Toward Its Being Safe, Legal, and Rare

Abstract

I was born in 1971 to an unwed mother, and so reading The Girls Who Went Away prompted the discovery that my mother might have been such a girl, one who went away?from me, forever, and I from her. My mother wouldn't have been sent away easily; she was a participant in radical politics and a burgeoning feminist who by the time I was born had lived apart from her parents for years. But thousands of women not so different from her were sent away, shunned, and hidden from view until they gave birth to babies who were taken away from them. Starting in the 1940s and lasting well into the 1970s, high schools throughout America had girls who went away. It was a gulag that didn't pile up bodies but did leave behind thousands of profoundly wounded women who are still among us. And yet, until now, the phenomenon has gone unmentioned in public dialogue. Through hundreds of interviews with women who gave up babies for adoption between 1945 and 1973, The Girls Who Went Away pro vides a revelatory account of the fifties, illuminating it as an anoma lous period beset by social contradictions. It airs a secret that still shapes our society, and it provides a window into what it would mean if the social agenda of the Christian right were to prevail. Convention has it that the sexual revolution started in the sixties