The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade

"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.

Author: Ann Fessler
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 07/01/2007
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.73lbs
Size: 8.42h x 5.58w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780143038979
Age Range: 18-UP

Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 08/12/2007 pg. 24

About the Author
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.