by Ann Fessler
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE GIRLS WHO WENT AWAY
Ann Fessler began interviewing women who surrendered children for adoption for an audio and video installation project, out of which this book has grown. She is a professor of photography at Rhode Island School of Design and a specialist in installation art. She was awarded a prestigious Radcliffe Fellowship for 2003–2004 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, where she conducted extensive research for this book. She is also the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the LEF Foundation; the Rhode Island Foundation; the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities; and Art Matters, NY. An adoptee herself, she begins and ends the book with the story of her own successful quest to find her mother.
Praise for The Girls Who Went Away
“A wrenching, riveting book…powerful.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Heartrending.”
—Boston Herald
“Amazing…Thanks to Fessler’s book, the girls who went away finally have a voice and, hopefully, a path to healing.”
—The Detroit News Online
“Astonishing.”
—Salon.com
“A stunning work of art.”
—The Providence Journal
“Fascinating…compelling…an eye-opening book. Fessler does a brilliant job.”
—Portland Tribune
“Fessler’s heartbreaking The Girls Who Went Away crackles with chilling details.”
—More Magazine
“This is a story that needs to be told—and Ann Fessler has done an excellent job.”
—Book Sense
“A valuable contribution to the literature on adoption.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Thought-provoking and thoroughly researched.”
—Library Journal
“In the glow of modern progress, the stories I tell my children about my girlhood sound as ancient as the Parthenon.…The classified ads divided by sex, the working women forced out of their jobs by pregnancy, the family businesses passed unthinkingly to sons-in-law while the daughters stood by: the witnesses to those artifacts are going gray and growing old. One of the most haunting reminders of those bad old days is on my desk, in a book…titled The Girls Who Went Away. I knew instantly who they were: the girls who disappeared, allegedly to visit distant relatives or take summer jobs in faraway beach towns, when they were actually in homes for unwed mothers giving birth and then giving up their children.”
—Anna Quindlen, Newsweek
“The Girls Who Went Away is an emotionally gripping and politically important book…Fessler weaves rich historical context with visceral firsthand accounts, leaving me amazed that I had not realized this phenomenon before. That she achieves this while also delving into her own personal story as an adoptee makes the book impossible to put down.”
—Karenna Gore Schiff
“This is a must-read book for all those who feel they have the right to engage in any part of the debate on sex education, a woman’s right to choose, or the impact of adoption.”
—Christine Todd Whitman
The Girls Who
Went Away
The Hidden History of
Women Who Surrendered Children
for Adoption in the Decades
Before Roe v. Wade
ANN FESSLER
PENGUIN BOOKS
For my two mothers,
Hazel and Eleanor
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2006
Published in Penguin Books 2007
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Ann H. Fessler, 2006
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint selections from the archives of
the Florence Crittenton Collection, Social Welfare History Archives, University of
Minnesota. By permission of the National Florence Crittenton Mission.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Fessler, Ann.
The girls who went away : the hidden history of women who surrendered children for
adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade / Ann Fessler.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-64429-4
1. Birthmothers—United States. 2. Adoption—United States—Psychological aspects.
I. Title.
HV875.55.F465 2006
362.82’98—dc22 2005058179
Printed in the United States of America
DESIGNED BY AMANDA DEWEY Set in Garamond BE
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Contents
1. My Own Story as an Adoptee
2. Breaking the Silence
Dorothy II
Annie
3. Good Girls v. Bad Girls
Nancy I
Claudia
4. Discovery and Shame
Marge
Yvonne
5. The Family’s Fears
Jeanette
Ruth
6. Going Away
Karen I
Pam
7. Birth and Surrender
Margaret
Leslie
8. The Aftermath
Susan III
Madeline
9. Search and Reunion
Susan II
Jennifer
10. Talking and Listening
Lydia
Linda I
11. Every Mother but My Own
Afterword
A Note on the Interviews
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
1
My Own Story as an Adoptee
MY MOTHER TOLD ME that on my first three birthdays she lit a special candle on my cake for the young woman who had given birth to me. She never explained why she did this for three years—no more, no less. I don’t remember this private ceremony, but I do remember that there were times in my childhood when she looked at me in a particular way and I knew she was thinking about this young woman, my mother.
Three generations of women from my family have been brought together by adoption. Neither my maternal grandmother nor my mother nor I have given birth to a child. I am the first for whom this was a conscious choice.
My mother was never told that she was adopted. For my grandmother to admit this would have been a public declaration of her own inadequacy, her inability to bear children for her husband. But my mother knew. She had found her birth certificate taped to the back of a painting at her aunt’s house. Her name had been Baby Helene before it was Hazel, and when she brought me home she named me Ann Helene.
My mother suffered her own private insecurity at not being able to bring a child to full term. But by the time she and my father turned to adoption there was no public stigma attaching to those who chose to adopt. In post–World War II America, families that wanted to adopt were carefully screened and represented a kind of model family—one with a mother and a father who really wanted to raise a child.
Although it is doubtful that families vetted through this process were actually any better or worse than other families, I was lucky enough to have parents who were loving and supportive and mindful of my development as an individual. They knew that they could guide me, but they also understood that I was not the sum of their parts. I was the product of two young people who had themselves, perhaps, been too young to fully understand the characteristics they had inherited from their own parents and passed on to me.
My adoptive mother and father were offered very little information about my biological parents. She was nineteen and from a big farm family of English and German descent. He was athletic, a college football player from a family of means. Their parents felt that this was no way to start a family.
My mother cried whenever she told me this story. She knew it could not be so simple. I did not. The story of that young couple sounded like the plot of a movie to me. I liked being part of this soulful story of ill-fated love, of having a mysterious past, of not being related to my family, of being my own person.
When I became sexually active, I imagined that if the worst happened I would do as my mother had done: go off to another town to a home for unwed mothers and return with a story about a kidney infection, or about an Aunt Betty in Sandusky who needed my care. This is what young women who got caught in this unfortunate situation did. Almost every graduating class had a girl who disappeared. Everyone knew where she had gone, and that she had most likely been told, “If you love your child you must give it up, move on with your life, and forget.”
It never occurred to me that those girls may not have forgotten, that it might not have been so easy for them to just move on with their lives. But then I had never gone through pregnancy and childbirth myself. And I had never heard the story from a woman who had surrendered her child.
Then something happened that forever changed my understanding of adoption. In 1989, I was attending the opening of an exhibition at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where I had been teaching for seven years. Not long after I arrived, I noticed a woman who looked very familiar. I had a distinct and clear memory of having recently talked to her but I couldn’t remember where or when. I asked several people if they knew who she was, but no one did, so I continued to look at the exhibition.
Later, this woman walked toward me from across the room and with no introduction said, “You could be my long-lost daughter. You look like the perfect combination of myself and the father of my child.” I said, “You don’t know what you’re saying to me. I could be your daughter—I was adopted.” There was a long silence and I saw her start to react as I had. Eventually we compared dates, but they were one year and one month apart. She kept asking, “Are you sure about your birth date? Sometimes records are changed.” But I was sure.
We continued to talk. She asked me if I had looked for my mother and I responded that I didn’t know if I wanted to invade her privacy. I said, “When you gave up a child for adoption in 1949, you didn’t expect her to come knocking on your door forty years later.” And she said, “You should find her. She probably worries every day about what happened to you and whether you’ve had a good life.” I could see in her eyes that she was speaking from her own experience, and the thought that my mother might feel the same sense of loss was shocking to me. I felt guilty and empathetic and naïve all at once. Why had I never considered this possibility? How could I not know? How could everyone not know?
I continued to listen, realizing that I had never heard the story of adoption from the perspective of a mother who had surrendered her child. It seemed incredible to me that after forty years of life as an adoptee I was hearing the other side of the story for the first time. As I listened I finally understood why this woman seemed so familiar to me: the image of the two of us talking had been in my dream the night before we met. I went home and wrote down every word of our conversation. I started to wonder if my mother’s worrying had caused the dream.
A year later, the woman I had met in the gallery had separated from her husband and was living down the block from me. I began to wonder if she really was my mother but had not told me because I seemed ambivalent about a reunion. Had she left her husband and home to be near me?
My parents had always been very open about any information they had surrounding my adoption. There was a file in my father’s cabinet with “Ann” neatly printed in my mother’s hand that contained all of my original paperwork. As a child, I periodically opened that file drawer as slowly and quietly as I could to look at the papers containing my original name, a carbon copy of a letter on tissue-thin paper from the minister of our church congratulating my parents on their recent adoption, and records of what I had been fed during the three-month waiting period before my parents could take me home. Now I returned to that file for the name of the adoption agency. I needed to know what information I was entitled to. I needed to know if this woman was my mother.
The man at the agency informed me that because I was born in Ohio before 1964, all I had to do was fill out a form, send it to the Department of Vital Statistics, State of Ohio, and the department would send me a copy of my original birth certificate. After all the stories I had heard about sealed records and professional searchers, it never occurred to me that I might be able to get a copy of my records with just a phone call, a notarized piece of paper, and two forms of identification.
When the envelope from the Department of Vital Statistics arrived, I was in the middle of making travel arrangements for a lecture I was to give about my artwork in an exhibition entitled “Parents.” I unfolded the single sheet of paper and saw my mother’s full name, her place of birth, and her permanent residence in 1949. The right side of the form, where information about my father should be noted, was blank.
I located my Ohio map. The trip I was planning would take me within an hour of the rural community where she was born. So I allowed an extra day and set off through a landscape of corn and bean fields, and an occasional white house and barn, in search of a yearbook picture. I wanted to see what she looked like. I wanted to see if I looked like my mother.
When I arrived I couldn’t find the public library, so I went to the school. The halls were empty; students had left for the day, but teachers were still in their classrooms. I could hear the rustle of papers and blackboards being wiped clean. The door to the library was locked, but the teacher in the next room offered to help. He said the yearbooks in the library did not go back that far but there was a chance one could be found down in the main office.
; We entered the office and he announced that I was looking for a yearbook from 1948, and the secretaries, principals, and vice principals all went to work rooting through their office bookcases. No one asked any questions. This is the rural Midwest. When they couldn’t find the right yearbook they wrote down names of people who graduated that year so I could call them, maybe go to their house and look at their yearbook. I felt sick. Things had gone too far—I just wanted to look at a picture.
I tried to leave but a man came through the door and they all turned toward him and said in unison, “Do you have a yearbook from 1948?” The man said, “Who are you looking for?” And they all turned back toward me.
I had to say a last name. I acted as if I were asking for somebody else. I tried to sound unsure, but he knew the name and he said her whole name out loud. And then he said, “She doesn’t live around here anymore, but there’s a house with a business out on Route 30 with that same last name. They might know where you can find her.”
I cleared out and started driving. I didn’t know where I was headed other than away from that school. I hadn’t wanted her name to get out. I just wanted to look at a picture. Then I realized I was on Route 30, the road with the business and the people with the same last name.
As I got closer I passed a road with the family name, the farm where I must have been before I was born. Then I saw the house and the barn and the sign for the business and I thought, I’ll just go in and buy something. I don’t know what. I pulled in, past buildings, past tractors, past corncribs, and reached the end of the driveway. But there was no business, just a sign out front, a number to call, and then a man came out of the barn waving. I had driven too far back into his driveway to pretend I was just turning around, so I rolled down my window and heard myself say, “I see your name up there on the barn. You wouldn’t happen to know someone by the name of Eleanor, would you?” And he said, “Yeah, that’s my sister.”
