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  • The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade
  • Barbara Joans
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. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006. 368 pp. Hardbound, $24.95; Softbound, $15.00.

The Girls Who Went Away is an important book on a number of levels. It recounts an almost lost and certainly forgotten time in American history. While the popular press remembers deathly abortions and twisted coat hangers from that period, it rarely recalls the pain, shame, and horror of the girls who were forced to relinquish their children after birth. This book tells their story. The women speak their histories in their own words and in their own time.

Fessler deftly handles their stories with both sensitivity and accuracy. Being born into that era, I have many memories of friends who lived through the very situations she describes. I was lucky; many of my friends were not. Fessler’s work rings with accuracy. She clearly writes about the variety of responses that the girls (young women) describe to her. Fessler brilliantly handles the responses in clear, compelling oral history form.

It was a dark time for women. The period roughly between the 1940s and the 1970s was especially difficult. Birth control in the form of male-oriented condoms was available but often unreliable or unused. Female birth control was available, but diaphragms were often denied to the very girls who needed them the most. Young women, younger than eighteen, needed parental consent to obtain a diaphragm, which was not often given. But beyond the contraceptive difficulties (the pill, the sponge, and the cervical cap were yet to be invented), the moral climate in America was at its most confusing and most contradictory. [End Page 285]

For young girls to become pregnant was, within most groups in society, the very worst thing that could happen. She was “in trouble.” First, being pregnant was the visible proof that she was having sex. In that era, sex for men was a good thing. Sex for “good” girls was a bad thing. Sex for young girls, those girls younger than eighteen years, was seen as very bad. Second, she was breaking moral, cultural, legal, religious, and family taboos. For most families, she became the object of deep shame.

Fessler covers the multiple stories and is especially sensitive to the fact that each story is unique in its own right. Her work starts with the overall theme of “Breaking the Silence.” She takes it first from the view of the children who had been adopted. Well into adulthood now, each of the adoptees lets us know how growing up within a created family has made them feel. As expected, most of the stories are happy, but a few are less so. And then we see the mothers. We learn about the young women who were forced, coerced, or just expected to give their children up, at birth, for adoption. The constant acknowledgment that they are now talking about a previously taboo subject remains dominant in almost all the stories. The emotions, for many of the women, vary from extreme sadness to final catharsis. Reading the memories of forced separation is chilling. This telling is best said in the words of the mothers: “As soon as the time was near and we were going to do this interview, all those physical things started happening. My jaw doesn’t want to open and my lungs are tight. ‘I wonder why I can’t open my mouth.’ Then I realized, I’m supposed to be silent. I’m not supposed to tell this story. The secrecy has dominated everything. It’s so powerful and pervasive and the longer you keep a secret, the more power it takes on” (9).

An even more telling personal commentary: “I’ve never really felt like I could talk to anybody about it. You know, society has this picture—you hear about people giving their babies away. The whole terminology is just so misleading. I didn’t give...

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