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The Girls Who Went Away
Ann Fessler
The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade
Penguin
May 2006
368 pages ISBN: 1594200947 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction Biography
A powerful and groundbreaking revelation of the secret
history of the 1.5 million women who surrendered children
for adoption in the several decades before Roe v. Wade In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the
lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American
women forced to give up their newborn children in the years
following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who
Went Away tells a story not of wild and carefree sexual
liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that
has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on
the children they gave up for adoption. Based on Fessler's
groundbreaking interviews, it brings to brilliant life these
women's voices and the spirit of the time, allowing each to
share her own experience in gripping and intimate detail.
Today, when the future of the Roe decision and women's
reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a
divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a
long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties,
sixties, and early seventies. In 2002, Fessler, an adoptee herself, traveled the country
interviewing women willing to speak publicly about why they
relinquished their children. Researching archival records
and the political and social climate of the time, she
uncovered a story of three decades of women who, under
enormous social and family pressure, were coerced or
outright forced to give their babies up for adoption.
Fessler deftly describes the impossible position in which
these women found themselves: as a sexual revolution heated
up in the postwar years, birth control was tightly
restricted, and abortion proved prohibitively expensive or
life endangering. At the same time, a postwar economic boom
brought millions of American families into the middle class,
exerting its own pressures to conform to a model of family
perfection. Caught in the middle, single pregnant women were
shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent
away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and
often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy. The majority of the women Fessler interviewed have never
spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by
grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing and
important look into a long-overlooked social history, The
Girls Who Went Away is their story.
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