Backlist Love is an informal series on “older” books that I hope you’ll find interesting. These aren’t so much reviews as quickie recommendations, so check out your favorite book review sources if you want more info.
The girls who went away: The hidden history of woman who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler (Penguin, 2006)
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.
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. 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.
Why I liked it
I’ve rewritten this whole thing several times. The first couple of drafts were thousands of words long, certainly longer than most of my full-length book reviews. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings on this subject! But, perhaps a mini-review on an obscure little book blog isn’t the right place for them. I’m not looking for a debate, nor is my aim here to try to politically sway other people. I just want to tell you about a book that I liked; maybe you’ll want to read it, too.
First, I want to be clear that although the subtitle of the book references Roe v. Wade, this book is not actually about abortion. It’s a collection of stories of women who got pregnant and gave their babies up for adoption in a time when both access to safe birth control and resources for disadvantaged parents were much rarer than they are today (even given our current healthcare system and political climate in the U.S.); most of these women were young and unsupported and felt coerced into making this choice.
I picked this one up on a whim one evening during a late shift at the library in undergrad. And even though I’ve only actually read it just that once, this book has stuck in the back of my brain all these years. These women’s experiences deeply affected me and informed my opinion about topics like adoption, contraception, and the social safety net for vulnerable children.
Who I’d recommend it to
As you can probably guess, this is not an easy book. I do think it is well worth reading, though, especially for folks who are open to hearing personal narratives of the real-life consequences of the kind of controversial political maneuvers we’re still grappling with to this day.
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