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

  —Karen I

  My parents are both dead now and I actually found the letters I wrote them while I was away. They are hard to read because I was still so naïve and such a goody-goody. I was trying to protect them, trying to give them this picture of a normal life with my continual, Shirley Temple kind of “I’m having a great day, the baby is kicking, everything is wonderful,” like it was a normal thing. “I’m going to ceramics class, I’m working on a very nice plate.” I mean, I was living in an institution, for Christ’s sake. They locked us in at night. It wasn’t a normal life at all.

  —Deborah

  Some women did not see the maternity home as a negative experience. They were relieved to be out from under the scrutiny of their parents and the community. A few recalled having helpful counseling sessions that enabled them to come to terms with the experience they were going through.

  I was sent to Buffalo to live with my aunt and uncle and then went into a maternity home the last six weeks. Many of the girls came from other parts of the country so nobody would know that they were there. They just came and went in the night. They appeared and then they left, and you never heard from them or had any contact afterward.

  But they had some excellent social workers there who really, really cared about us. From what I understand, after you give up a child your physical and your mental psyche just wants to get pregnant again. They worked very, very hard to make sure that did not happen. They were very concerned and spoke about our emotions afterward and how to handle it.

  —Jill

  I think if I hadn’t been in this Florence Crittenton Home it would have been entirely different. My parents never talked about emotional issues. The group counseling enabled me at a very young age to sort of talk to myself and to ask myself the necessary questions to be able to make the decision: Will I be able to live with this? I knew I could go totally off the deep end, having to make such a decision, if I wasn’t 100 percent sure that I could live with it.

  —Pamela I

  Many women established strong friendships during their stays, though most did not keep in touch after they left.

  You’re going to laugh at this, but what I remember most about this home was that it was right next to a black church and on Sunday mornings they sang and I had never heard anything like that in my life. I was a singer. As a matter of fact, I met the father of my child in the chorus at the University of Toledo. But a memory I have to this day is looking down from this building and seeing the church and the movement of the bodies, and the singing.

  I also remember going en masse with all these other pregnant girls to the museum. I was embarrassed to be going out with the other girls because it was so obvious to other people what the situation was. I was probably mixed with more varieties of girls than I had ever known growing up in a little town in Ohio where everybody was white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. My mother, who was Catholic, was looked upon as someone different. So it was broadening to be with such a variety of girls.

  I remember two or three girls in particular. One got pregnant by her high-school coach and another worked in a motel and I think she got pregnant by one of the men who were staying there. I thought that was pretty shameful. One was a wonderful girl and we corresponded for years after. I don’t believe she ever had any other children. I had to go back to Cleveland for a checkup and she lived there. Her family had me stay at their home; they were lovely people. She was very bright and she became a reporter for one of the Cleveland newspapers. Whoever got that little child must have been very lucky.

  —Carole I

  For most of the women I interviewed, however, especially those who were younger, being sent to a maternity home was a traumatic experience. They had been banished from their schools and homes, they were soon to give birth to a child, and rather than being surrounded by caring family members they were living in institutions among strangers. Although many felt camaraderie with the other young women who were there, they also felt that the environment was cold and demeaning and that the disapproval of those who looked after them was palpable.

  The philosophy and mission of maternity homes had changed considerably since the early 1900s, when the maternity-home movement began. The religious women who first ran the homes saw themselves as sympathetic sisters who were there for women who had no other place to turn.7 The home was a place of refuge and spiritual reform for women who had, in their eyes, been seduced and abandoned. Motherhood, they believed, would increase a woman’s chances of living a good and proper life. During this time, babies were not separated from their mothers except under extreme circumstances, as when women “cannot be helped or compelled to meet their obligation as parents.”8 The homes generally encouraged bonding through breast-feeding and they helped the women find employment—usually as domestic servants—which would enable them both to care for their child and to work.9 Well into the early 1940s, some homes still encouraged, if not required, the mother to breast-feed her baby to ensure that a bond developed between mother and child.10

  But by the end of World War II a sea change had occurred in the mission and philosophy of the homes. Maternity homes of the 1950s and 1960s were, to a great extent, a place to sequester pregnant girls until they could give birth and surrender their child for adoption. If a young woman was unsure of or uninterested in relinquishment, the staff attempted to convince her that it was her best, and perhaps only, option. Though maternity homes were the only place a girl in trouble could turn for help outside of her family, by the 1950s they best served her interest if her interest was in giving her child up for adoption at the end of her stay.

  The change in philosophy was highly contested among those who ran the homes and did not come about uniformly. To a great extent the views at individual homes changed as the staff changed. Between the turn of the century and the 1940s, the women who had founded the homes were supplanted by professional social workers who reshaped the understanding of nonmarital pregnancy.

  In the first two decades of the twentieth century, social work evolved into a genuine profession, and those who helped professionalize the field were eager to differentiate themselves from charity workers and reformers, whom they saw as overly sentimental and old-fashioned.11 These professionals formulated what they considered to be more rigorous approaches to social problems, rather than basing their practices on religious perspectives. As the professionals took positions at maternity homes and began to work alongside religious reformers, philosophical clashes resulted. Social workers claimed expertise. As trained professionals, they considered themselves better equipped to diagnose the problems associated with illegitimacy. While their religious predecessors had generally attributed out-of-wedlock pregnancy to the social circumstances of the women’s lives and to outside social forces, the new breed of social worker focused on the women themselves. Over many years, they posited a number of theories about why single women became pregnant, all of which were predicated on the problems inherent in the women themselves.

  In the early 1900s, most social workers argued that women who became pregnant out of wedlock were “feebleminded”; their pregnancy was proof of their feeblemindedness. This made them seem especially dangerous to society because it was believed that these women were not only likely to be repeat offenders, but that they would produce offspring of low intelligence. These concerns were amplified by social reformers who were already proclaiming that the country was in the midst of moral decay and that the family was breaking down, as evidenced by lower birthrates among the “better classes” of people. They believed that unwed mothers were both the product of bad homes and the cause of broken homes. During this time the concern over nonmarital pregnancy was so great that many “feebleminded” unwed mothers were either institutionalized or sterilized.12

  Classifying all unwed mothers as feebleminded, however, proved impossible. Social workers themselves had to acknowledge that many of the women who became pregnant were “normally intelligent and relatively well-balanced young women.”13 S
o a new category was identified, that of the “delinquent.”14 This type of woman had a parallel in the male population. But where delinquency in the male was identified by criminal behavior, female delinquency was defined in sexual terms. The young women who fell into this category were largely seen as those belonging to the working class. By the 1920s, many single women were working in factories, offices, and department stores.15 They enjoyed a degree of independence and opportunities to fraternize with men. Their sexual lives did not always conform to middle-class standards and in those cases were labeled “sexually deviant.” This behavior, incidentally, was soon to invade the ranks of the middle class.

  Despite the widespread characterizations of unwed mothers as either feebleminded breeders or sex delinquents, letters and internal correspondence from Florence Crittenton homes operating in the 1940s offer evidence to the contrary, and the personnel at the homes were still generally supportive of and empathetic to the girls in their charge. A concrete example of such support was found in the application materials for the Kate Waller Barrett Scholarship, which was sponsored by the Crittenton homes in the early 1940s. These scholarship funds were described in materials printed by the Florence Crittenton Mission as being available to “a girl who wishes to continue her education to enable her to care for her child.”16 The application required support letters from the superintendent of the home and if the application was successful, the agreement stipulated that the staff at the Crittenton Home would assume responsibility for the care of the child, if necessary, while the mother attended school.17

  One such application, from a girl I will call Bea, was submitted by the superintendent of an Arizona maternity home after the deadline had passed. The scholarship committee wrote back to say that the home would have to resubmit the application the following year. The staff continued to write letters on behalf of the young woman, lent her money from their treasury to pay tuition, and pursued the matter until funds were secured. The application, with support letters, provides a vivid portrait both of the young woman and of the staff’s perception of her.

  Bea’s application was accompanied by a letter from the principal of her high school that described her as graduating in “the upper bracket of her class…and rated by faculty as being outstanding, dependable and trustworthy, and one most likely to succeed in her undertakings.”18 The superintendent of the Crittenton Home wrote:

  Bea has worked with our Graduate nurse and has shown a liking and aptitude for the nursing profession. Bea is a girl with a very pleasing personality, nice even disposition; soft spoken and reserved of manner. She has always been desirous of becoming a nurse and we feel that with these mentioned qualities and the fact that she takes “telling” nicely she will do well in this her chosen work. For the present we are keeping Bea’s baby boy, who is a dear little fellow, until other plans can be worked out for him. It gives us pleasure to recommend Bea for this scholarship and we shall await your reply anxiously.19

  In November of 1941, Bea received her scholarship and wrote the following letter of thanks:

  Dear Mrs.——

  Since this is the Thanksgiving season, I thought it would be very appropriate for me to write and tell you what a great part your help has been and all the thanks I have to give this year.

  Your Scholarship of $50.00 has enabled me to stay here at St. Mary’s and continue my training where otherwise I don’t see how I could possibly have stayed.

  My work here is so very interesting—such good work—I’ve made very good grades and as I am Catholic the setting here is very much to my liking. We have a very lovely hospital two miles out from the city. Sister ——, our directress of Nurses, has been very kind to me, and shows a great deal of interest in me and my little baby boy.

  My baby is in Phoenix now and once in a while I get to see him. He’s growing so fast and I’m so proud of him. I guess I’m just a little awed by him and of course there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do to enable him to have every advantage I think he deserves.

  Mrs.—— of the Florence Crittenton Home in Phoenix has been a great factor in helping me get back on my feet again. She’s so kind and thoughtful. You can’t imagine how wonderful I was treated at the Home. Mrs.—— was always there to offer comfort or advice whenever it was needed—surely no other person could do her work quite so wonderfully as she.

  Then after I left there the Scholarship Fund helped me into St. Mary’s and here I am, trying earnestly to get back on my feet and more so I can support my little boy and prove myself worthy of all the trust that has been placed in me.

  Once more I wish to express my thanks to you and all you’ve done for me and believe me a day never goes by that I do not say a little prayer of thanks for such wonderful friends as you.

  Sincerely,

  Bea20

  Another young woman from Youngstown, Ohio, upon learning that she has received a scholarship, writes:

  I wish to thank you for helping me fulfill my life ambition to become a nurse. This will also mean I can keep my baby, and otherwise my family didn’t want me to. Now, because of what you have done to help me, they have agreed to keep her for me until it is possible for me to take her.21

  The kind of support and compassion demonstrated by maternity-home staff in these letters seems to have all but evaporated in the years after World War II. The ongoing struggles between those who aligned themselves with the sentiments of maternity-home founders and those who adopted newer professional strategies came to a symbolic if not an actual end in 1947, when the National Florence Crittenton Mission abandoned its policy of keeping mother and child together.22

  As the philosophical differences narrowed in the 1940s and social workers coalesced toward agreement on the best course of action for unwed mothers and their babies, efforts to identify the cause of out-of-wedlock pregnancy took a new turn. With the dramatic rise in premarital pregnancies after the war, and as greater numbers of middle-class women became pregnant, it became increasingly implausible to label all of those women as either feebleminded or sexual delinquents. Social workers noted that many of these new unmarried mothers were middle-class girls from good families. A Crittenton social worker wrote about these girls that the “sizeable numbers further confound us by rendering our former stereotypes less tenable. Immigration, low mentality, and hyper sexuality can no longer be comfortably applied when the phenomenon has invaded our own social class—when the unwed mother must be classified to include the nice girl next door, the physician’s or pastor’s daughter.”23

  Social workers turned to the growing field of psychiatry for their answer and, as early as the 1940s, began to classify middle-class girls who became pregnant as neurotic: the unwed mother was a neurotic woman who had a subconscious desire to become pregnant. This theory dominated much of the diagnosis and treatment of unwed mothers in the decades that followed the war. Though social workers had been quick to condemn working girls as sex deviants, this new explanation was more appealing in explaining middle-class pregnancy because it downplayed the issue of sexual drive. By identifying the young woman’s goal as pregnancy, rather than sex, the diagnosis of deviance could be bypassed.24 Though a young woman’s peers, family, and community may still have attributed her pregnancy to loose morals or an overactive sex life, professionals determined that the problem was in her mind.

  One of the outcomes of this new professional diagnosis was the justification of the separation of mother and child: a neurotic woman was seen as unfit to be a mother. Given the stigma of illegitimacy in the 1950s and 1960s, many middle-class parents were quick to agree that the solution to the problem was relinquishment and adoption. Following this course, their daughter would be given a second chance. Her pregnancy would effectively be erased from her history and she could expect to go back to a normal life, as if it had never happened. Without her child she would be able to marry a decent man and have other children. She would not have to live with her mistake. Adoption also came to be understood as being in the best inte
rest of the child. Rather than growing up with the stigma of illegitimacy and an unfit, neurotic mother, the child would be raised by a stable, well-adjusted, married couple.

  And though some maternity-home workers were still empathetic to young women who did not want to surrender their baby for adoption, in the postwar years this breed of social worker was rapidly becoming extinct. Internal struggles at the maternity homes continued even into the 1950s, and are evident in correspondence between the leadership of the Florence Crittenton Association of America and the newly hired staff of individual homes. In a letter dated December 23, 1952, Robert Barrett, the chairman of the Florence Crittenton Mission, expresses his concern over a move to shorten the minimum length of a girl’s stay in the maternity home postpartum. The purpose of a mother and child’s returning to the home after birth was, Barrett asserts, to give the mother time to be with her baby before making a final decision to surrender. He writes:

  Personally I feel very badly that a girl in our Homes shall not be given every opportunity and help to keep her baby if she wants to. Often a girl who has made up her mind to give up her baby feels different after the baby comes and her mother’s instinct is aroused. Not to give her that chance seems a cruel and unnatural proceeding. I am not sure but I feel it would be better for the girl if she tries to take her baby and fails and has to give it up later.25

  The new policies were shaped by the experts—primarily psychiatrists, social workers, and medical professionals—and promoted by social organizations that had the power and means to disseminate the ideas. The women whose babies were being placed for adoption were not in any position to influence the policies made on their behalf. Shame is a very effective way to silence individuals, and those who are less socially or economically powerful are rarely in a position to influence the decisions that affect them.