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 remembered standing in a kitchen, talking to this fellow about calculus and all these Latin things, and somebody handed me a drink, and the next thing I know everything was spinning. I felt desperately sick and I said, “I’m going to get sick. I’ve got to go lie down.” I remember walking and trying to find someplace to lie down. That’s the last of my memory.

  The next morning I thought, “Oh my God, what has gone on?” I was still feeling so out of it that I wasn’t really quite sure, but I started to suspect what may have happened. Back then date rape was not a term, but apparently that’s what it was. So I don’t know the birth father at all. I have no visual memory of him. My reaction was “I don’t ever want to think about this again. Whatever happened, happened. I don’t want any part of this.”

  When I went home for Easter break, I started feeling really sick and I thought, “Oh gosh, I have the flu.” Well, when it didn’t go away I thought, “Could I have become pregnant?” Two months later, I thought, “This is not right.” I went to the library, and I started reading all these books about pregnancy to try and figure it out. I had no idea what the symptoms were. I don’t know when I really figured it out, but I knew I absolutely could not tell anybody because I would be expelled from college. It was just automatic expulsion, no questions asked, and I was halfway through my senior year. I knew I had to hide it in order to get out of school.

  I was so devastated that this happened to me, because it was the antithesis of everything I was and how I was brought up. It really just shattered every sense of self I had, and I went into denial. By denying it, I could be who I really was, and not what I had become, or at least what I thought I had become.

  —Carol II

  One might expect that with premarital intercourse becoming more frequent among the youth, a loosening of the stigma associated with engaging in sex would have followed. But one of the great ironies of this time period was that the social policing of youth by their peers was intense, and could be psychologically brutal. The girls bore the brunt of this social condemnation as the sexual revolution evolved. For young men, being known as sexually active was a badge of honor among their peers, whereas for young women sexual activity had to be kept secret, and if word got out, their reputations could be devastated. Throughout the fifties and sixties, women had to be highly discreet about their sexual behavior; a reputation lost was almost impossible to regain. An unattached girl thought to be “putting out” was a threat to the social order of the peer community. More specifically, she was a threat to other young women who were following the rules and feared losing their boyfriends to someone more sexually adventuresome.

  There was this business then that girls are only two types, you were either a Madonna or a whore, and not the singer Madonna, the virgin Madonna. You were good or bad. Between the culture of the family and the culture of the religion, you were very bad if you had sex. So you couldn’t really plan to have sex; it had to just happen.

  We had been petting and you get all the, “Oh, we have to go further, we have to go further.” I said, “I don’t want to get pregnant, don’t get me pregnant.” He said, “Oh, don’t worry, I won’t.”

  —Diane IV

  In my Midwest high school even in the late 1960s, women did not admit having sexual intercourse even to their closest friends. There was very little talk about sex apart from boys’ locker-room talk, which often stretched the truth but could make or break a girl’s reputation. Being well liked and popular among one’s female and male friends, and being sexually active behind closed doors, required a set of advanced social skills. There were very definite and complicated rules about what was and was not permissible, and under what conditions. Careful calculations had to be made about the number of dates and the number of bases that a boy was allowed to reach. The sum of these calculations then had to be weighed against the seriousness of the commitment and how others perceived the relationship. Going steady was the pinnacle of commitment in my school and held a kind of false promise of a future together. It was, for all intents and purposes, a practice engagement. Often young people practiced quite a bit and had one “steady” after another, ostensibly in search of the ideal mate.

  Once a young woman was going steady, she removed herself from the competitive dating scene and her sexual behavior fell off her classmates’ radar screen. Having sex with a steady did not presume a promise of eternal bliss, but at least if a young woman had sex with her steady she would not be labeled promiscuous. Everyone silently agreed on a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it came to the activities of committed couples.

  If a young woman had not gotten to the going-steady stage before having sex, her reputation was more vulnerable. There were always a few young women who were either unfamiliar with the rules, unfairly targeted, or more sexually adventurous, all of whom were labeled “sluts.” Those of us who escaped being the target of rumors did not, to our shame, befriend these girls because we feared guilt by association. After all, our status was tenuous and could be preserved only by keeping our distance and maintaining our hypocritical stance through steadfast denial.

  The deep and damaging irony of the “bad girl” myth is that those who became pregnant were assumed to be less moral—to be transgressors—by others who were engaging in the very same behavior. A young woman’s pregnancy was thought to result from her “badness.” The scorn and blame heaped on these women seem to have been partly a mechanism of denial: by focusing attention on women whose sexual behavior was evident, others could continue to deny their own.

  You were shunned if you were pregnant. That’s the way they reacted to girls who were pregnant in high school. The girls who didn’t get pregnant were all virgins. We swore up and down we were virgins. If you fooled around, nobody else knew about it. It was never a thing where you could say to a friend of yours that you went to bed with somebody—that was just taboo.

  You were all supposed to be virgins and the ones that got pregnant it was like…oh, she was no good, she was promiscuous. Guys were supposed to be that way. They have their oats to sow. So that’s the way it was. Girls weren’t supposed to do it, and guys were always trying to do it with them.

  —Carol I

  There were good girls and there were bad girls and I played a good girl, but I was really a bad girl. A lot of people didn’t know that I was sexually active. There was such shame associated with being pregnant and unmarried at that time. When I was in high school, there was a girl who became pregnant. She had PE with us and then she was gone. I remember being in the locker room and the girls were snickering and making jokes. She was such a nice person and a good athlete, and they turned their back on her. They could at least have said, “It’s okay, we still like you.”

  —Joyce I

  I was a sorority girl and I was going into my junior year at the University of Minnesota. I conceived on September 20, 1968, in the Gopher Motel. I was from a small town, so I didn’t tell anybody because in 1968 you were considered trash if you were pregnant. The symbol of being a good, white, middle class family was a lily–white daughter.

  —Sue

  The other fateful irony about the explosion in premarital sex in the postwar years was that society at large failed to acknowledge the magnitude of change under way, and failed to act responsibly to educate the youth about pregnancy and prevention. Young people were clearly secretive about their behavior, but by the 1960s so many pregnancies were occurring that the warning signs should have been clear and troubling enough to sound an alarm. Instead, adult society effectively turned a blind eye to the situation, and in the main simply continued to profess that young people should hold out until marriage.

  Women were expected to wait and learn about sex from their husbands, who would bring their sexual experience to the marriage. I’ve never quite figured out how that was supposed to be mathematically possible, but presumably the theory was that the future husbands gained their experience with a few bad girls who were not marriage material and who wer
e having sex with the majority of the male population.

  Most parents simply did not want to acknowledge that their sons and daughters were having sex. Not my son. Not my daughter. But with millions of young people having sex with no planning and no protection, there was a high likelihood that parents’ denial would be short-lived. School systems had not yet begun offering substantial sex education and, incredibly, in the late 1960s were still referring to sexual intercourse as “the marriage act.” Sex education generally consisted of watching a scratchy movie that showed egg and sperm meeting. Wherever this mysterious meeting place was, it seemed to have nothing to do with being in the backseat of a car with your boyfriend. Many of the women I interviewed were utterly uninformed about sex and pregnancy and learned what little they knew from their boyfriends.

  I can remember in sixth grade we had a film. You know, the sperm and the egg and that whole thing. There was no sex education. My mom sent away for the Kotex kit in the mail and it came and there were all the different sizes and shapes of pads. Of course, this was before tampons. She didn’t really talk to me but she sort of supplied the information. That was probably the best she could do. I remember there was controversy about should we have sex education in high school at the time, but I don’t think we ever had any. And condoms weren’t as available to kids as they are now. We were oblivious. I mean, certainly I knew that if you had sex you could get pregnant. I wasn’t that naïve. But abstinence wasn’t thought of. You were just horny teenagers and that was that.

  —Becky

  If there was any talk of sex in the home, it was usually the sex talk the girls had with their mother around their first period and mainly concerned itself with the wearing of Kotex pads and the stretchy belts that kept them in place.

  I think I was in the fifth or sixth grade and I went to the bathroom and I’m pulling my panties down and they had blood on them and I started screaming because I didn’t know what was going on. They called my mother and she came and picked me up from school. We stopped by a drugstore, she left me in the car and went in and then handed me a bag and told me go in the bathroom and put it on. I sat in that bathroom probably an hour trying to figure out how all this mess worked. There was a stretchy thing with clamps on it, and then these pads. Scared me to death.

  —Joyce I

  When parents did talk to their daughters about sex, they often began the sentence with the word don’t, as in “Don’t ever let a boy touch you.” Or, if pregnancy was even acknowledged as something that could occur before marriage, “Don’t ever come home pregnant.” This directive rarely included an explanation of how one might actually get or not get pregnant. Since most adolescents are eager to grow up as quickly as possible, the silence and mystery surrounding sex surely only made it all the more intriguing.

  My mother talk about sex? Oh, God. Please. “You can’t be kissing boys. You can’t be letting anybody touch you. Sex is dirty. Sex is bad.” It was always bad things. Always taboo. It was never healthy, never, never a healthy talk. My mother was twenty-four with four kids. Probably that’s why sex was bad.

  We did not have sex education in school. I mean, I graduated high school in ’64, and sex was not discussed. You were not supposed to have sex until you were married and that was it. My goodness. You just didn’t talk about sex. It was all negative, it only got you in trouble. She was right about that, though, when you think about it. She was right. I should have listened to her.

  —Carolyn I

  I was throwing up and one of my friends said, “You’re probably pregnant.” And I said, “Oh no, no, no, you can’t be pregnant unless you’re married.” That’s what my parents told me: “You have to be married to have a baby.” So I couldn’t be pregnant because I wasn’t married. Sex education was in sixth grade all the Campfire Girls went and saw this film. I didn’t understand it. I mean, it was just the man has the sperm and the woman has the egg, and somehow or other they make a baby. They didn’t talk about body parts, ever. Oh gosh, no. Men and women, back in that day, slept in separate beds on television. I’m adopted and my parents were older. They were scared to death to talk about sex, scared to death to talk about anything.

  —Nancy II

  Sex was just not discussed in those days. You found out from your friends. The girls would talk at pajama parties or if they got together at somebody’s house after school, but sex talked about in school? Oh, my God, no! I remember when Peyton Place was published. It was banned, so we all had a copy of Peyton Place. We would stick it inside a book in study hall and read it. If you ever got caught reading that book—I mean, you can’t even imagine the detentions and the phone calls home. Life would not be worth living.

  And you did not discuss sex at home. I can see my mother sitting there knitting. My mother was a great knitter. She was like Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities. She would knit, knit, knit to avoid conversation. I remember her knitting away and all of a sudden I said to her, “What is sexual intercourse?” She looked me right in the eye and said, “Don’t bother me, I’m counting.”

  —Maureen II

  The mothers’ denial of the reality that their daughters might need some facts about sex and pregnancy is especially illogical given that, statistically, almost half of the mothers themselves had had sex before marriage, and some had walked down the aisle pregnant. But then again, logic usually has little to do with sex, and parents usually don’t think their child is having sex. That has likely not changed over time.

  Even for those who were somewhat aware of how to prevent pregnancy, effective contraceptives were hard to come by. The legacy of blame and shame that so many of the women who became pregnant have had to live with has been perpetuated in part by a current lack of awareness about just how difficult contraceptives were to get hold of in those postwar decades. This was particularly true of contraceptives for single women.

  Many of the laws in effect in the 1950s and 1960s had been in place since the Victorian era. In 1873 for the first time in U.S. history, birth control was prohibited by law with the passage of the Comstock Law, which criminalized sending “obscene” matter through the mail.11 In the mid-1800s, women could send away for informational pamphlets, and ads for douches to prevent pregnancy were common in women’s magazines and newspapers, though they were often veiled in nonspecific language having to do with cleansing or health.12 In fact, information about birth-control methods had been passed down through generations of women, long before devices were regulated through the medical establishment. Women were using vaginal sponges several thousand years before Christ.13 Whether through herbal potions, vaginal suppositories, diaphragms, the rhythm method, or douching, women have tried to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

  But in 1872, Anthony Comstock, a religious reformer and the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, drafted an anti-obscenity bill, which included a ban on contraceptives. He argued that contraceptive devices were obscene and sinful because they prevented conception. Comstock successfully campaigned for the enactment of the bill as a federal law, and he was also instrumental in twenty-four states adopting their own versions of the Comstock Law, restricting the sale of contraceptives at the state level. Despite the diligence of birth-control advocates like Margaret Sanger in the early 1900s, as late as the 1960s some states still criminalized merely dispensing information about birth control or making contraceptive devices available to women.14 Even as laws changed state by state, the moralistic attitudes endured and few unmarried women were willing to attempt an appointment with a doctor to obtain contraceptives.

  I mean, the lack of information in 1966 was astounding. If you wanted to get birth-control pills, you had to be flashing a diamond solitaire. Doctors really didn’t give them to you. Why would you need those? You shouldn’t be having sex anyway.

  —Nancy III

  During the late 1950s and through most of the 1960s, the most effective means of birth control—the pill and the intrauterine device—were either unavailable or inacce
ssible to single women. The pill was available for the regulation of menstrual periods beginning in 1957 and was approved for contraceptive use by the FDA in 1960. The IUD also became available in the 1960s. But both the pill and the IUD posed safety concerns when they were initially released and it was not until the early 1970s that both were generally considered to be safe. It was not the safety of contraceptives, however, that prevented doctors in the 1960s from prescribing the pill or the IUD to unmarried women but state laws or personal moral values.15 The diaphragm was the device most widely used by married women in the 1950s, but it was also largely unavailable to single women because a doctor’s visit was required.16

  I had finished nursing school and I was working as a nurse. And, you know, one thing led to another and we had sex. That’s what happens. Birth control just wasn’t available. I mean, condoms were available but hardly ever used. The birth-control pill was on the market, but in those days you really had to be married to go to a doctor and ask. There weren’t walk-in clinics. There wasn’t any of that stuff. Birth control just was not a subject that was talked about. If you knew somebody who was not married and was taking oral contraceptives, they were taking them to regulate their period. I couldn’t even tell you how many people had that story.

  —Maureen II

  I knew I should be doing something to prevent pregnancy but I would never have gone to a doctor. You had to pretend you were married to get birth-control pills. I could never have done that. I’m not an actress. There was a girl in our dormitory who sold them—I don’t know how she got them. I started taking them, but I felt terribly guilty because it went against what I had been taught. So I sort of took them and then I didn’t take them, and then I took them and I didn’t take them, and I got pregnant. I mean, I just didn’t really understand that you had to continuously take them.