The Girls Who Went Away - Questions

Suggested DISCUSSION QUESTIONS from Penguin Reading Group:

A couple of women the author interviewed explain the difference in grieving for a child that was taken and grieving for a child that died. Explore and discuss the two scenarios. How are they different? How are they similar?

What recollections do you have of girls who became pregnant before marriage, whether or not they were sent away?

Several of the interviewees recall maternity home staff using mind-control techniques (assigning pseudonyms, isolating “clients,” etc.). What are some other examples of how psychology and coercion were used with these young girls?

Are teenage girls today more likely to stand up and make decisions for themselves? If so, what is the source of this empowerment?

Discuss how public schools in the ’50s and ’60s handled sex education. How has this changed today? In your opinion, is there too much, or not enough, of a focus on sex education in schools? How has the Internet affected access to information about sex and sexuality?

Was there a particular interviewee with whom you felt closest (similar education background, socioeconomic status, family makeup, etc.)? What was it about her story that you most identified with?

Discuss how reliable paternity testing has changed how we look at premarital pregnancies. Is there still a sense of “boys will be boys”?

What are the pros and cons of unsealing adoption and birth records? Is it in an adopted child’s best interest to meet his or her birth mother? Is it in the best interest of the birth mother to connect with her child later in life? Why?

The Girls Who Went Away

February Book Club Selection - Meets Feb. 26th upstairs in Joseph Beth, Rookwood Plaza.

After the first incredible book (Snowflower and the Secret Fan), I couldn't wait to see what PPSWO had planned for us next. After reading several reviews and the intro to The Girls Who Went Away, I have the sense this book too will be provocative, challenging to our perception of girls, women, motherhood and the definition of family for each of those stages of life as well as evocative as we find their courage, strength and frailty all too human.

The Girls Who Went Away by Anne Fessler.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Ann Fessler brings to light American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who Went Away tells 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. Today, when the future of the Roe decision and women's reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies.
In 2002, Fessler, uncovered a story of three decades of women who were coerced or outright forced to give their babies up for adoption. Caught in the middle of a great social upheaval, single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy.
The majority of the women Fessler interviewed have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing and important look into a long-overlooked social history, The Girls Who Went Away is their story.

From the Reviewers
New York Times Book Reviewer, Kathryn Harrison

"The Girls Who Went Away" is a remarkably well-researched and accomplished book, especially considering that its author is not a sociologist but a professor of photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. She does, of course, have her vested interest in the topic. Fessler was adopted during the 50's, and she explores the era's glorification of the conventional nuclear family, along with the power of a cultural institution like Life magazine to create and disseminate comforting myths, as it did in its Feb. 19, 1951, cover story. Beginning with its title, "The Adoption of Linda Joy" infuses a sense of serendipity into an experience that virtually all birth mothers seem to have found irreparably damaging. Such discussions provide the background necessary for readers to fully appreciate the many profoundly sad and disturbing oral histories in "The Girls Who Went Away."

For discussion questions, author Ann Fessler directed us to Penguin Pages and thanked us for including her book in this club's selections. I will post those questions a week before the book club meets again - which is February 26th.