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

  I never had another relationship with a boy. I would never let anyone close enough to me. I no longer associated pleasure with sex. I associated death and pain and loss with sex. At some point I cleaned up enough to get a job, and I met my ex-husband in the late eighties. By then I was, like, thirty-six or something. And he taught me to enjoy sex, which I’m really grateful for. Before the age of thirty-six, I did not know how to enjoy sex.

  I also noticed another phenomenon: I couldn’t talk about what had happened to me, about my daughter and giving her up, because every single person I told the story to judged me. Not one single person said, “I know how you feel. If I were in your spot I would have had a hard time.” Every single person judged me.

  ANNIE

  I was a junior in high school and an above-average student. I finished in the top 10 percent of my class, but I had no aspirations for continuing my education. I simply wanted to work for a year as a secretary and then get married and have babies. I had my husband picked out. He and I had been going steady since I was fourteen and he was fifteen. I was madly in love with him and he with me. That was the thing then. Around age fourteen and a half, we started having sex. Unfortunately, that was not that unusual for young people at that age, though no one admitted it then. When I returned to school in September of my junior year, that would have been 1957, there were about a half dozen girls who didn’t come back because they had gotten married over the summer. So in this area of Milwaukee, and our socioeconomic class, it wasn’t all that unusual.

  We were so serious at fifteen and sixteen. We talked about getting married. We talked about the children we would have. We never thought about any birth control. Neither one of us really knew much about it. It just was not talked about then. Young men certainly couldn’t get condoms, and there was no such thing as the birth-control pill. I doubt if I’d ever heard of a diaphragm. Maybe they didn’t even exist. We just didn’t really face the issue. The feelings that we had for each other were so strong, it never occurred to either one of us that we wouldn’t be allowed to get married, because that’s what happened if you got pregnant. I didn’t know anything about girls being sent away. I never knew anyone who was sent away.

  I missed a period and I worried and I worried. I missed another one and we decided that we had to tell our parents because we would both require their written permission to get married since we were underage. We dreamed up some excuse to take my mother somewhere in the car. We got a few blocks from home and he parked the car around the corner. She said, “Why are we stopping here?” I said, “Mother, we didn’t go to the circus last night. We went to a doctor.” And she said, “Oh my God, don’t tell me you’re pregnant. Let me out of this car. Let me out of here right now.” She was just crying and angry and we kept saying that we wanted to get married and she said something like “We’ll see about that.” She wanted to know if his parents knew and he said, yes, he had told them and they were willing to sign for us to get married and that his boss had offered us a room in their home rent free until we could be more established. She said, “I don’t know those people.”

  Within a few days, she took me to her doctor, who was not very nice. He said, “Well, you know, there’s a place where they send girls like her down in Kansas City,” and he handed her a brochure. He said, “It’s pretty expensive. If you have any money put aside for her, use it for this. She doesn’t deserve to have it anyway.” That was when the shame began. Before that, I had not really felt ashamed.

  My mother and aunt went to his family’s home and did not like what they saw. She said, “They have linoleum on the living-room floor. They’re not good enough for you. Do you want your life to be like that twenty years from now?” When it became obvious that we were not going to be allowed to be married, he decided to enlist in the Marine Corps.

  Then one day my mother said, “We are leaving for the Willows Friday night.” That was the maternity home in Kansas City that her doctor had told her about. She said, “You’re going there and you’re going to stay there until you have the baby. Then you’re going to give your baby up for adoption and you’re going to come home and forget that this ever happened. Someday you’ll thank me.” I was very compliant. I respected authority and I did what I was told. At sixteen, back then, you couldn’t get a job other than working at the local custard stand or as a car hop and earning two dollars in tips. I don’t even know if welfare existed. I had no exposure to anything like that. I just had to do everything that my mother said. That was it. There were no options. The only option was to get married and she wouldn’t allow it. So that was it. It was all decided for me.

  We left for the Willows after dark so that nobody would see us. We rode the train all night long, in coach. I still remember those horrible seats. They were like the old streetcar seats. We took a taxicab to the maternity home and the owner came to greet us. My first thought was, “She seems pretty nice. This might not be so bad.” My mother waited in Mrs. H’s office while she took me on a tour. There were two vacancies, and they were both semiprivate rooms. One of them had a washbasin and the other didn’t. As soon as I found out that the room with the washbasin cost five dollars more a week, that was the one I wanted. It was one of the few things I could do to get back at my mother.

  We spent the day in downtown Kansas City. We went out for supper and it was quite a treat because we didn’t normally dine in restaurants. We stayed at a hotel and on Sunday morning my mother took me back to the Willows in a taxicab. They had a front entrance with thirty, forty, fifty steps, but nobody used it except the adoptive parents when they came to get the babies. Everyone else used the rear entrance. The taxi driver knew exactly where to go. I imagine he had delivered quite a few young women. My mother briefly got out of the cab and hugged and kissed me, and I remember that she was sobbing when she left. I remember that her shoulders were shaking and I think now of how difficult, how heartbreaking, that must have been for her. I was so nasty to her—oh, I was nasty to her. I made her pay five dollars a week more. She had on a red-and-white sleeveless blouse and a rust-colored skirt. Horrible color combination but, you know, this was 1958. But I’ll always carry that picture in my mind of her with her shoulders shaking as she got into the taxicab.

  I NEVER TOLD my husband about my first child. People used to say, “Never tell a man, because he’ll think that you’re used merchandise.” They thought men should have all this experience and women should be virgins. You were supposed to fake it. Well, that’s what I did. My obstetrician knew, and he said I made a very good decision. I believed what I was told, and I went along with it. The person that I am today looks back on that young girl and thinks, “Didn’t she have her own mind?” But it was a totally different time. There’s just no way that it can be compared to today.

  When our second child was about seven, things started to fall apart between my husband and me. It seemed like we disagreed for the sake of disagreeing on just about everything. At that time in Wisconsin, the grounds for divorce were horrible things: physical abuse, mental cruelty, abandonment or voluntary separation of one year or more. So we separated. I had quit a really good job about two and a half years before because I was doing better at work than my husband and, you know, in 1972 that was an issue. I had been earning more money, and I hadn’t told him about the last couple of raises I had gotten, and when he found out it was a big problem. So I quit the job because I thought the job was not as important as the marriage. The man was supposed to be the provider. It was getting to the point where it was okay for the woman to work, but only to supplement the family income. This was in our circle, anyway.

  Everybody was very surprised to see that we were separating; we had put on a really good show. When I went around and told my family members, the first thing my mother said was “I hope you never told him about that baby you had in Kansas City, because if you did he can have you declared an unfit mother and take the girls away from you.”

  So my husband and I had separated and I don’t re
member why, but one Saturday when he came over I told him about the daughter I placed for adoption. And I saw something in him that, after living with him for fifteen years, I’d never seen before. I saw a caring, a depth, a compassion, and that was really…that was big. He had always been kind of surface and cavalier about everything, and I was the one who spoke about feelings. That was a big, big issue between us. I told him very matter-of-factly. I didn’t elaborate a great deal. I did not cry. I just said that I’d never told him because I had been advised not to, but I did not like having this between us. I’d never felt honest about it and I just felt that I wanted him to know. He was so caring. He said, “It must have been so horrible for you to carry that all those years.” This was one of the finer moments of our marriage, it really, truly was, but by then it was just too late. There was so much else that had happened. It was just too late.

  3

  Good Girls v. Bad Girls

  It was 1959 and I was living in a dormitory at the University of Toledo and working two or three part-time jobs to work my way through school. I was dating this guy who was a couple of years older who was an engineering student and I cared about him very much. I don’t think in those days we knew about birth control. I didn’t know anything. It was something good girls didn’t talk about. I never talked about sex with anyone, including my family. I didn’t know about ovulation or anything. Good girls didn’t talk about those things.

  —Carole I

  IF YOU ARE A WOMAN over fifty who had sex before marriage, you are one of the so-called bad girls. I would put myself squarely in that category. The only difference between me and the women whose stories appear here is that I didn’t get caught. These women and I were certainly not alone in our badness. As early as the 1950s, about 39 percent of unmarried girls had gone “all the way” before they were twenty years old, and by 1973 the percentage had risen to 68 percent.1 Because of the difficulty of getting contraceptives, the frequency of premarital pregnancies rose right along with that number. In the mid-1950s, about 40 percent of first births to girls age fifteen to nineteen were conceived out of wedlock.2 Thereafter, the numbers rose sharply. By 1971–1974, the number of first births conceived outside of marriage to teenage girls had reached 60 percent.3

  In the post–World War II years, young people’s attitudes toward premarital sex, as well as their actual sexual behavior, began to change. A revolution in dating behavior had actually begun back in the 1920s as teens, rather than their parents, started regulating dating behavior. Unlike their Victorian predecessors who courted on the front porch where their behavior could be closely monitored, the young people in the 1920s enjoyed a degree of privacy and mobility. As dating moved off the porch and into the community, parents were no longer present to set limits. Teens themselves began to determine what was appropriate sexual behavior and to enforce their own standards through peer pressure.4 At the same time, they were being influenced by notions of love and romance disseminated through movies, magazines, and popular music rather than by local customs.

  In 1924, for example, when the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd conducted extensive interviews with the residents of Muncie, Indiana, the young people there were already having petting parties, going to the movies on their own, and parking.5 As more and more families owned cars, they afforded young people increasing independence and provided the privacy that allowed them to engage in sexual activity. Henry Ford, it seems, may have been at least partly to blame for the sexual revolution.

  Over the decades cars have, of course, continued to play a significant role in dating life, and that was certainly true in the postwar years. Not only were they safe havens, they also served—as they continue to—as a measure of a young man’s status.

  We were middle-class folks; I had a pretty normal childhood. I was in my senior year of high school, still kind of quiet and shy, not one of the popular cheerleader girls, but I had my own little clique of friends. And there was a guy who had moved to town that all the girls just thought was so cute, and so cool, and we talked and whispered, “Weren’t his blue eyes so pretty,” and all this kind of stuff.

  He drove a really hot car, which was real important at the time. I think it was a pumped-up Super Sport Chevelle—big tires, big engine, souped up, beautiful, fast, noisy because noisy was important, with a stick shift, which was also very important. And for some reason he decided to ask me out. It wasn’t my first date or anything, it wasn’t even my first sexual experience, but he was very cool and I was cool because I was going out with him.

  —Barbara

  The economic boom that followed World War II increased young people’s independence from their parents and escalated the revolution in sexual behavior. An increasing number of nonmarried coeds left home to attend college and joined the nearly six million returning veterans whose education was funded by the GI Bill.6 This younger generation became a cultural force to be reckoned with and much of the new energy seemed to be sexual. As early as 1952, panty raids were being conducted on campuses all across the country. Gangs of nice college boys were breaking windows and entering women’s dorms just to get hold of girls’ underpants.7

  More overt expressions of sexuality not only became common among single people in their twenties but trickled down into high-school age youth culture as well. Young people took their cues from older teens and mass media, decidedly not from their parents. For girls, magazines like Seventeen were looked to as the fonts of wisdom about what was popular and sexy. Increasing one’s sex appeal, of course, required a whole host of products that mothers thought their girls were too young to buy or wear. I remember the many battles over skirt length, lipstick, and blusher—which my mother insisted on calling rouge—that raged routinely in my house and I’m sure in households across America. The first-floor girls’ restroom in my high school was packed every morning with young women rolling the waistbands of their skirts so as to raise their hemline to the maximum distance above the knee permitted by school law. A considerable amount of elbowing was required to make it up to the mirror and apply makeup, which was promptly removed after seventh period.

  Interestingly, as young people expanded the boundaries of permissible sexual activity a movement toward forming steady relationships took hold. Sociologists in the early fifties noted a significant new trend among young people to get into serious relationships rather than date around,8 which had been more popular in previous decades. This new emphasis on commitment might well have been due to the fact that it provided something of a safety net for preserving a girl’s reputation, as more and more young people engaged in sexual intercourse. During the postwar decades, the question that the youth grappled with became not so much if as when premarital sex was considered permissible. Permissible by their peers, that is, because sexual activity was still not discussed, or even acknowledged, by most parents.

  And though the rules about who could have sex without risking reputational suicide surely varied from group to group, town to town, and region to region, they followed a general progression over the years. At first, sex was permissible only for couples who were engaged; later for those who were pinned or going steady; then for those in love; and finally widening all the way to include those who were simply attracted to one other.

  If you got pregnant outside of marriage you were a whore, a slut, whatever. You had no morals, therefore you deserved this. But if you didn’t get caught you were smart. When you got a fraternity pin on your boob, that meant you were allowed to have sex. That meant you were engaged to be engaged or whatever. I never understood all that, but that’s the way it was.

  —Nancy III

  In the early fifties, many women engaged in heavy petting but refrained from sexual intercourse until a promise of marriage was forthcoming, and the majority waited until their wedding night. But as the years progressed not only did more young couples begin having sex before marriage, but they had it at younger and younger ages. Comparing white, unmarried women who turned eighteen between 1956 an
d 1958 with those who did so between 1971 and 1973, the percentage who had their first premarital sexual intercourse at age fifteen quadrupled, from 1.3 percent to 5.6 percent. Those in the same cohort who had premarital sex before age twenty jumped from 33.3 percent to 65.5 percent.9 And though eventually a commitment was no longer required, what sexual intercourse signified in a relationship often varied quite a bit among partners. Plenty of young women, and some young men, presumed sex would solidify a commitment where one was never intended.

  In some cases, young women who did not feel ready to have sex did so anyway because of continual pressure from a boyfriend and the lack of assertiveness required to put a stop to the steady progression of sexual advances. More recent studies have shown that sexual coercion from partners still plays a powerful role in the timing of a young woman’s sexual debut. In a survey from the 1990s, 25 percent of women indicated that they did not want to have sex the first time they did so.10 Sometimes sexual aggressiveness went beyond coercion and women were date-raped, though neither the concept nor the terminology was well understood or defined at the time. About 7 percent of the women I interviewed became pregnant as a result of rape—not by the violent sex criminals who have become the staple of television dramas but by nice young men.

  I think it was in about February, and a friend’s brother was home on break from his school and called me up and said, “All my friends are having this party at the summer house that we’re opening up. I don’t have anybody to go with. Would you go with me?” I said, “Sure, I’ll go.” And we went off to the party, and I really remember very little about that night.