The Girls Who Went Away

Author: Ann Fessler
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Group, 2007
Pages: 368
Rating: Highly Recommend

Synopsis: In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out in 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 vs 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: I pondered what to write in this review from early on in this book. Since I wasn't born until the late 1970s, there's much about life / culture in mid-century America that I just don't know. Sometimes history is watered down and altered over time. My perception of life in the 1950s and 60s was clearly not everyone's reality.

As a mom, I cried for the women and their babies in this book. The injustices are unspeakable. It was an eye-opening and necessary read. I also have a better sense of how we've gotten here, our culture in 2012.

This book also caused me to reflect upon the human race over thousands of years. We are flawed and our experiences are flawed. We merely survive and live by the ever-changing "rules" of society.