Based on Fessler's groundbreaking interviews, it brings to brilliant life these women's voices and the spirit of the. Although at times rambling and self-pitying, these knowing oral histories are an emotional boon for birth mothers and adoptees struggling to make sense of troubled pasts. The Girls Who Went Awaytells 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. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more. Fessler, a photography professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, is an adoptee whose birth mother confessed that she had given her away even though her fiancé, who wasn't Fessler's father, was willing to raise her. In these pages, which are sure to provoke controversy among adoptive parents, birth mothers repeatedly insist that their babies were unwanted by society, not by them. More than one birth mother was emotionally paralyzed until she finally met the child she'd relinquished years earlier. They recall callous parents obsessed with what their neighbors would say maternity homes run by unfeeling nuns who sowed the seeds of lifelong guilt and shame and social workers who treated unwed mothers like incubators for married couples. In The Girls Who Went Away, Ann Fessler gathers the forgotten history of a generation who gave up their children, one of whom was Fessler’s own mother.

Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to keep the baby,' says Joyce, in a story typical of the birth mothers, mostly white and middle-class, who vent here about being forced to give up their babies for adoption from the 1950s through the early '70s.

The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler