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. 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. To the Editor: I was one of the 'girls who went away,' but my experience was different in some important ways from what was described in Kathryn Harrison's reviewof Ann Fessler's. 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.
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.
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