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A powerful and groundbreaking revelation
of the secret history of the 1.5 million women who surrendered
children for adoption in the several decades before Roe v.
Wade
In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler
brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young
single American women forced to give up their newborn children
in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade.
The Girls Who Went Away tells a story not
of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating
double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on
these women and on the children they gave up for adoption.
Based on Fessler’s groundbreaking interviews, it brings to
brilliant life these women’s voices and the spirit of the
time, allowing each to share her own experience in gripping
and intimate detail. Today, when the future of the Roe decision
and women’s reproductive rights stand squarely at the front
of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore
a long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties,
sixties, and early seventies.
In 2002, Fessler, an adoptee herself, traveled
the country interviewing women willing to speak publicly about
why they relinquished their children. Researching archival
records and the political and social climate of the time,
she uncovered a story of three decades of women who, under
enormous social and family pressure, were coerced or outright
forced to give their babies up for adoption. Fessler deftly
describes the impossible position in which these women found
themselves: as a sexual revolution heated up in the postwar
years, birth control was tightly restricted, and abortion
proved prohibitively expensive or life endangering. At the
same time, a postwar economic boom brought millions of American
families into the middle class, exerting its own pressures
to conform to a model of family perfection. Caught in the
middle, single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends,
evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have
their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt
by doctors, nurses, and clergy.
The majority of the women Fessler interviewed
have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been
haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing
and important look into a long-overlooked social history,
The Girls Who Went Away is their story.
Ann Fessler is professor of photography
at Rhode Island School of Design and a specialist in video-installation
art. She won a prestigious Radcliffe Fellowship at the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, for 2004,
to complete her extensive research for this book. She is also
the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the
Arts; the LEF Foundation, Boston; the Rhode Island Foundation;
the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities; Art Matters,
New York; and the Maryland State Arts Council. An adoptee
herself, she begins and ends the book with the story of her
own successful quest to find her birth mother.
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