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

  The next week I got a letter from her mom with pictures, and she looked just like my daughters. And her mom sent the most beautiful letter. Her mom is the most wonderful person, and the most generous person. The next week I got a letter from my daughter with more pictures. She explained that she was about to be married and she was going through a whole lot and that when she got back from her honeymoon perhaps she’d write. Her mother wrote me again just before the wedding and said, “When I walk our daughter down the aisle, you’re going to be there with us.” I tell you, her mom is just a peach.

  Since then, my birth daughter and I e-mail every week. She’s going to have a baby. We haven’t met, we haven’t talked since that first time on the telephone, but she e-mails, and she signs her letters “I love you.” It’s more than I could ever have asked. If I never meet her, I’ll know that she’s happy and healthy and has a fulfilling job, and is about to have a wonderful family, and that she has the best parents. I begged God every night that she would be happy and healthy and be with loving people, and God gave her to the best.

  But for thirty-two years I really didn’t live. After we gave the baby away I was in shock. For a long time, we didn’t have a very good marriage and I thought I deserved that. Everything negative that happened in my life I thought I deserved, because I was a disappointment to my family, I dishonored my family. In my mind, I committed a sin. I felt I deserved unhappiness and I didn’t deserve a good marriage. I was ashamed and I was angry, and I just felt like I let God down, and I let my baby down because I didn’t do enough to keep her.

  It was a combination of finding my baby and losing my breast to cancer that made me realize that it’s important to live in the here and now. I have forgiven my mother-in-law. I think she did what she did out of love for her child. I have forgiven my mom, and my dad, and finally, after fifty-five years, I have forgiven myself.

  I was really messed up emotionally for a long time. It wasn’t until I went to the therapist that I allowed myself to have a better life. I have a really, really good marriage now. And I’m doing what I always wanted to do—going to school and studying things I love. I hope someday my birth daughter will meet me and tell me she doesn’t hate me, because I’m still hoping for absolution from her, but I’m okay.

  I am sure that there are some people who surrender their babies because it’s really not feasible for them to be a parent, and they know that they’re doing something good. They’re giving their child to somebody who can really care for her. In that situation, it’s an act of love that they should be proud of. In my situation, I never wanted to surrender my baby. My baby was taken from me. It’s like somebody ripping out a piece of me for thirty-two years.

  I think any woman who’s had a child knows the depth of feeling she has for that child, and can imagine the pain you would go through if you lost that child. To not even be allowed to look at your child, to feel it inside of you and then have it gone into thin air—it leaves you feeling like a shell. You shut down all emotion, because if you don’t it comes to the surface and then it just spills over. So you keep everything bottled up and you keep pushing it down, down, and it’s just a horrible pain.

  It’s important for people to know, while we honor adoptive mothers—and they should be honored—that birth mothers must be honored, too. That baby is with them every breath they take, every second of their lives. Every prayer, that baby is with them forever.

  6

  Going Away

  I was in beauty school in Florida and my mom picks me up and takes me back to Alabama and takes me to the doctor. The next recollection I have is being dumped at the Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers in Birmingham. It was an old, old, old house with big rooms. I was just put in a situation in which I had no control. It was almost like being put on a train or like being in a car wreck or something. Once you start skidding, that’s it. I kind of skidded through it.

  Anytime they approached the subject of the baby, it was “When you give up the baby” or “After you leave here.” They were telling me that I could just forget all about this, go home, and pick up my life where I left off.

  —Joyce I

  THE MATERNITY HOMES that many women were sent to in the 1950s and 1960s were modern incarnations of homes run by organizations that had been doing “rescue work” with women and girls since the late 1800s. Two of these organizations, the Salvation Army and the Florence Crittenton Mission, had initially defined their work more broadly as offering shelter and redemption to all sorts of “fallen women,” including prostitutes, the homeless, and unwed mothers. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Christian women who ran the homes gradually narrowed their focus to residential facilities for unwed mothers. In part, this was due to their lack of success with prostitutes. By turning their attention to “first offenders,” they hoped to find women who were more amenable to redemption and to intervene in their lives before they turned to prostitution for survival.1

  Maternity homes continued to proliferate and in the years when the women I interviewed were sent away there were more than two hundred maternity homes in forty-four states run by the Florence Crittenton Association of America, the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, and others. Despite the sizable number of facilities, by the 1960s they could not accommodate the growing number of single pregnant girls who needed a place to live out their pregnancies. A young woman who could not go into hiding as soon as she began showing often hid her pregnancy by wearing one of the massive Spandex girdles that were popular at the time, even among girls who needed them only to hold up their nylon hose. These girdles were invaluable in helping a girl preserve her reputation, since it was often impossible to enter a maternity home until the seventh month of pregnancy. Collectively, the homes could house only about 25,000 girls a year and as many as 35 percent of the applicants were turned away.2

  Frequently, a young woman destined for a maternity home was sent to a “wage home” until space in the maternity home became available. Families in these homes took girls in and provided them with room and board, and occasionally a little spending money, in exchange for housekeeping and, ironically, childcare. This arrangement allowed a young woman to leave her family’s home and community while she waited to enter the maternity home. It also meant she would earn her keep during the weeks or months she stayed with a family and thus the total cost of her exile was considerably lower than if she had stayed at a maternity home the entire time.

  A priest and family friend came out to the house and an arrangement was made where I was going to be whisked away. Nobody would know where I was. It was arranged through Catholic Charities. I would be living with a family. He would be my gynecologist and take care of the delivery of the baby and in return I would be the nanny, help the kids with their schoolwork, and do the laundry. I was given a room in the basement. While I was living there, everybody was told that I was living in Florida. The priest had a cousin who lived in Pompano Beach and I would write out postcards—“I’m having a wonderful time. I’m doing this and that”—and he would mail them in an envelope to his cousin and they would be postmarked from Florida. So any correspondence I had was very controlled. My mother would come to see me on Saturdays and remind me that I shouldn’t eat too much because I would put on weight. I was given a sun lamp to make sure that when this was all over I looked like I had spent the time in Florida.

  —Kathi

  They found what they call a wage home for me right away. I went and lived with a family that had eight children. You were their servant. I went to the Catholic Infant Home in St. Paul one or two days a week for school until I graduated. Other than that, I did laundry and cooked meals and took care of eight little kids. They had many pregnant girls stay at their home.

  —Mary I

  I was sent off to be a nanny for a family. The man was a physician, and they had three children—a five-year-old, a two-year-old, and a newborn baby. I was the nanny and did light housekeeping. They gave me a nice room in the
basement and they liked me because I was their girl. It was the “in” thing in their neighborhood to have a girl. Word got around that we were virtually free help.

  —Sheryl

  Middle-class girls who did not go to a maternity home were often confined in their family’s house, where their mothers could keep a watchful eye on the door and send them running to their room if anyone came knocking. Many older women, including college students and those working full time, simply continued to live on their own, while others went to live with relatives in distant towns. Some worked directly with adoption agencies and never spent time in a maternity home or told their parents they were pregnant. Sometimes the woman’s parents never learned that a grandchild had been born until long after the event, if ever.

  I was working in Washington, D.C., at the time for the telephone company. I went to talk to someone at Social Services and she made arrangements for me to go to a Florence Crittenton Home in my seventh month. All the while I’m going to work and getting bigger and bigger, so everybody at the telephone company knew my situation. In fact, I was in D.C. when Martin Luther King got shot and there was martial law in the city. I was working that day when the rioting started and we couldn’t leave our building. There was one bed in the whole building and they were kind enough to let me sleep in it because I was six months pregnant. It was kind of eerie, you know, because troops were marching up and down the street. The National Guard was out and there were fires everywhere. We didn’t know what was going to happen.

  A month later, I was in the Florence Crittenton Home and during that time we were watching the presidential primaries in California and we saw Robert Kennedy get shot. So it was a traumatic time. My world was in turmoil but so was the rest of the world. It kind of put my problems in perspective. I started focusing on the people around me and that helped me to cope. I tried to help others who seemed to be emotionally distraught and it had a calming effect on me.

  —Nellie

  All I knew was that I had to somehow disappear. I didn’t tell my parents. I just wrote and said I was going to go off to find a job, not to worry. My baby’s father drove me to Cleveland and left me with some money that paid a little toward the Florence Crittenton Home. I was there from June through the birth of my baby, which was November 22, a date you can’t forget because four years later, on the same date in 1963, John Kennedy was assassinated. So it makes that date even more melancholy because something very tragic in American history occurred on the same day.

  —Carole I

  The financial cost to a young woman or her family for the maternity home, the hospital, and a doctor’s care was not insignificant. In 1951, the cost of a Salvation Army home was $50 per month, plus a $50 delivery charge.3 By the early 1960s, the cost of room and board alone could run over $100 per month. With an average stay of just over six weeks, and additional delivery charges, the total cost could easily exceed $200,4 or what today would be the equivalent of more than $1,200.5 Some maternity homes used a sliding scale and charged according to the parents’ income. A few women reported paying nothing at all, though in some cases those who could not pay were admitted to homes contingent upon the surrender of the baby.6 Occasionally, the young man’s family offered to pay part of the maternity-home expenses, but among the women I interviewed it was more common for the families of the young women to pay. Some families required their daughters to pay them back. Several women talked about the payments they continued to make to the home or to their parents long after their stay.

  After I came home from St. Mary’s and got back on my feet, my mother told me straight out that I owed her for the money I would have contributed to the household income during the months that I didn’t work. She actually wrote it out. She gave me a piece of paper that showed how many weeks, at half the pay that I would have gotten during that time. She said when I got a job I was going to have to pay her back. I even owed her for the months before I went into the maternity home, because I had quit work, obviously. See, back then you didn’t work when you were pregnant. Plus, I owed Catholic Charities for the layette, the christening outfit, and the postnatal care. I remember it was a huge sum of money. I couldn’t believe how much I owed everybody.

  I did get a job and I paid my mother back. It took a year and a half, and after that I started paying back Catholic Charities. Long after my daughter was adopted, I went in to make my final payment. Recently, I got my file from Catholic Charities and it’s quite detailed about the whole sequence—from the first time I met with them through my stay at St. Mary’s, and then every month after that until I paid off the final debt. But I just broke down and cried when I saw the last paragraph of all this documentation, the last entry about me and the baby. It said I had finally come in to pay the balance and I still had a chip on my shoulder.

  —Sheila

  The experience of living in the maternity home varied greatly among the women I interviewed, but almost all talked about feeling afraid and abandoned when they were told they would be sent away. Many had never been away from home and most were not given any information about what they would find before they arrived. It is doubtful that the parents had much information to offer since most of them did not visit the homes in advance.

  I was so scared. I wanted so badly for my parents to say, “You’re staying with us, you’re our girl.” I had this persona of a hippie but I just wanted to be with my family. We drove to the maternity home in Biddeford, Maine, on back roads. My mother and father were so heartbroken. I was told on the way that I was supposed to be in Old Orchard Beach working in a hotel as a chambermaid. So while I was at the home I was to get a tan to continue the cover-up.

  I walked in and there were all of these strange pregnant people and these nuns. And some of the nuns were harsh. Harsh. I had committed a sin. It’s not like today when you go through therapy, for God’s sakes. No. There was no therapy. When my parents turned around and walked out the door, I felt abandoned—I felt so alone. And I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand how parents could do that.

  —Lynne

  I was sent away to a Florence Crittenton Home. I remember going up a long drive to this Gothic castlelike building with big trees and a winding drive. It had big, thick doors and when I entered I saw two girls coming down the stairway and they just looked so sad.

  We had a little lounge on each floor and in the lounge we had a little TV and what they called a hi-fi back then—this was in the days before stereo. We had two records—one was Ray Charles’s “Born to Lose” and the other was something about “…stuck up here, I want to go home.…” I mean, real upbeat songs. Most of the girls didn’t stay there as long as I did, but it was always full. It was just a revolving door.

  —Pollie

  Life at the maternity home generally included chores like washing dishes, helping in the kitchen, or cleaning toilets. Often tutors supplied by local school districts came to conduct classes in the homes, which enabled high-school girls to continue their education and avoid being held back. Recreational activities included instruction in pursuits that were appropriate for a young woman headed for a life of domesticity, such as sewing, knitting, or classes in arts and crafts.

  Girls were usually asked to take an assumed first name when they entered the maternity home and they used this fake name with the other girls. This renaming—meant to protect a young woman’s identity—could not have been very effective since the young women could obviously recognize each other. Perhaps it was meant to separate the young woman’s pregnant identity from the identity she would resume when she left the home.

  I was a sophomore in college, at Wheaton, and I was walking across campus and it was late at night in the fall. The street lamps were all lit and this girl is coming toward me and just under the light we saw each other’s face and we both stopped in our tracks. It was a girl who had been at the home with me. That home was very confidential and nobody could say the other person’s last name. But there she was. We hugged and we stood there u
nder the lamp chattering away, but in hushed tones. We didn’t want anybody to know we’d both given up our children. Nobody in our families knew except our mothers.

  —Rose

  Despite the rules, behind closed doors many of the girls divulged their real names, talked about boyfriends and families, and speculated about what giving birth would be like. Some homes organized outings or allowed the girls to walk freely in the neighborhood. Occasionally, the girls were required to put on wedding bands when they left the building. Since they often traveled in groups, it is doubtful that this charade was very effective.

  The homes were sometimes quite strict when it came to communication with the outside world. The women were permitted visits from their parents, though some families did not visit, call, or write their daughters the entire time they were there. In some cases, letters in and out were read and censored and phone calls could be made only to individuals who were on an approved list. If there was a list, it usually did not include the father of the baby. This lack of communication generally ensured that there would be no opportunity to work out a resolution that included the young man if the girl had held out hope of doing so when she entered.

  I was not allowed to call the father of my child. Even when we would write letters they would read them. They would either cut out things they didn’t like in them or they would cross through what they didn’t like. If the letter really upset them, they would throw it away in front of us or tear it up. That goes for anything coming in or anything going out. They read everything. They censored everything. You were not allowed to call the father of the baby. You were not allowed to call friends. You were only allowed to call your parents or anybody else who was on the approved list.