came “out of the clear-blue western sky” every week in his plane, The Songbird, to spend his days with his niece, Penny. Meanwhile, there were no popular shows of the time that featured single moms—not even widowed moms—even though in the aftermath of World War II many more widowed women than men were actually raising kids on their own. The anomaly is a powerful testimony to the social stigma of single motherhood.

  Despite this stigma, many families did allow their daughters to keep their children, and even helped to raise them. Studies of the time show that women whose families did offer to help raise their child were, for the most part, from less economically advantaged families or from families that had had a previous experience with single pregnancy.43 I did interview women whose families had offered to help but who elected to surrender nonetheless. In these cases, the women surrendered either because they did not want the child raised in the environment being offered, because they felt it was not economically feasible, or because they saw educa
tion as the only hope for a better life.

  I was a senior in high school and we had a really strong romance going on and it was really difficult because he was white and I’m black. There we were in Georgia, you know, trying to date. So all kinds of horrible, horrible things happened to us. I got pregnant coming up to Brown University to spend the weekend with him. He took me to see Dionne Warwick as a birthday present.

  I don’t know when I started to feel like I wasn’t in love with him enough to get married, but I was sensible. Something told me, “You better figure out a way to go to school.” I really wanted an education. I had been in the Upward Bound program and it had given me just a little glimpse of what was out there. When I was growing up, it was all about being a maid and cleaning somebody else’s house. You know, being married to a man who could treat you like a dog.

  I was sick and tired of the ignorance I saw around me. I was tired of the men treating the women like crap. You couldn’t even fight the system, because you didn’t have the words. I decided I’m not going to be a part of this. My education was the only key I had. That’s what they were saying all over the country. That’s what Kennedy was saying, that’s what Dr. King was saying.

  My mother was the worst about it. She ragged me out a lot of times about giving my baby up. She would get mad and say, “I don’t understand why you just couldn’t bring her home. That’s my grandbaby.” I did say to her, “Because I don’t want her to have the influence.” I didn’t want her to have the influence of my stepdaddy.

  —Rose

  My mother was the unwed mother. She was in a mother and babies’ home in England for six months—three months while she was pregnant with me and three months afterward. About a month before I had my daughter, late in the evening when the younger kids were sleeping, my mom was sitting in the rocker and I was lying on the couch. And for the first time, she talked about my biological father. I think she was trying to relate to me by saying, “I know what you’re going through.” She told me how much I would have liked him, how he was such a nice man, how much she loved him, and how good-looking he was in his Canadian Air Force uniform. My mother loved uniforms. She told me how they danced. I was born in ’46, after the war, but they had known each other during the war.

  She told me that my grandmother had said she couldn’t come home with me and she didn’t know what she was going to do, but she knew she wasn’t leaving the maternity home without me. Evidently, Grandma relented and we left the home when I was three months old.

  After I delivered and came home from the hospital, I was lying in my bed crying and my mom came in and said, “What are you crying about?” And I said, “I want my baby. I love my baby.” And my mom said, “If you really loved her, you would have kept her.” I stopped crying and I never cried again. I never cried until 1999, when I found my daughter. I didn’t think I had the right to cry.

  My mother and I never spoke of my daughter again, not one word ever, ever again. For all those years I thought my mother was wicked and horrible for saying that to me, but now I think she was disappointed. I think she was disappointed because of what she went through. She had me, and kept me. No matter how our lives turned out—and my mother paid her price, marrying the man that she did, and through that us kids suffered—but no matter the childhood, I am so thankful that I was with my mother.

  —Christine

  Married couples who were not raising children seemed odd in the pronatal environment of the 1950s and 1960s. The desire to parent, and to conform to the normal social and family expectations of the time, imposed substantial strain on couples who could not conceive. Such couples turned to adoption in record numbers during those years, and the rising demand for adoptable children intensified the pressure applied to young women to surrender. One of the most common arguments made to unmarried pregnant women at the time was that the child would have a better life if they surrendered it to a married couple who would have more to offer economically and could offer legitimacy to an otherwise illegitimate child. Many women I interviewed recounted how maternity-home and adoption-agency workers strenuously made this case to them.

  The staff were very condescending and very judgmental. They would say, “Your child will be better off without you. You’re doing the right thing. There’s a loving family out there.” And I was thinking, “Well, how come I can’t be a loving mother?”

  —Cathy II

  The intense social pressures that families felt during the 1950s and 1960s and the stigma associated with unwed pregnancy have waned dramatically over the last forty years. In fact, young women who place children for adoption now are more likely to be viewed by their peers as “selfish” and their actions thought of as “incomprehensible”44—the very same language used against young mothers who did not want to surrender their children forty years ago. For mothers who surrendered in the fifties and sixties, a more tolerant society today offers little solace. Instead, the change in views underscores the flexible nature of societal attitudes and the degree to which the women’s lives were governed by the attitudes of their time. They are well aware that many who have grown up in subsequent generations—including their surrendered sons and daughters—cannot understand how mothers could have “given away” their own flesh and blood.

  Three years later and my life would have had a different outcome. Three years later, the first girls in the area were pregnant and staying in school. I mean, think about that—twelve hundred days later. You didn’t have to go to an unwed mothers’ home. You didn’t have to give your baby up, and you didn’t have to hide in shame. Twelve hundred days later.

  I was scared for my baby all those years. I never slept through the night. I never made it through a night without wondering how she was.

  —Susan II

  JEANETTE

  I was a senior in high school in a small town in Washington State. I’d had a boyfriend since the previous summer. He was captain of the football team and very athletic and, you know, I was one of the cute girls. I was Roman Catholic, and absolutely believed that I would burn in hell if I didn’t lead a good life. However, we started having sex in the fall. The first time was after a football game where he had done very, very well, and after that it continued. I really cared for him. I liked his family and my family liked him. I told him I had missed my period, and we went to a doctor who I assume other football players took their girlfriends to. He gave me this little white pill and said that I should have my period soon. Well, I didn’t. My boyfriend and I talked about it. He had a really good football scholarship to Washington State University and, of course, he couldn’t be married. This was 1952.

  I started wearing a girdle because I had to keep my stomach in. I was so sick that spring. I had a sister who lived in San Francisco and I wrote her a letter and said I was “in trouble.” She knew exactly what I was talking about. The day after I graduated from high school, I went to live with her. I never told my mother, I never told my father, I never told anyone. Both of my parents died without knowing.

  The previous year, in my little town of five thousand, there was a girl who had a baby and wasn’t married. She kept that baby and it was a scandal. Their house was about five blocks from the high school. One morning we were sitting in class and we heard this terrible explosion. Their house had blown up. The baby was fine, but she was terribly burned on her legs and her arms. We all thought it was God’s way of disapproving. I don’t know if he disapproved of her getting pregnant or of her keeping the baby, but I thought about that incident constantly when I was pregnant.

  Single people got pregnant, but almost everyone married. There’s a saying the Irish have—something about six-month babies, I forget—but it was very common. We couldn’t even say the word pregnant. My mother became pregnant when I was nine or ten years old. No one told me until she brought the baby home. The first time I heard the word pregnant out loud was when I was in nursing school.

  While I was at my sister’s I had one maternity dress and I remember it to
this day. It was a yellow checked smock with a matching yellow skirt. I wore it every day. We didn’t wear pants much in those days. I would write to my parents and say I was looking for a job. My boyfriend would write and he would send me a dollar bill once in a while. It was the only money I ever had. The apartment house had these little mailboxes. I didn’t have a key, but I would peer in there to see if there was a letter from him. If there ever was, I would sit by that mailbox until my sister came home. Toward the end, he wasn’t writing at all. I thought it was strange because the plan was that we were going to get together afterward.

  The entire time I was pregnant, I actually separated myself from this baby. I had been told repeatedly, “Don’t see that baby and it won’t hurt. If you ever hold him, it will be very painful for you.” But they brought him to my room. The nurse was standing in the doorway holding this baby and I screamed at her, “Get that baby out of here.” That’s a hard, hard memory—that I rejected him. They never brought him back again.

  I was isolated from the other mothers at the hospital. Let me tell you how naïve I was. I had been in labor for so long and they kept doing rectals to see how dilated I was. And I was so sore that afterward I asked my sister, “Where does that baby come out anyhow?” I thought it must have come through the rectum.

  I’d taken my high-school annual with me. There was one very nice nurse’s aide. She was the kindest person I’ll ever meet in my life because she never looked down on me for being pregnant. She would sit with me and I’d go through the annual and I’d show her my boyfriend, and me at the ball games cheerleading.