I just finished reading Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away this week. It's not what I'd planned for my next entry here, but I'm discovering that it's best to let the juices flow when they want to and to save the canned ideas for when the juices run dry.
It's hard for me to categorize Fessler's book. It's non-fiction. It's sociological. It has to do with adoption. Those are the things I can say with certainty.
Fessler is an artist and an adoptee. Her mother is also an adoptee. Fessler has used art, photography and film to capture the experience of adoption for many years. This book, she tells, began when a woman stopped her in an exhibition. She'd noticed that Fessler looked just like her. She had placed a daughter for adoption who would be about the same age. Was she that baby girl?
She wasn't, but, of course, she is someone's baby girl that they gave up decades ago. The more she snooped, the more women like the one in the art gallery she discovered.
In a nutshell, between the end of World War II and the legalization of abortion in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade case, an extraordinary number of women surrendered babies for adoption. They number over a million. To give you an idea of how large the scope was, these figures are from Fessler's book. In these decades, 40% of unmarried white women who became pregnant would surrender their child. By comparison, 1.5% of black women did the same, and that rate has remained the same for black women since. Today's surrender rate for unmarried white women is similar to that of black women. How did this happen?
Fessler chronicles the societal forces at work in The Girls Who Went Away. A growing number of white Americans were reaching middle class status after the war, a status they felt the need to reinforce constantly with appearances. Attitudes about sex were changing among young people, but the world they lived in was still that of their parents. There was no birth control for unmarried women, paltry sex education and no accountability for the men and boys who played their part. To keep up appearances, young women had to play the part of virgins even if they were not; no one would discuss sex with them. The stigma of an unwed mother was unbearable. The social work professionals of the time believed the young woman was to blame, that she was unfit to raise a child. Her parents sought to hide the problem. The girl or woman knew nothing of her options or her rights and were completely vulnerable.
Fessler's book features quotes and many lengthy stories told by the women who once went away as girls, to have their babies in secret and give them away. Some did not know sex would result in pregnancy. Many more did not know how the baby would leave their body. Most did not receive emotional support from their families. The vast majority were manipulated into surrendering their children. They were told by their families that they could not return home with their children; they were told by maternity homes that they would have to pay back their stay there if they did not surrender; they were told by agencies they had no rights, though this was a lie. (I was very surprised to discover revocation periods existed even then!)
Everyone told them to go home, go on and forget. No one would talk to them about what they'd lost.
You might be thinking, given my masochistic tendencies when it comes to reading adoption sob stories, that I would be crazy to read this book. I disagree. The reason I read this book was to help me understand the loss of a birth mother. No, our birth mother will not be coerced away from her child. If I even begin to suspect that might be the case, I'll be only too glad to walk away.
The women in The Girls Who Went Away, however, talk very openly about how surrendering their child affected their lives. Although the circumstances will not be the same, any one of them could be the woman whose child we adopt. Hearing their stories makes me feel a little more prepared to be someone she can talk to about it. I, being her child's new parent, might not be the best person, but it would be selfish of me not to try.
What I didn't expect to get from the book was the historical perspective I got. We so often hear about "returning to family values." We hear about "nuclear families." It's easy to forget that that is not how things always were. It was an ideal conceived during this same time period: perfect house, perfect car, perfect job, perfect marriage, perfect kids, perfect life. Who wouldn't be happy?
Except, it doesn't sound like very many people were happy at all with trying to shove their size 12 lives into size 6 shoes.
For the older generation who came up with this ideal, it was just that, an ideal, something to strive for.
For their children, this was no "ideal." It was reality. That's why they're so desperate to go back to it, even if it's not really realistic and it never really existed. Life was different then. Nobody got divorced, right? So everybody who wanted to was unhappy and those who did disappeared. Nobody got pregnant out of wedlock, right? Those girls disappeared, too, and their babies with them. The Girls Who Went Away shows just how well that worked.
Now those same folks are in power. It explains a lot.
If they could history textbooks like Fessler has written this book, we might actually learn something.
This also explains a lot for me about attitudes toward adoption.
Couples were supposed to have children, and those who were "forced" to go the adoption route were to be pitied. Although it surely doesn't explain all the reticence, I think this attitude, either internally or externally, keeps a lot of couples striving for biological children long after they want to and rules out adoption for folks who would otherwise be open to it. Adoptive parents are touched on only briefly in Fessler's book, but it seems society was putting such pressure on the "family" model that folks were marrying who shouldn't have and having children who shouldn't have. Couples who couldn't have children turned to adoption in not a completely dissimilar way to that of the birth mothers of the children they would adopt. It's like supply and demand when neither side really wants to supply or demand, but feels like they have to.
Birth mothers were supposed to be irresponsible and dangerous. You might be surprised at how pervasive this idea still is. You might be surprised at the resistance we've encountered to the idea of an open adoption and contact with our child's birth parents. You might be one of those people who had that reaction . . . The truth is, I counted up the number of women I've known who I know for sure became pregnant out of wedlock. It was more than a dozen, just in my own life. I'm only 30. All those women chose to raise their children, but I can see how, for some, if circumstances had been just a little different(no birth father involvement, no family support, no job), they might have made a different choice. These women in my life are no different from those in Fessler's book. Are these women irresponsible and dangerous?
Most of all, I understand why adoption feels so ominous. Look at where it's coming from! Since the beginning of our adoption process, I've felt uneasy. It's so hazardous, so cloudy, it's so easy to go astray.
I think people knew. They knew what was going on. They thought it was right because they were told so, but deep down they knew it wasn't. Not everybody, no, but enough people to make it a phenomena that became a part of our culture. When I say "We're adopting . . . " people hear "We're stealing a girl's baby." I suddenly understand why there are people who oppose adoption altogether. I understand why adoptees are often hesitant to search or reunite. I understand why birth mothers are as rare as gold when panning for insight from all sides of adoption.
I can't tell you we won't do it that way. I'll simply have to prove it to you, to our child and his or her birth mother.
The legacy of these practices is that I feel like I've got something to prove, to prove I'm not one of Them.
For what it's worth, I'm definitely not a Them.
I highly recommend The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler. Even if you have zero connection to adoption, well, you probably do after all. There is almost certainly someone you know who was touched back then by this. I'm certain you'll learn about someone in your life from these women's stories.
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