The Girls Who Went Away (5 page)

I said to myself, “Well, she’s got it all sewn up good and proper, doesn’t she?” Everything I could think of, she had an answer for. And as things got a little tense, and I was about to say, “No. I’m not gonna sign these,” she said, “You know, the state paid for you to go to St. Agnes. That’s quite a bit of money that we put out in good faith. Do you have the money to pay for that?” I said, “No.” I looked at my mother, and I said, “Mommy, what am I going to do?” And she said, “Babe, I don’t know. We don’t have any
money.” I wanted to know from an attorney—I wanted to know from somebody what my rights were. But for every question I asked this woman I got the answer that I didn’t want to hear: that I had no rights. That I had already given her away. That it was the best thing. And that it was all my fault. Somehow, it was all my fault that things weren’t going well. And that I needed to just go home and I would forget about it and I would be fine.

We sat there for a long time, wrangling back and forth, and she wore me down. I was still sick, I still had not recovered. I was very weak and needed to lie down. She wasn’t moving that car until I signed those papers. I remember almost grabbing them from her at one point and saying, “All right, I’ll sign them.” I remember just scrawling my name and handing them back to my mother and my mother signed. The social worker took the papers, put them in her briefcase and we drove to my house without saying one more word. And life for me was never the same.

That fall I went back to school. I was a junior in high school but all I cared about was escaping. I couldn’t concentrate—it was very difficult. I realized that I could find escape in drugs and, later, in alcohol. And that began a lifelong problem, with trying to realize you can’t bury your emotions. You just have to talk about them. So for about fifteen years, I smoked pot really heavily. I drank. I couldn’t hold a job. I didn’t know what I wanted. I remember just being really wild and not caring about anything. I was courting death, certainly. This went on for years.

I never had another relationship with a boy. I would never let anyone close enough to me. I no longer associated pleasure with sex. I associated death and pain and loss with sex. At some point I cleaned up enough to get a job, and I met my ex-husband in the late eighties. By then I was, like, thirty-six or something. And he taught me to enjoy sex, which I’m really grateful for. Before the age of thirty-six, I did not know how to enjoy sex.

I also noticed another phenomenon: I couldn’t talk about what had happened to me, about my daughter and giving her up, because every single person I told the story to judged me. Not one single person said, “I know how you feel. If I were in your spot I would have had a hard time.” Every single person judged me.

ANNIE

I
was a junior in high school and an above-average student. I finished in the top 10 percent of my class, but I had no aspirations for continuing my education. I simply wanted to work for a year as a secretary and then get married and have babies. I had my husband picked out. He and I had been going steady since I was fourteen and he was fifteen. I was madly in love with him and he with me. That was the thing then. Around age fourteen and a half, we started having sex. Unfortunately, that was not that unusual for young people at that age, though no one admitted it then. When I returned to school in September of my junior year, that would have been 1957, there were about a half dozen girls who didn’t come back because they had gotten married over the summer. So in this area of Milwaukee, and our socioeconomic class, it wasn’t all that unusual.

We were so serious at fifteen and sixteen. We talked about getting married. We talked about the children we would have. We never thought about any birth control. Neither one of us really knew much about it. It just was not talked about then. Young men certainly couldn’t get condoms, and there was no such thing as the birth-control pill. I doubt if I’d ever heard of a diaphragm. Maybe they didn’t even exist. We just didn’t really face the issue. The feelings that we had for each other were so strong, it never occurred to either one of us that we wouldn’t be allowed to get married, because that’s what happened if you got pregnant. I didn’t know anything about girls being sent away. I never knew anyone who was sent away.

I missed a period and I worried and I worried. I missed another one and we decided that we had to tell our parents because we would both require their written permission to get married since we were underage. We dreamed up some excuse to take my mother somewhere in the car. We got a few blocks from home and he parked the car around the corner. She said, “Why are we stopping here?” I said, “Mother, we didn’t go to the circus last night.
We went to a doctor.” And she said, “Oh my God, don’t tell me you’re pregnant. Let me out of this car. Let me out of here right now.” She was just crying and angry and we kept saying that we wanted to get married and she said something like “We’ll see about that.” She wanted to know if his parents knew and he said, yes, he had told them and they were willing to sign for us to get married and that his boss had offered us a room in their home rent free until we could be more established. She said, “I don’t know those people.”

Within a few days, she took me to her doctor, who was not very nice. He said, “Well, you know, there’s a place where they send girls like her down in Kansas City,” and he handed her a brochure. He said, “It’s pretty expensive. If you have any money put aside for her, use it for this. She doesn’t deserve to have it anyway.” That was when the shame began. Before that, I had not really felt ashamed.

My mother and aunt went to his family’s home and did not like what they saw. She said, “They have linoleum on the living-room floor. They’re not good enough for you. Do you want your life to be like that twenty years from now?” When it became obvious that we were not going to be allowed to be married, he decided to enlist in the Marine Corps.

Then one day my mother said, “We are leaving for the Willows Friday night.” That was the maternity home in Kansas City that her doctor had told her about. She said, “You’re going there and you’re going to stay there until you have the baby. Then you’re going to give your baby up for adoption and you’re going to come home and forget that this ever happened. Someday you’ll thank me.” I was very compliant. I respected authority and I did what I was told. At sixteen, back then, you couldn’t get a job other than working at the local custard stand or as a car hop and earning two dollars in tips. I don’t even know if welfare existed. I had no exposure to anything like that. I just had to do everything that my mother said. That was it. There were no options. The only option was to get married and she wouldn’t allow it. So that was it. It was all decided for me.

We left for the Willows after dark so that nobody would see us. We rode the train all night long, in coach. I still remember those horrible seats. They were like the old streetcar seats. We took a taxicab to the maternity home and the owner came to greet us. My first thought was, “She seems pretty
nice. This might not be so bad.” My mother waited in Mrs. H’s office while she took me on a tour. There were two vacancies, and they were both semiprivate rooms. One of them had a washbasin and the other didn’t. As soon as I found out that the room with the washbasin cost five dollars more a week, that was the one I wanted. It was one of the few things I could do to get back at my mother.

We spent the day in downtown Kansas City. We went out for supper and it was quite a treat because we didn’t normally dine in restaurants. We stayed at a hotel and on Sunday morning my mother took me back to the Willows in a taxicab. They had a front entrance with thirty, forty, fifty steps, but nobody used it except the adoptive parents when they came to get the babies. Everyone else used the rear entrance. The taxi driver knew exactly where to go. I imagine he had delivered quite a few young women. My mother briefly got out of the cab and hugged and kissed me, and I remember that she was sobbing when she left. I remember that her shoulders were shaking and I think now of how difficult, how heartbreaking, that must have been for her. I was so nasty to her—oh, I was nasty to her. I made her pay five dollars a week more. She had on a red-and-white sleeveless blouse and a rust-colored skirt. Horrible color combination but, you know, this was 1958. But I’ll always carry that picture in my mind of her with her shoulders shaking as she got into the taxicab.

I
NEVER TOLD
my husband about my first child. People used to say, “Never tell a man, because he’ll think that you’re used merchandise.” They thought men should have all this experience and women should be virgins. You were supposed to fake it. Well, that’s what I did. My obstetrician knew, and he said I made a very good decision. I believed what I was told, and I went along with it. The person that I am today looks back on that young girl and thinks, “Didn’t she have her own mind?” But it was a totally different time. There’s just no way that it can be compared to today.

When our second child was about seven, things started to fall apart between my husband and me. It seemed like we disagreed for the sake of disagreeing on just about everything. At that time in Wisconsin, the grounds for divorce were horrible things: physical abuse, mental cruelty, abandonment
or
voluntary separation of one year or more. So we separated. I had
quit a really good job about two and a half years before because I was doing better at work than my husband and, you know, in 1972 that was an issue. I had been earning more money, and I hadn’t told him about the last couple of raises I had gotten, and when he found out it was a big problem. So I quit the job because I thought the job was not as important as the marriage. The man was supposed to be the provider. It was getting to the point where it was okay for the woman to work, but only to supplement the family income. This was in our circle, anyway.

Everybody was very surprised to see that we were separating; we had put on a really good show. When I went around and told my family members, the first thing my mother said was “I hope you never told him about that baby you had in Kansas City, because if you did he can have you declared an unfit mother and take the girls away from you.”

So my husband and I had separated and I don’t remember why, but one Saturday when he came over I told him about the daughter I placed for adoption. And I saw something in him that, after living with him for fifteen years, I’d never seen before. I saw a caring, a depth, a compassion, and that was really…that was big. He had always been kind of surface and cavalier about everything, and I was the one who spoke about feelings. That was a big, big issue between us. I told him very matter-of-factly. I didn’t elaborate a great deal. I did not cry. I just said that I’d never told him because I had been advised not to, but I did not like having this between us. I’d never felt honest about it and I just felt that I wanted him to know. He was so caring. He said, “It must have been so horrible for you to carry that all those years.” This was one of the finer moments of our marriage, it really, truly was, but by then it was just too late. There was so much else that had happened. It was just too late.

Good Girls v. Bad Girls

It was 1959 and I was living in a dormitory at the University of Toledo and working two or three part-time jobs to work my way through school. I was dating this guy who was a couple of years older who was an engineering student and I cared about him very much. I don’t think in those days we knew about birth control. I didn’t know anything. It was something good girls didn’t talk about. I never talked about sex with anyone, including my family. I didn’t know about ovulation or anything. Good girls didn’t talk about those things.

—Carole I

I
F YOU ARE A WOMAN
over fifty who had sex before marriage, you are one of the so-called bad girls. I would put myself squarely in that category. The only difference between me and the women whose stories appear here is that I didn’t get caught. These women and I were certainly not alone in our badness. As early as the 1950s, about 39 percent of unmarried girls had gone “all the way” before they were twenty years old, and by 1973 the percentage had risen to 68 percent.
¹
Because of the difficulty of getting contraceptives, the frequency of premarital pregnancies rose right along with that number. In the mid-1950s, about 40 percent of first births to girls age fifteen to nineteen were conceived out of wedlock.
²
Thereafter, the numbers
rose sharply. By 1971–1974, the number of first births conceived outside of marriage to teenage girls had reached 60 percent.
³

In the post–World War II years, young people’s attitudes toward premarital sex, as well as their actual sexual behavior, began to change. A revolution in dating behavior had actually begun back in the 1920s as teens, rather than their parents, started regulating dating behavior. Unlike their Victorian predecessors who courted on the front porch where their behavior could be closely monitored, the young people in the 1920s enjoyed a degree of privacy and mobility. As dating moved off the porch and into the community, parents were no longer present to set limits. Teens themselves began to determine what was appropriate sexual behavior and to enforce their own standards through peer pressure.
⁴
At the same time, they were being influenced by notions of love and romance disseminated through movies, magazines, and popular music rather than by local customs.