Book summary “The Girls Who Went Away”: summary

Introduction

You live with the legacy of a hidden era when society forced millions of young women to hide their pregnancies and surrender their babies. You might assume these mothers willingly abandoned their children out of callousness or convenience. Ann Fessler shatters this myth by exposing a vast system of coercion that trapped nearly one and a half million unmarried American women between World War II and the 1973 legalization of abortion.

Between World War II and 1973, 1.5 million unmarried American women were coerced by society, family, and institutions into surrendering their babies for adoption, leaving them with lifelong trauma.

The book guides you through the architecture of this secrecy. You explore the brutal double standard of the era, the isolation of maternity homes, and the calculated pressures used by social workers to force relinquishments. You witness the clinical cruelty of the delivery rooms and the silent decades that followed.

• How did families and institutions enforce absolute secrecy?
• What specific tactics did professionals use to secure surrenders?
• How do women survive the lifelong psychological aftermath of forced relinquishment?

1. Scale of Surrender and the Myth of Unwanted Pregnancies

The common cultural assumption that birth mothers willingly and easily abandoned unwanted babies is a profound misconception hiding massive systemic pressure.

Between the end of World War II and the legalization of abortion in 1973, an unprecedented number of babies were relinquished for adoption in the United States. Ann Fessler documents that between 1945 and 1973, 1.5 million babies were relinquished for nonfamily or unrelated adoptions.

During these decades, increasing premarital sexual activity among young people clashed with severely restricted access to birth control and sex education. Strict social norms demanded that unmarried mothers surrender their children. You see that rising social restrictions left these young women with few valid choices.

Historical Scale

The narrative that mothers simply did not want their children ignores the overwhelming societal, familial, and economic pressures that forced them to relinquish custody under the belief that it was the only way to secure the child's future.

A birth mother named Glory noted that the baby was unwanted by society rather than by the mother, explaining that she felt she had no other option to give her child a socially accepted life.

The Myth of Moving On

The promise given to relinquishing mothers that they would simply move on, forget, and live normal lives proved to be entirely false. Instead of forgetting, birth mothers experienced the surrender as the most significant and defining event of their entire lives, often suffering lifelong grief, guilt, and a pervasive sense of emptiness.

Author Ann Fessler noted that her own adoptive mother lit a special candle for three years on her birthday for the birth mother, suggesting even adoptive parents recognized the enduring loss.

2. Good Girls Bad Girls and the Double Standard

Premarital sexual activity among teenagers and young adults increased dramatically from the 1950s through the early 1970s. In the 1950s, 39 percent of unmarried girls had gone all the way before age twenty. By 1973, that number reached 68 percent of unmarried girls.

Society rigidly divided women into binary categories of virtuous virgins or fallen women.

Adult society and educational institutions maintained an absolute silence regarding reproductive biology, leaving adolescents completely uninformed about sex and pregnancy prevention. Nancy II recalled that her sixth-grade sex education consisted solely of viewing a film about a sperm and egg meeting without any discussion of body parts. In the mid-1950s, 40 percent of first births to girls aged fifteen to nineteen were conceived out of wedlock. By 1971-1974, 60 percent of first births conceived outside of marriage to teenage girls reached this level.

Carole I, a student in 1959, noted that good girls never talked about sex or ovulation, reflecting the complete silence surrounding the topic at the time.

Car Culture and Privacy

The widespread ownership of automobiles acted as a primary catalyst for the postwar sexual revolution by giving young people unprecedented privacy and mobility away from parental supervision. As dating moved off the front porch and into the community, cars provided safe havens and served as status symbols for young men, enabling private sexual activity without parental limits. Barbara described going out with a guy who drove a hot, pumped-up Super Sport Chevelle with a stick shift, which was central to his cool status and their dating life.

A significant number of young women experienced unwanted sexual initiation, coercion, or date rape by acquaintances or peers rather than violent criminals. Carol II was given a drugged drink at a summer house party while away at college, suffered a blackout date rape, and later discovered she was pregnant during her senior year. In a 1990s survey, 25 percent of women indicated they did not want to have sex the first time they did so. Among the women interviewed by the author, 7 percent became pregnant as a result of rape.

Contraception Barriers

Legal prohibitions, Comstock laws, and personal moral values of doctors made effective contraceptives largely unavailable or inaccessible to single women during the 1950s and 1960s. The Comstock Law was passed in 1873, prohibiting birth control through the mail. In 1967, William Baird spent 36 days in jail after being convicted under Massachusetts anticontraception laws.

Unmarried women could not obtain prescriptions for the pill without pretending to be married or flashing a diamond solitaire. Maureen II noted that while the birth control pill was on the market, walk-in clinics did not exist, and obtaining oral contraceptives required visiting a doctor under the guise of marriage. A sexually active teenager who does not use contraceptives faces a 90 percent chance of becoming pregnant within a year.

3. Secrecy Stigma and Maternity Homes

Families sequestered pregnant daughters and sent them to isolated maternity homes where they faced strict institutional rules and moral shaming.

A common solution for single pregnant girls was a rushed marriage designed to cover up premarital conception and make the birth appear premature. On average, half of these young women were married before their babies were born, preventing the births from being officially recorded as illegitimate. Many couples married to give the child a name and divorced afterward, though numerous girls faced obstacles when young men fled, parents or clergy intervened and refused permission, or minors lacked the legal age to marry without consent.

Sheryl was pressured by her mother to marry her boyfriend to escape the family scandal, but her parents later intervened just before a justice of the peace could marry them, telling her not to rush into it. The median age at first marriage for women remained below twenty-one from the war years until about 1972, while 50 percent of young women were married before the baby was born, leaving only half to be recorded as illegitimate births.

Forced Marriages

Pregnant teenagers faced severe social shunning, community banishment, and mandatory expulsion from high schools and colleges. Once a pregnancy became visible, it could no longer be denied, and community members distanced themselves to avoid appearing to condone the unwed pregnancy. Schools routinely forced pregnant students to withdraw immediately, deepening their isolation until Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 finally made it illegal for federally funded schools to expel a pregnant girl or teenage mother.

Margaret was called down to the school office and told she could not return until she provided a doctor's note proving she was not pregnant, after which neighborhood parents made their daughters cross the street to avoid walking near her. Families frequently sequestered pregnant daughters inside the house, forcing them into intense secrecy to protect the family's reputation. Families drew drapes, made daughters duck down in cars or lie in the backseats, and instructed them to hide whenever neighbors visited. The girls were burdened with the belief that they had shamed or ruined their entire families.

Nancy II had to hide on the car floorboards and enter her family's new Dallas home through the alley garage with closed curtains so neighbors would not discover she was pregnant. Society applied a strict double standard, holding young women exclusively accountable for sexual behavior and conception. Fathers faced no public shaming or academic consequences, and parents rarely held their sons responsible.

Barbara discovered years later that the father who had walked away from her was concurrently responsible for impregnating two other young women at the same time, leaving him with three pregnant girlfriends as a nineteen-year-old. In the decades before DNA testing, proving paternity was scientifically impossible, allowing denying fathers to go completely unchallenged. Before the 1970s, blood tests could only eliminate a portion of the male population rather than prove paternity. Best blood tests before the 1970s could only eliminate 40 percent of the male population, and 1970s tests could exclude about 80 percent of men from being the father, while true DNA testing establishing 99.9 percent certainty did not arrive until the 1980s.

Leslie's boyfriend denied responsibility and his parents took him back to university, offering financial help for the pregnancy while ending any further obligation for their son.

Life in Maternity Homes

Maternity homes run by religious orders subjected residents to rigid institutional rules, severe moral condemnation, and a total lack of choices. Girls were assigned false names, subjected to high-sodium institutional diets offset by diuretic pills, and given no counseling other than moral lectures emphasizing that they had committed a mortal sin and must surrender their babies. About twenty-five girls were in the home at that time.

Claudia was given the alias Marsha at St. Mary's home in Dorchester, where nuns with visible facial hair presided over strict routines, large dormitories, and daily reminders of female sinfulness. Despite widespread familial rejection, some fathers provided rare moments of compassion and support during confinement. While mothers often enforced social rules and panic, some fathers visited their banished daughters in maternity homes alone, bringing forbidden treats and taking the visibly pregnant girls out into the community without shame.

Claudia's father regularly visited her at St. Mary's maternity home in Dorchester, sneaking in Dunkin' Donuts and taking her and her pregnant roommates to movies, museums, and Chinatown. Decades later, mothers initiated searches to find their surrendered children, often navigating complex family dynamics and initial rejections before achieving reconciliation. When adult adoptees or birth mothers initiated contact through agencies or registries, they frequently encountered initial hesitation due to loyalty conflicts with adoptive parents, but perseverance often led to emotional reunions and healing.

Claudia initiated a search at age forty and met Raina at age forty-six, and the birth father was sixty years old when Claudia found him. Claudia searched for her daughter Raina after forty years, eventually reconnecting with both Raina and her original birth father, who had never told his wife about the pregnancy.

4. Institutional Coercion and Financial Pressures

Social workers and agencies weaponized immediate paperwork, emotional vulnerability, and insurmountable institutional debts to force relinquishments.

Marge lived in a small Kansas town of twelve hundred people where rumors spread instantly. When she became pregnant at sixteen years old, her parents forced her to travel two hundred and fifty miles away from home to the maternity home at four months pregnant.

Agency Pressure

You faced harsh judgment from caseworkers who questioned your fitness as a mother. Yvonne worked the evening shift at a battery factory making battery packs for soldiers in Vietnam, earning less than a dollar and a half an hour. Each battery pack contained 21 cells.

Yvonne met weekly with an older social worker from Catholic Social Services who berated her for being late and irresponsible. The caseworker evaluated her physical appearance negatively in official records and asked how she could possibly be fit to raise a baby on meager wages.

Financial Coercion

Agencies used insurmountable financial demands for medical and institutional care to block mothers from keeping their children. Yvonne delivered her baby in the hospital and spent 5 days there after an induced labor on December 14.

When Yvonne finally decided to keep her baby and asked to pick him up, the social worker presented an impossible bill covering her hospital stay, the baby's hospital, doctors, counseling, the maternity home, and foster care. Thousands of dollars were demanded to cover expenses before releasing the baby, forcing Yvonne to sign adoption papers because she could never acquire that kind of money.

Two and a half weeks old when Yvonne started working at the cheese-packaging factory, her child entered the foster care system while debts accumulated to keep the meter running. You found yourself trapped by a system designed to ensure surrender.

5. Cold War Paranoia and Professional Ideology

Postwar conformity and professionalized social work redefined unwed pregnancy as individual deviance while sealing women into a conveyor belt of surrender.

Cold War Surveillance

The post-World War II economic boom created an intense culture of mass conformity. An unwed pregnancy became a catastrophic threat to a family's hard-won middle-class status. Between 1950 and 1960, 66 percent of the population was married, rising to 68 percent. During this same decade, 18 million people moved to the suburbs. Parents feared ostracism if their unmarried daughter's pregnancy became known.

Deborah recalled that her affluent parents viewed her pregnancy as a shameful regression to a lower social category. They forced her away so they wouldn't have to face questions. Cold War paranoia and the fear of communism fueled an obsessive policing of nonmarital sexual behavior. Government narratives equated traditional nuclear family structures with patriotism. Single mothers and sexually active unmarried women were treated as subversive and dangerous perverts.

Jeanette secretly had a baby in San Francisco. An Atomic Energy Commission investigator interrogated her, convincing her that her hidden pregnancy made her vulnerable to communist coercion. Between 1950 and 1973, 250,000 to one million illegal abortions took place each year. These back-room procedures caused 40 percent of all maternal deaths.

Racial Disparities

Unmarried pregnant women in the 1950s and 1960s were rarely given a genuine choice. Families and doctors processed them along a rigid system of concealment and forced surrender. Diane II was forced to drop out of school, hide out of town, and give up her baby because her mother wanted to conceal the pregnancy from neighbors.

Surrender rates for white women were vastly higher than for African American women. Between 1952 and 1972, whites surrendered at an average of ten times the rate of African Americans. In 1964, white surrenders reached about 40 percent, almost twenty-seven times the rate for African Americans. White families frequently disowned pregnant daughters. African American families were far more likely to absorb the child into the extended family or practice informal adoption. Carole II noted that her community relied on extended family and pooled resources rather than abandoning mothers.

6. Hospital Trauma and Lifelong Psychological Aftermath

Surrendering a child for adoption is often a defining life event that leads to chronic, unresolved grief rather than closure, largely because society discouraged mourning and demanded secrecy.

Surrendering a child leaves relinquishing mothers with lifelong trauma that society expects them to quietly forget.

Ann described the experience as being cut in half, living as half a person pretending to be whole while carrying a permanent black hole inside. Unexpressed grief and trauma from child surrender frequently manifest as severe somatic symptoms, including chronic migraines, physical illnesses, and recurring nightmares about searching for a lost child.

Connie III suffered from continuous, debilitating migraines requiring hospitalization on IVs starting one year after surrendering her child at seventeen; the migraines stopped entirely after she entered a reunion. In a study, 50 percent of mothers reported ongoing pain and suffering as a result of their loss. Traditional mental health professionals and therapists frequently failed to diagnose or properly treat surrendering mothers because they lacked training in adoption issues and tried to medicate symptoms rather than address the root loss. Only 27 percent of practicing clinical psychologists felt well prepared or very well prepared to work with adoption issues.

Support and Recovery

Peer support organizations and advocacy groups provided a vital lifeline for surrendering mothers, enabling them to break decades of isolation, share grief anonymously or openly, and realize they were not crazy. Florence Fisher founded ALMA in 1971, and Lee Campbell founded CUB in 1976.

Pollie attended a meeting for adoptees and birth parents at a local library in April 1983 and finally felt like she had come home to people who truly understood her feelings. When you encounter profound loss, you can apply these steps for recovery:

• Seek out people who understand your feelings of loss.
• Tell others how you feel.
• Take care of your physical health and be aware of the danger of developing a dependence on medication or alcohol.
• Make an effort to live in the present and not dwell on the past.
• Try to take time to adjust to your loss by waiting to major changes such as moving, remarrying, changing jobs or having another child.
• Seek outside help when grief seems like it is too much to bear.
• Be patient because it can take months or years to absorb a major loss.

10 Key Ideas

1. Between 1945 and 1973, 1.5 million unmarried American women were coerced by society, family, and institutions into surrendering their babies for adoption, leaving them with lifelong trauma.
2. The common cultural assumption that birth mothers willingly and easily abandoned unwanted babies is a profound misconception hiding massive systemic pressure.
3. Society rigidly divided women into binary categories of virtuous virgins or fallen women while maintaining an absolute silence regarding reproductive biology and accessible contraception.
4. Families sequestered pregnant daughters and sent them to isolated maternity homes where they faced strict institutional rules and moral shaming.
5. Social workers and agencies weaponized immediate paperwork, emotional vulnerability, and insurmountable institutional debts to force relinquishments.
6. Postwar conformity and professionalized social work redefined unwed pregnancy as individual deviance while sealing women into a conveyor belt of surrender, driven by Cold War surveillance and stark racial disparities in surrender rates.
7. Surrendering a child leaves relinquishing mothers with lifelong trauma that society expects them to quietly forget, often manifesting as severe somatic symptoms and chronic grief.
8. When adult adoptees or birth mothers initiated contact through agencies or registries, they frequently encountered initial hesitation due to loyalty conflicts with adoptive parents, but perseverance often led to emotional reunions and healing.
9. Peer support organizations and advocacy groups provided a vital lifeline for surrendering mothers, enabling them to break decades of isolation and realize they were not crazy.
10. Survivors of forced relinquishment can achieve recovery and healing by seeking out people who understand their feelings of loss, practicing patience, and seeking outside help when grief feels like it is too much to bear.