The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade - Fessler, Ann Review & Synopsis

 Synopsis

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. 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 than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.

Review

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.*Starred Review* Between 1945 and 1973, when unwed motherhood was considered shameful and abortion was generally illegal, 1.5 million babies were relinquished for adoption. Fessler, who was herself adopted, offers an incredible and deeply moving look at the personal cost suffered by the women who gave up their babies, voluntarily and involuntarily. More than 100 women spoke to Fessler about the shame of unwed pregnancy compounded with the guilt over giving away the child as well as the life of secrecy and lies thereafter. Many of the young women were temporarily banished from their communities, sent away to maternity schools to deliver their babies, and then returned to what was supposed to be "normal" life. But for many, the experience changed forever their relationships with their parents, the fathers of their babies, and subsequent husbands and children. Years later, many of the women struggled with the question of reuniting with their children as laws on adoption and social mores changed. Fessler recounts her own journey to find and reunite with her birth mother in this heartrending look at the untold story of American women compelled to surrender their children. Vanessa Bush

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The Girls Who Went Away

“A remarkably well-researched and accomplished book.” —The New York Times Book Review “A wrenching, riveting book.” —Chicago Tribune In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. 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 than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.

        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 than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to ..."

Adoption

The ancient practice of adoption has changed significantly through history. In colonial America, parents adopted out their unwanted children--those who were "rude, stubborn, and unruly"--to other families. Today, Americans go abroad looking for children to adopt, and have adopted more than a quarter million internationally. "Adoption: A Reference Handbook, Second Edition" not only traces the development of expert thinking about adoption, it also looks at both sides of the latest controversial issues. Should adoptions be open or closed? Should the government regulate adoptions more closely--or less? This updated second edition offers an international perspective with a new chapter on how countries outside the United States provide adoption services. This work is an indispensable resource for those thinking about adoption or researching its history.

        This is the story of the next twenty-two years , ending in a happy reunion. Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade ."

The Child Catchers

When Jessie Hawkins' adopted daughter told her she had another mom back in Ethiopia, Jessie didn't, at first, know what to think. She'd wanted her adoption to be great story about a child who needed a home and got one, and a family led by God to adopt. Instead, she felt like she'd done something wrong. Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of reproductive rights, pitched as a "win-win" compromise in the never-ending abortion debate. But as Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers, adoption has lately become even more entangled in the conservative Christian agenda. To tens of millions of evangelicals, adoption is a new front in the culture wars: a test of "pro-life" bona fides, a way for born again Christians to reinvent compassionate conservatism on the global stage, and a means to fulfill the "Great Commission" mandate to evangelize the nations. Influential leaders fervently promote a new "orphan theology," urging followers to adopt en masse, with little thought for the families these "orphans" may already have. Conservative evangelicals control much of that industry through an infrastructure of adoption agencies, ministries, political lobbying groups, and publicly-supported "crisis pregnancy centers," which convince women not just to "choose life," but to choose adoption. Overseas, conservative Christians preside over a spiraling boom-bust adoption market in countries where people are poor and regulations weak, and where hefty adoption fees provide lots of incentive to increase the "supply" of adoptable children, recruiting "orphans" from intact but vulnerable families. The Child Catchers is a shocking exposéf what the adoption industry has become and how it got there, told through deep investigative reporting and the heartbreaking stories of individuals who became collateral damage in a market driven by profit and, now, pulpit command. Anyone who seeks to adopt -- of whatever faith or no faith, and however well-meaning -- is affected by the evangelical adoption movement, whether they know it or not. The movement has shaped the way we think about adoption, the language we use to discuss it, the places we seek to adopt from, and the policies and laws that govern the process. In The Child Catchers, Kathryn Joyce reveals with great sensitivity and empathy why, if we truly care for children, we need to see more clearly.

         Ann Fessler , a documentary historian and author of The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v . Wade , has meticulously chronicled the lives of women of the Baby ..."

Regulating Desire

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Examines the organized efforts to reshape the law relating to young women’s sexuality in the United States. Starting with the mid-nineteenth-century campaign by the American Female Moral Reform Society to criminalize seduction and moving forward to the late twentieth-century conservative effort to codify a national abstinence-only education policy, Regulating Desire explores the legal regulation of young women’s sexuality in the United States. The book covers five distinct time periods in which changing social conditions generated considerable public anxiety about youthful female sexuality and examines how successive generations of reformers sought to revise the law in an effort to manage unruly desires and restore a gendered social order. J. Shoshanna Ehrlich draws upon a rich array of primary source materials, including reform periodicals, court cases, legislative hearing records, and abstinence curricula to create an interdisciplinary narrative of socially embedded legal change. Capturing the complex and dynamic nature of the relationship between the state and the sexualized youthful female body, she highlights how the law both embodies and shapes gendered understandings of normative desire as mediated by considerations of race and class. J. Shoshanna Ehrlich is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of Family Law for Paralegals, Sixth Edition and Who Decides? The Abortion Rights of Teens.

        The discussion about adoption and surrender owes a great deal to the following books: Ann Fessler , The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decade Before Roe v . Wade (New York: ..."

Making Families Through Adoption

This volume examines adoption as a way of understanding the practices and ideology of kinship and family more generally. Adoption allows a window onto discussions of what constitute family or kin, the role of biological connectedness, oversight of parenting practices by the state, and the role of race, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic class in the building of families. The book focuses primarily on adoption practices in the US but will also use examples of adoption and fostering across cultures to put those American adoption practices into a comparative context. While reviewing practices of and issues surrounding adoption, the authors highlight the ways these practices and discussions allow us greater insight into overall practices of kinship and family.

        The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade . New York: Penguin. This is the story of unmarried women who gave up children for adoption before changes in ..."

Secrets to Your Successful Domestic Adoption

A social worker, birthmom and adoption advocate shares her proven strategies and unique insights for finding the perfect adoption match, in a must-have guide for a faster, successful open domestic adoption, with reduced red tape and wait times, compared to a traditional agency. Original. 20,000 first printing.

        Memoirs Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v . Wade . Penguin, 2006. Franklin, Lynn. May the Circle Be Unbroken: An Intimate Journey into the ..."

Families Under Construction

This book is designed for law school seminars and courses, including first-year electives, as well as advanced undergraduate courses in legal studies or other departments. Families Under Construction: Parentage, Adoption, and Assisted Reproduction, Second Edition, provides an in-depth exploration of the fascinating and controversial issues emerging out of biotechnology and society’s changing understanding of family identity. The authors combine solid treatment of the law and carefully crafted additional content to provoke inquiry and fuel class discussion, using a multidisciplinary presentation of legal authorities, policy perspectives, critical analysis, and cultural contexts. Coverage includes the impact of marriage equality, increasing departures from traditional family arrangements, and modern approaches to adoption, as well as infertility treatments, collaborative reproductive arrangements, and reproductive tourism. New to the Second Edition: A new Part I on parentage, parental responsibilities, and parental authority, tracing the evolution from traditional doctrine to contemporary approaches and emphasizing the policy of keeping dependency private The addition of principal cases on wrongful adoption, challenges to sealed adoption records, and intercountry adoption Restructured chapters on assisted reproduction reflecting consequential changes in the legal landscape Professors and students will benefit from: Thorough coverage of significant cases, statutes, and regulations, including law reform efforts and recognition of law’s silence on some topics Opportunities for comparative analysis of law and policy, from “then” to “now” and among various states and nations, with examination of jurisdiction, choice of law, and enforcement An approach that questions core concepts, such as parentage, by highlighting the role of the state in the construction of family and the influence of assumptions about gender, race, sexualities, marriage, class, and dependency Inclusive materials, such as narratives as well as summaries of popular books and films, which explore the interaction of law and life Consideration of professional responsibility, including the often challenging role of lawyers in adoptions and reproductive collaborations A mix of classic and leading-edge cases Notes and Questions that provide background and illuminate salient themes Thought-provoking Problems that prompt consideration of new issues Inserts presenting “Depictions in Popular Culture” of the situations at the center of the cases

         ANN FESSLER , THE GIRLS WHO WENT AWAY : THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF WOMEN WHO SURRENDERED CHILDREN FOR ADOPTION IN THE DECADES BEFORE ROE V . WADE 207-210 (2006) I guess once I got married I felt more normal but still, it's kind of like being in ..."

Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection [4 volumes]

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This four-volume set documents the complexity and richness of women's contributions to American history and culture, empowering all students by demonstrating a more populist approach to the past. • Provides significantly more detail than typical reference works on women's history and culture, enabling readers to better appreciate the contributions of women of all socio-cultural statuses • Covers the astounding range of American women's experience, including women of various economic and racial statuses, religious affiliations, political and ideological identifications, and sexualities • Includes a significant selection of primary documents, thereby combining the educational power of secondary and primary literature to create a richer learning experience for users

        interview. with. Julia. Child. regarding ... Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child , Mastering the Art of French Cooking , Vol . 1 . Copyright © 1961 by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child . Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf ..."

Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets

From the bestselling author of Tripping the Prom Queen comes a fascinating and provocative look at the reasons behind female deception. Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets reveals how society doles out mixed messages to women, fostering the lies they tell. Among the liars are: •A woman who shoplifts, and has it "down to a science" •A woman who tells her husband she is working late in order to be with her lover •A woman who lies about her children's achievements to her friends •A woman who pretends her husband is doing well when they are going broke •A woman who has covered up her husband's emotional abuse for years •A woman whose secret is her misery in being a stay-at-home mom in suburbia •A woman who lies about loving her partner, deciding it's better to stay than be alone •And many other secrets and deceptions Honest and even outrageous, Susan Shapiro Barash is fast becoming the author who explores issues that are important to women—issues that they are loath to talk about . . . until now.

         Ann Fessler's book, The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v . Wade , consists of interviews with young mothers who gave up their babies in the 1950s and 1960s, ..."

Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece

Reveals the history of how 3,000 Greek children were shipped to the United States for adoption in the postwar period

         Fessler , Ann (2006). The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade . New York: Penguin Press. Fieldston, Sara (2015). Raising the World: Child Welfare in the ..."

Women's Roles in Twentieth-Century America

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The twentieth century was a time of great transformation in the roles of American women. Women have always worked and raised families, but, theoretically, the world opened up to them with new opportunities to participate fully in society, from voting, to controlling their reproductive cycle, to running a Fortune 500 company. This content-rich overview of women's roles in the modern age is a must-have for every library to fill the gap in resources about women's lives. Students and general readers will trace the development of American women of different classes and ethnicities in education, the home, the law, politics, religion, work, and the arts from the Progressive Era to the new millennium. The twentieth century was a time of great transformation in the roles of American women. Women have always worked and raised families, but, theoretically, the world opened up to them with new opportunities to participate fully in society, from voting, to controlling their reproductive cycle, to running a Fortune 500 company. This content-rich overview of women's roles in the modern age is a must-have for every library to fill the gap in resources about women's lives. Students and general readers will trace the development of American women of different classes and ethnicities in education, the home, the law, politics, religion, work, and the arts from the Progressive Era to the new millennium. Each narrative chapter covers a crucial topic in women's lives and encapsulates the twentieth-century growth and changes. Women's participation in the workforce with its challenges, opportunities, and gains is the focus of Chapter 1. The developing role of women and the family, taking into consideration consumerism and feminism, is the subject of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 explores women and pop culture and the arts-their roles as creators and subjects. Chapter 4 covers education from the early century's access to higher education until today's female hyperachiever. Chapter 5 discusses women and government, from winning the vote through the battle for the Equal Rights Amendment, to Women's Lib, and public office holding. Chapter 6 addresses women and the law, their rights, their use of the law, their practice of it, and court cases affecting them. The final chapter overviews women and religious participation and roles in various denominations. An historical introduction, timeline, photos, and selected bibliography round out the coverage.

        Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V . Wade . New York: Penguin, 2007. Fields, Jill."

Abuse: An Encyclopedia of Causes, Consequences, and Treatments

This timely volume shows how abuse impacts every segment of society—and how society is seeking effective ways to respond. • Offers an introductory essay that places the subject in context and provides a framework within which to study and understand abuse • Features entries from leading scholars who provide a contemporary approach to the issues • Covers a wide range of types of abuse, individuals and organizations affected by abuse, and people working to reduce and eliminate abuse • Includes summaries of laws that apply to various forms of abuse • Provides a "topic finder" to assist readers in locating information relative to particular types of abuse

        Further Reading Fessler , Ann . 2006. “The Girls Who Went Away ”: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade . New York: Penguin Press. Joyce, Kathryn. 2013. The Child Catchers."

Jane Against the World

A riveting look at the extraordinary and tumultuous history of abortion rights in the United States from the 19th century to the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, by award-winning author and journalist Karen Blumenthal. Tracing the path to the pivotal decision in Roe v. Wade and the continuing battle for women's rights, Blumenthal examines, in a straightforward tone, the root causes of the current debate around abortion and its repercussions that have rippled through generations of American women. This urgent book is the perfect tool to facilitate discussion and awareness of a topic that affects each and every person in the United States.

         Roe v . Wade and the Fight for Reproductive Rights Karen Blumenthal ... Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade ."

Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries

This book is about the ways we make sense of the constant changes and interchanges of webs of meaning and being that we are all connected to. Working from textual, visual, historical, and contemporary fieldworks, each chapter presents a unique exercise on challenges of thinking through the figurations of imaginaries into their aesthetic forms.

        Following the Tambourine Man: A Birthmother's Memoir. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Fessler , Ann . 2006. The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v . Wade ."

Intimate Integration

Privileging Indigenous voices and experiences, Intimate Integration documents the rise and fall of North American transracial adoption projects, including the Adopt Indian and M?tis Project and the Indian Adoption Project. The author argues that the integration of adopted Indian and M?tis children mirrored the new direction in post-war Indian policy and welfare services. She illustrates how the removal of Indigenous children from Indigenous families and communities took on increasing political and social urgency, contributing to what we now call the "Sixties Scoop." Intimate Integration utilizes an Indigenous gender analysis to identify the gendered operation of the federal Indian Act and its contribution to Indigenous child removal, over-representation in provincial child welfare systems, and transracial adoption. Specifically, women and children's involuntary enfranchisement through marriage, as laid out in the Indian Act, undermined Indigenous gender and kinship relationships. Making profound contributions to the history of settler-colonialism in Canada, Intimate Integration sheds light on the complex reasons behind persistent social inequalities in child welfare.

        ... in Feminist Historical and Cultural Materialism.” Signs 27, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 58–85. Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade ."

Hole in My Heart

In the days before Roe v. Wade, an ambitious young journalist, abandoned by her beau, leaves Michigan for a dream job on the city desk of a Rochester, NY newspaper. Burned once, she's eager for love, but as the only Girl in the newsroom, she's more concerned about finding allies and making friends. When a new leading man appears, she recognizes a kindred spirit. Soon her bylined stories claim front-page space. However, when she becomes pregnant, she must switch her attention from deadlines to decisions. With adoption on the horizon, she pushes her man to make a commitment. Sadly, he wants her, but not their daughter. Will Dusky ever find the little girl she longed to raise, and if she does, what will be the fallout from their years apart? In Hole in My Heart, the author uses her skills as a journalist to report on the social history and long-term consequences of family separation. If you like true stories with strong women narrators, you’ll love Lorraine Dusky’s timely and heart-rending memoir about motherhood, identity and love. Written by a leader in the movement to reform adoption practices and the first to come out of the era's closet of shame. With footnotes, bibliography and index.

         Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade . New York: Penguin, 2006. Glaser, Gabrielle. American Baby: A Mother, a Child , and the Shadow ..."

Everybody Else

In the popular imagination, the twenty years after World War II are associated with simpler, happier, more family-focused living. We think of stereotypical baby boom families like the Cleavers—white, suburban, and well on their way to middle-class affluence. For these couples and their children, a happy, stable family life provided an antidote to the anxieties and uncertainties of the emerging nuclear age. But not everyone looked or lived like the Cleavers. For those who could not have children, or have as many children as they wanted, the postwar baby boom proved a source of social stigma and personal pain. Further, in 1950 roughly one in three Americans made below middle-class incomes, and over fifteen million lived under Jim Crow segregation. For these individuals, home life was not an oasis but a challenge, intimately connected to the era's many political and social upheavals. Everybody Else provides a comparative analysis of diverse postwar families and examines the lives and case records of men and women who applied to adopt or provide pre-adoptive foster care in the 1940s and 1950s. It considers an array of individuals—both black and white, middle and working class—who found themselves on the margins of a social world that privileged family membership. These couples wanted adoptive and foster children in order to achieve a sense of personal mission and meaning, as well as a deeper feeling of belonging to their communities. But their quest for parenthood also highlighted the many inequities of that era. These individuals' experiences seeking children reveal that the baby boom family was about much more than “togetherness” or a quiet house in the suburbs; it also shaped people's ideas about the promises and perils of getting ahead in postwar America.

         Adoption and the Politics of Domestic Diversity in Postwar America Sarah Potter ... Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade ."

Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption

Adoptions that cross the lines of culture, race and nation are a major consequence of conflicts around the globe, yet their histories and representations have rarely been considered. Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption is the first critical study to explore narratives of transcultural adoption from contemporary Britain, Ireland and America: fictions, films and memoirs made by those within the adoption 'triad' or those concerned with the pain and possibilities of transcultural adoption. While acknowledging the sobering inequalities which engender transcultural adoptions and the lasting upset of sundered relations, at the same time John McLeod considers the transfigurative and creative propensity of imagining transcultural adoption as radically calling into question ideas of biogenetic attachment, racial genealogy, cultural identity and normative family-making. How might the predicament of 'being adopted' transculturally enable the transformative agency of 'adoptive being' for all? Exploring works by Andrea Levy, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, Sebastian Barry, Caryl Phillips, Jackie Kay and several others, Life Lines makes a groundbreaking intervention in such fields as transcultural studies, postcolonial thought, and adoption theory and practice.

         Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v Wade . With a New Afterword. New York and London: Penguin, 2007. Frears, Stephen, dir. Philomena."

The Spirit of Adoption

The Spirit of Adoption explores many of the complexities inherent in adoption and its relationship to spirituality, challenging us to move beyond the common mythologies about adoption to consider the more difficult questions adoption raises about the nature of God, family, culture, loss, and joy. Rather than hearing from experts in adoption, this collection uses the narratives of birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees themselves, bearing witness to the ways adoption shapes its participants' spiritual lives. By allowing others to narrate their spiritual journeys through adoption, we hope to proclaim that adoption can be a wonderful, powerful, hopeful experience, and one that is difficult, painful, despairing--and that these paradoxes of adoption might be held together in God's hand.

         Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe vs . Wade . New York: Penguin, 2006. Groody Daniel G. Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice: Navigating ..."

Female Adolescent Sexuality in the United States, 1850–1965

This book examines the history of female adolescent sexuality in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the 1960s. The book analyzes both adult perceptions of female adolescent sexuality and the experiences of female adolescents themselves. It examines what girls knew (or thought they knew) about sex at different points in time, girls’ sexual experiences, girls' ideas about love and romance, female adolescent beauty culture, and the influence of popular culture on female adolescent sexuality. It also examines the ways in which adults responded to female adolescent sexuality and the efforts of adults to either control or encourage girls' interest in sexual topics, dating, girls’ participation in beauty culture, and their education on sexual topics. The book describes a trajectory along which female adolescents went from being perceived as inherently innocent and essentially asexual to being regarded (and feared) as primarily sexual in nature.

        A Girl Grows Up. New York: Whittlesey House, 1939. Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v . Wade . New York: Penguin Books, 2007."

What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood

A People Best Book of Summer A New York Times Most Anticipated Book of the Summer A riveting investigation into a cold case asks how much control women have over their bodies and the direction of their lives. July 1970. Eighteen-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Four months later, her remains were discovered just beyond the mouth of a culvert overlooking the Cedar River. Her homicide has never been solved. Fifty years cold, Paula’s case had been mostly forgotten when journalist Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could the powers that be, how could a community, have given up? Tracing Paula’s final days, Dykstra uncovers a girl whose exultant personality was at odds with the Midwest norms of the late 1960s. A girl who was caught between independence and youthful naivete, between a love that defied racially segregated Cedar Rapids and her complicated but enduring love for her mother, and between a possible pregnancy and the freedoms that had been promised by the women’s liberation movement but that still had little practical bearing on actual lives. The more Dykstra learned about the circumstances of Paula’s life, the more parallels she saw in the lives of the women who knew Paula and the women in Paula’s family, in the lives of the women in Dykstra’s own family, and even in her own life. Captivating and expertly crafted from interviews with Paula’s family and friends, police reports, and on-the-scene investigation, What Happened to Paula is part true crime story, part memoir, a timely and powerful look at gender, autonomy, and the cost of being a woman.

         Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v . Wade . New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of ..."

Abortion in the United States: A Reference Handbook, 2nd Edition

Distinctive in its use of two disciplinary lenses—sociology and political science—Abortion in the United States provides a balanced scholarly analysis of the most salient issues in the pro-life/pro-choice debate. • Traces the continually shifting landscape of public opinion, spotlighting millennial and male perspectives and the factors that shape abortion beliefs • Offers an intersectional analysis of restricted access to abortion, paying particular attention to the sociodemographic characteristics of women who have abortions and the lived experiences of making pregnancy decisions amidst the political controversy • Accentuates the role that institutions including schools, pharmacies, the military, prisons, and immigration detention facilities play in determining women's reproductive decisions • Features an analysis of movement-countermovement dynamics and relies on scientific evidence to investigate contested claims over emergency contraception, late-term abortions, and the safety of the abortion procedure and its psychological outcomes

        In The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade , Ann Fessler (2007), whose own mother had given her up for adoption , tells the stories of more than a ..."

Children and the Politics of Cultural Belonging

Conversations about multiculturalism rarely consider the position of children, who are presumptively nested in families and communities. Yet providing care for children who are unanchored from their birth families raises questions central to multicultural concerns, as they frequently find themselves moved from communities of origin through adoption or foster care, which deeply affects marginalized communities. This book explores the debate over communal and cultural belonging in three distinct contexts: domestic transracial adoptions of non-American Indian children, the scope of tribal authority over American Indian children, and cultural and communal belonging for transnationally adopted children. Understanding how children 'belong' to families and communities requires hard thinking about the extent to which cultural or communal belonging matters for children and communities, who should have authority to inculcate racial and cultural awareness and, finally, the degree to which children should be expected to adopt and carry forward racial or cultural identities.

        42 Ann Fessler , The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v . Wade (New York: The Penguin Group, 2006). 4 Although many children initially adopted from Korea were ..."

Howard Cruse

Howard Cruse tells the life story of one of the most important figures in LGBTQ+ comics. A preacher’s kid from Alabama who became “the godfather of queer comics,” Cruse (1944–2019) was a groundbreaking underground cartoonist, a wicked satirist, an LGBTQ+ activist, and a mentor to a vast network of queer comics artists. His comic strip Wendel, published in The Advocate throughout the 1980s, is considered a revolutionary moment in the development of LGBTQ+ comics, as is his inaugurating the editorship of Gay Comix with Kitchen Sink Press in 1979, which furthered the careers of important artists like Jennifer Camper and Alison Bechdel. Cruse’s graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, published in 1995, fictionalizes his own coming out in the context of the civil rights movement in 1960s Birmingham and was a significant forerunner to contemporary graphic novels and memoirs. Howard Cruse draws on extensive archival research and interviews and covers Cruse’s entire body of work: the cute and zany Barefootz, the unexpected innovations of the Gay Comix stories, the domestic intimacies of Wendel, and the complexity and power of Stuck Rubber Baby. The book places Cruse’s art in the context of his life and his times, including the historic movements for gay rights and against the AIDS crisis, and it celebrates this extraordinary and essential figure of LGBTQ+ comics and American comics art more broadly.

        Archives However, before the satire: “Quad Controversy Settled. ... 35 The mission of the Homes: Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v . Wade ."

Mothers in Children's and Young Adult Literature

Living or dead, present or absent, sadly dysfunctional or merrily adequate, the figure of the mother bears enormous freight across a child’s emotional and intellectual life. Given the vital role literary mothers play in books for young readers, it is remarkable how little scholarly attention has been paid to the representation of mothers outside of fairy tales and beyond studies of gender stereotypes. This collection of thirteen essays begins to fill a critical gap by bringing together a range of theoretical perspectives by a rich mix of senior scholars and new voices. Following an introduction in which the coeditors describe key trends in interdisciplinary scholarship, the book’s first section focuses on the pedagogical roots of maternal influence in early children’s literature. The next section explores the shifting cultural perspectives and subjectivities of the twentieth century. The third section examines the interplay of fantasy, reality, and the ethical dimensions of literary mothers. The collection ends with readings of postfeminist motherhood, from contemporary realism to dystopian fantasy. The range of critical approaches in this volume will provide multiple inroads for scholars to investigate richer readings of mothers in children’s and young adult literature.

         Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade . New York: Penguin, 2006. Fraustino, Lisa Rowe. “The Apple of Her Eye: The Mothering Ideology Fed ..."

Kinship by Design

What constitutes a family? Tracing the dramatic evolution of Americans’ answer to this question over the past century, Kinship by Design provides the fullest account to date of modern adoption’s history. Beginning in the early 1900s, when children were still transferred between households by a variety of unregulated private arrangements, Ellen Herman details efforts by the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the Child Welfare League of America to establish adoption standards in law and practice. She goes on to trace Americans’ shifting ideas about matching children with physically or intellectually similar parents, revealing how research in developmental science and technology shaped adoption as it navigated the nature-nurture debate. Concluding with an insightful analysis of the revolution that ushered in special needs, transracial, and international adoptions, Kinship by Design ultimately situates the practice as both a different way to make a family and a universal story about love, loss, identity, and belonging. In doing so, this volume provides a new vantage point from which to view twentieth-century America, revealing as much about social welfare, statecraft, and science as it does about childhood, family, and private life.

        ... Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Ann Fessler , The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade ..."

Mothers, Mothering and Motherhood Across Cultural Differences - A Reader

Mothers, Mothering and Motherhood across Cultural Differences, the first-ever Reader on the subject matter, examines the meaning and practice of mothering/motherhood from a multitude of maternal perspectives. The Reader includes 22 chapters on the following maternal identities: Aboriginal, Adoptive, At-Home, Birth, Black, Disabled, East-Asian, Feminist, Immigrant/Refuge, Latina/Chicana, Poor/Low Income, Migrant, Non-Residential, Older, Queer, Rural, Single, South-Asian, Stepmothers, Working, Young Mothers, and Mothers of Adult Children. Each chapter provides background and context, examines the challenges and possibilities of mothering/motherhood for each group of mothers and considers directions for future research. The first anthology to provide a comprehensive examination of mothers/mothering/ motherhood across diverse cultural locations and subject positions, the book is essential reading for maternal scholars and activists and serves as an ideal course text for a wide range of courses in Motherhood Studies.

         Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v . Wade . Penguin Books, 2007. Freundlich, M. “Access to Information and Reunion in Korean American ..."

Mother without their children

Conceiving of and representing mothers without their children seems so paradoxical as to be almost impossible. How can we define a mother in the absence of her child? This compelling volume explores these and other questions from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, examining experiences, representations, creative manifestations, and embodiments of mothers without their children. In her 1997 book, entitled Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood, the critic Elaine Tuttle Hansen urged for critical and feminist engagement with what she described as ‘the borders of motherhood and the women who really live there, neither fully inside nor fully outside some recognizable “family unit”, and often exiles from their children’. This book extends and expands this important enquiry, looking at maternal experience and mothering on the borders of motherhood in different historical and cultural contexts, thereby opening up the way in which we imagine and represent mothers without their children to reassessment and revision, and encouraging further dialogue about what it might mean to mother on the borders of motherhood.

         Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade . Penguin Press, 2006. Fitzpatrick, Peter. “Life or a Cabaret?: Nick Enright and The Boy from Oz.” ..."

Undoing Motherhood

In 1978 the world’s first “test-tube baby” was born from in vitro fertilization (IVF), effectively ushering in a paradigm shift for infertility treatment that relied on partially disembodied human reproduction. Beyond IVF, the ability to extract, fertilize, and store reproductive cells outside of the human body has created new opportunities for family building, but also prompted new conflicts about rights to and control over reproductive cells. In collaborative forms of reproduction that build on IVF technologies, such as egg and embryo donation and gestational surrogacy, multiple women may variously contribute to conception, gestation/birth, and the legal and social responsibilities for rearing a child, creating intentionally fragmented maternities. Undoing Motherhood examines the implications of such fragmented maternities in the post-IVF reproductive era for generating maternity uncertainty—an increasing cultural ambiguity about what does and should constitute maternity. Undoing Motherhood explores this uncertainty in the social worlds of reproductive medicine and law.

        Retrieved January 2021. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/poly-relationship- adoption - embryo-surr. Fessler , Ann . 2006. The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v ."

Reproductive Rights Issues in Popular Media

\ufeff “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body.” Almost a century after Margaret Sanger wrote these words, women’s reproductive rights are still hotly debated in the press and among policymakers, while film, television and other media address issues of birth control and abortion to global audiences. This collection of new essays brings fresh perspectives to the study of family planning, contraception and abortion with a focus on their representation in popular media. Topics include dramas of adoption and abortion, telling the story of the pill, Sanger’s depiction in entertainment media, and a controversy about demographic developments stirred by Carl Djerassi, also known as “the father of the pill.”

         Adoption in America: historical Perspectives. ann arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Print. Fessler , ann . The girls Who Went Away : The hidden history of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v ."

A Generation Removed

On June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl, which pitted adoptive parents Matt and Melanie Capobianco against baby Veronica’s biological father, Dusten Brown, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Veronica’s biological mother had relinquished her for adoption to the Capobiancos without Brown’s consent. Although Brown regained custody of his daughter using the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Capobiancos, rejecting the purpose of the ICWA and ignoring the long history of removing Indigenous children from their families. In A Generation Removed, a powerful blend of history and family stories, award-winning historian Margaret D. Jacobs examines how government authorities in the post–World War II era removed thousands of American Indian children from their families and placed them in non-Indian foster or adoptive families. By the late 1960s an estimated 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated from their families. Jacobs also reveals the global dimensions of the phenomenon: These practices undermined Indigenous families and their communities in Canada and Australia as well. Jacobs recounts both the trauma and resilience of Indigenous families as they struggled to reclaim the care of their children, leading to the ICWA in the United States and to national investigations, landmark apologies, and redress in Australia and Canada.

         Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade . New York: Penguin Press, 2006. Fey, Harold E. “The Church and the Indian."

An Open Secret

An Open Secret traces the history of women's experiences with unwanted pregnancy and abortion in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia between the early 1950s and 2010. It finds that women's personal reproductive experiences contributed to shaping policies and services in reproductive health care.

        The History of Unwanted Pregnancy and Abortion in Modern Bolivia Natalie L. Kimball ... Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe V . Wade ."

Failure to Flourish

Exploring the connection between families and inequality, Failure to Flourish: How Law Undermines Family Relationships argues that the legal regulation of families stands fundamentally at odds with the needs of families. Strong, stable, positive relationships are essential for both individuals and society to flourish, but from transportation policy to the criminal justice system, and from divorce rules to the child welfare system, the legal system makes it harder for parents to provide children with these kinds of relationships, exacerbating the growing inequality in America. Failure to Flourish contends that we must re-orient the legal system to help families avoid crises and, when conflicts arise, intervene in a manner that heals relationships. To understand how wrong our family law system has gone and what we need to repair it, Failure to Flourish takes us from ancient Greece to cutting-edge psychological research, and from the chaotic corridors of local family courts to a quiet revolution under way in how services are provided to families in need. Incorporating the latest insights of positive psychology and social science research, the book sets forth a new, more emotionally intelligent vision for a legal system that not only resolves conflict but actively encourages the healthy relationships that are at the core of a stable society.

        See ANN FESSLER , THE GIRLS WHO WENT AWAY : THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF WOMEN WHO SURRENDERED CHILDREN FOR ADOPTION IN THE DECADES BEFORE ROE V . WADE (2006) (describing the pre -Roe years , when large percentages of young unmarried women were ..."

Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood

Provides a model for queering motherhood that resists racist, neoliberal, and hetero- or homonormative ideals of “good” mothering.

         Fessler , Ann . 2006. The girls who went away : The hidden history of women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before Roe v . Wade . London: Penguin. Fetzer, Philip L. 1999. Child abuse and neglect: A multicultural ..."

Babies without Borders

International adoptions are both high-profile and controversial, with the celebrity adoptions and critically acclaimed movies such as Casa de los babys of recent years increasing media coverage and influencing public opinion. Neither celebrating nor condemning cross-cultural adoption, Karen Dubinsky considers the political symbolism of children in her examination of adoption and migration controversies in North America, Cuba, and Guatemala. Babies Without Borders tells the interrelated stories of Cuban children caught in Operation Peter Pan, adopted Black and Native American children who became icons in the Sixties, and Guatemalan children whose 'disappearance' today in transnational adoption networks echoes their fate during the country's brutal civil war. Drawing from extensive research as well as from her critical observations as an adoptive parent, Karen Dubinsky aims to move adoption debates beyond the current dichotomy of 'imperialist kidnap' versus 'humanitarian rescue.' Integrating the personal with the scholarly, Babies Without Borders exposes what happens when children bear the weight of adult political conflicts.

         Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v . Wade . New York: Penguin, 2006. Fidel and Religion: Talks with Frei Betto."

Aftermath

After nearly fifty years as settled constitutional law, the federally protected right to an abortion in America is now a thing of the past. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has left Americans without a guaranteed right to access abortion―and the cost of that upheaval will be most painfully felt by individuals who already struggle with access to resources: the poor, Black and brown communities, and members of the LGBTQIA+ population. Pulling together the experiences, expertise, and perspectives of more than 30 writers, thinkers, and activists, Aftermath: Life in Post-Roe America offers a searing look at the critical role Roe has played in improving women’s and pregnant people’s lives, what a future without Roe may look like, and what options exist for us to secure reproductive freedom in the future. With contributions from Jessica Valenti, Soraya Chemaly, Michele Goodwin, Alyssa Milano, Ruby Sales, Heather Cox Richardson, Robin Marty, Linda Villarosa, Jennifer Baumgardner and more, this anthology is essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of reproductive rights in America―and beyond.

        Then, in 2006, I read Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v . Wade . Reader, that book changed me. First, it is deeply researched and ..."

A Child of One's Own

A fascinating study examining the diversities and novelties of contemporary parenthood in the light of a range of literary and philosophical works ranging from Greek tragedies to contemporary psychoanalytic theory by way of diverse writers from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

         Fessler , Ann , The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before ' Roe v . Wade ' (New York: Penguin Press, 2006). Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones (1749), ed."

Framed by War

An intimate portrait of the postwar lives of Korean children and women Korean children and women are the forgotten population of a forgotten war. Yet during and after the Korean War, they were central to the projection of US military, cultural, and political dominance. Framed by War examines how the Korean orphan, GI baby, adoptee, birth mother, prostitute, and bride emerged at the heart of empire. Strained embodiments of war, they brought Americans into Korea and Koreans into America in ways that defined, and at times defied, US empire in the Pacific. What unfolded in Korea set the stage for US postwar power in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. American destruction and humanitarianism, violence and care played out upon the bodies of Korean children and women. Framed by War traces the arc of intimate relations that served as these foundations. To suture a fragmented past, Susie Woo looks to US and South Korean government documents and military correspondence; US aid organization records; Korean orphanage registers; US and South Korean newspapers and magazines; and photographs, interviews, films, and performances. Integrating history with visual and cultural analysis, Woo chronicles how Americans went from knowing very little about Koreans to making them family, and how Korean children and women who did not choose war found ways to navigate its aftermath in South Korea, the United States, and spaces in between.

         Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade . New York: Penguin, 2006. Fieldston, Sara. Raising the World: Child Welfare in the American ..."

Somebody's Children

A feminist historian and an adoptive parent, Laura Briggs gives an account of transracial and transnational adoption from the point of view of the mothers and communities that lose their children.

         Fessler , Ann . The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Childrenfor Adoption in the Decades before Roe v . Wade . New York: Penguin Press, 2006. Fisher v. District Court, 424 U.S. 382 (1976)."