Thinking about "The Girls Who Went Away"

I'm reading a fascinating, compelling, haunting book. It has caused me to take a step back and examine a part of life, a given in society, that I'd never questioned before. The book is The Girls Who Went Away and it's a true story -- "The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade".  The author, Ann Fessler, is herself an adoptee.  She had wondered about her birth mother, and then she met a woman who'd surrendered a daughter many years ago and thought Fessler might be that daughter.  She was not, but this incident started her on a quest to give voice to women who'd been silenced and shamed into keeping the secret of bearing and surrendering their babies.

Oh, I remember it so well, the mindset, the societal pressure that victimized Fessler's birth mothers.  The period she writes about begins after World War II and continues through the 1970s.  When I was in junior high and high school, in the latter half of the 1960s, I can well remember the dread and horror of unwed motherhood.  Girls' magazines and books told the story over and over -- a girl has sex, discovers she's pregnant, and is quickly made to disappear.  She's on vacation, or staying with a relative, so the story goes; but in reality she's in a maternity home.  Her baby is born, she gives it up for adoption, then she comes home and goes on with her life -- or at least, that's how the story goes.  Then the child is raised by the adoptive parents.  Everybody's happy...

Except they aren't.  And I never suspected that they weren't, because I'll confess I never knew anyone who went through this.  According to the women who told Fessler their stories, the people around them pressured them to give up their babies.  It wasn't that they "wanted to be rid of this situation" -- they all desperately wanted to keep their babies, some to raise them alone somehow, others with the birth fathers.  But in story after story, we hear that the girls were told that they were "selfish" to even think of keeping their babies.  That they were "unworthy" to raise their babies, because they had had premarital sex.  That the child would be taunted on the playground as a "bastard".  That they owed it to their babies to give them to a good home, to good parents, who were older and married and could raise them right.  In several stories, the young woman persists in wanting to keep her baby -- and is told that if she does, she will have to pay for her time in the maternity home, and the hospital, and the birth.

The social workers and nuns in the maternity homes weren't the only ones pressuring these mothers, of course.  Their own parent families felt shame, fear, and panic because society in those days would condemn them too.  The big fiction was that girls from good families, girls who were raised right, saved themselves for marriage.  Therefore, if your teenage daughter got pregnant, you were a bad parent.  In the 1950s and even well into the 1960s, conformity was important to adults -- they were frantically concerned with "what the neighbors would think".  How well I remember that mentality in my own parents!  How I resented and despised it!  My own attitude of not giving a rat's ass what the neighbors think is a direct and enduring result of this repressive atmosphere in which I grew up.

So here these young women were, with nobody supporting the idea of them keeping their babies.  Not society; it called them "sluts" and unworthy to raise a child.  Not their parents; they just wanted to put this horrible tragedy behind them and hope nobody ever found out.  Not the social workers and nuns in the maternity homes; they just wanted the mothers' signatures on the surrender papers so they could give the babies to the "better, more worthy" adoptive families.  Many of the girls were even lied to about what they were signing -- some signed blank papers; some signed under pressure while still flat on their backs after the delivery; some were told the baby's placement would be "temporary".  So they signed the papers, they surrendered their babies, and they went home to forget...

But for the women who told their stories to Ann Fessler, forgetting was not an option.  Each of them felt there must be something wrong with them; they'd been told they should put it behind them, but they couldn't.  They grieved for the loss of their babies -- but they weren't allowed to grieve; they were even made to feel unworthy (again!) because they couldn't just forget it and go on.  Some of them never had another child, even if they got married: they felt it would be a betrayal of that first child they surrendered; or they'd bought into the "you're a bad mother, unworthy to raise a child" litany that had been drummed into them.  Many married abusive men, unconsciously seeking punishment -- for the unworthiness others had accused them of for getting pregnant, or for the guilt they felt for surrendering their babies.  Many of them did have other children, but had separation issues, always unconsciously fearing that someone was going to take these children away from them too.  When one of these women saw her daughter die of leukemia, she felt that God was punishing her for giving up her first baby.  Some have had substance abuse problems, seeking to relieve the pain of the grief they were never allowed to acknowledge.

Even those who have reunited with their children found that it didn't solve all their problems.  Meeting the child as an adult brought home to the birth mother all that she'd missed by not seeing the child grow up.  If the child had a bad adoptive home, this added to the birth mother's guilt that she didn't fight harder to keep her baby.  For some, the reunion brought back the feelings of misery, shame, and resentment that they'd repressed at the time and never worked through.  There were troubles for the children as well: many of them had been brought up on the conventional wisdom that their birth mothers hadn't wanted them, had rejected them; and it was hard for them to completely accept the idea that their mothers basically had no choice.

I have never lived any of the roles in this sad drama.  I have only been pregnant as an adult, married, both financially and emotionally prepared to raise a child; so I never had to even think of giving up a baby.  I had no trouble getting pregnant when I wanted to, so I never had to consider adoption.  I always knew all too well that I was my parents' natural child ("accident" that I was!), so I don't know what it's like to wonder who I really am or whether or not I have siblings somewhere.  Reading these women's stories, hearing what they were told, how they were treated, and how it affected the rest of their lives, has been a revelation to me.  If you've read very much of my journal, you know I have no illusions about "the good old days", or the wisdom of "the greatest generation", so in that context, this is just more of the same.  However, it was surprising in that I'd assumed that at 53 I wouldn't be learning anything else new about the world of my growing-up years.