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The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children
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The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade Paperback - 2007

by Ann Fessler

This powerful revelation uncovers the astonishing, untold history of the million-and-a-half women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before "Roe v. Wade."


Summary

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.

From the publisher

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.

Details

  • Title The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade
  • Author Ann Fessler
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition Reprint
  • Pages 368
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Penguin Books, U.S.A.
  • Date 2007-07-01
  • Features Bibliography, Index, Price on Product - Canadian, Table of Contents
  • ISBN 9780143038979 / 0143038974
  • Weight 0.73 lbs (0.33 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.42 x 5.58 x 0.8 in (21.39 x 14.17 x 2.03 cm)
  • Ages 18 to UP years
  • Grade levels 13 - UP
  • Themes
    • Sex & Gender: Feminine
    • Topical: Adoption
    • Topical: Family
  • Library of Congress subjects Adoption - United States - Psychological, Birthmothers - United States
  • Dewey Decimal Code 362.829

Media reviews

Journalism of the first order, moving and informative in equal measure. (San Francisco Chronicle)

A remarkably well-researched and accomplished book. (The New York Times Book Review)

A wrenching, riveting book. (Chicago Tribune)

Haunting. (People)

Citations

  • New York Times Book Review, 08/12/2007, Page 24

About the author

Ann Fessler is a Professor Emerita at Rhode Island School of Design, where she taught from 1993 to 2018. She has spent nearly four decades creating work that deals with the stories of women and the impact that myths, stereotypes, and mass media images have on their lives and intimate relationships. She has spent the last twenty-five years bringing the first-person narratives and hidden history of adoption into the public sphere through her writing and visual works. She turned to the subject after being approached by a woman who thought Fessler might be the daughter she had surrendered forty years earlier. Though the woman was not her mother, Fessler, an adoptee, was profoundly moved by the experience. The conversation that ensued shifted the focus of her work to adoption and she has since produced three films, several audio and video installations, and written The Girls Who Went Away.
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by Ann Fessler

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

by Fessler, Ann

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

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