Quotes from Ann Fessler

For women born after 1949, the odds were that they would have sex before they reached age twenty.1 Despite the increase in the number of young people having sex in the 1950s and 1960s, access to birth control and sex education lagged far behind. Fearing that sex education would promote or encourage sexual relations, parents and schools thought it best to leave young people uninformed. During this time, effective birth control was difficult to obtain.

Secrets keep families sick. You never keep secrets in families because even if the child doesn't know what the secret is, they will always know there is a secret.

I think one of the reasons I don't talk to some people about it is because they are so judgmental. Quite frankly, it's not that society can't understand, it's that they won't understand. People choose to not understand. —

The damage in many cases was lifelong. These women had not just surrendered a child. They had surrendered control over the most important decision they might ever make to people who they felt did not necessarily have their best interest at heart. The shame was no longer about being single and pregnant. The shame was that they had given away, or not fought hard enough to keep, their child.

Women were expected to wait and learn about sex from their husbands, who would bring their sexual experience to the marriage. I've never quite figured out how that was supposed to be mathematically possible, but presumably the theory was that the future husbands gained their experience with a few bad girls who were not marriage material and who were having sex with the majority of the male population.

This is a must-read book for all those who feel they have the right to engage in any part of the debate on sex education, a woman's right to choose, or the impact of adoption." —

Shame is a very effective way to silence individuals, and those who are less socially or economically powerful are rarely in a position to influence the decisions that affect them.

in some states it was illegal to sell contraceptives to those who were unmarried.

My personal struggle is to get beyond thinking I'm not worth caring about. I am here. I do exist. Maybe by adding my two cents I can help other moms who feel the way I do. Maybe they will find someone who cares. —

I was abandoned when it was right in everybody's face, so I still believe that nobody cares.

According to the prevailing double standard, the young man who was equally responsible for the pregnancy was not condemned for his actions. It was her fault, not their fault, that she got pregnant. This was in that period of time when there wasn't much worse that a girl could do. They almost treated you like you had committed murder or something. —

The state of Connecticut, home state of Anthony Comstock, still had a law in 1961 that prohibited counseling and medical treatment to married persons for the purposes of preventing conception.

I know what my parents thought they were bringing me to, but that's not where my parents left me. I didn't understand it at the time, but in the military they do a thing where they train you to comply with the rules by tearing you down and breaking your spirit so you will conform, and then little by little they build you into what they want you to be. That's what they did there. I was gonna try and get through this and get out. That was my goal.

And it's funny. While I was locked up, I would call the father and he was going on with his life. He was having his summer and was, you know, worried about whether he would get a new tape or album. People had gossiped about him but they were still allowed to hang out with him. Before I left home, nobody was allowed to be around me. Occasionally

One time we couldn't even get out the front door, there was so much being thrown, so everybody retreated, including the person who was going to drive the van. I remember the driver crying; it had never happened to him before. The lady who was with him just kept saying, "Oh, this is normal, this is normal." And he kept saying, "These poor girls, these poor girls.

Looking back, I was becoming extremely hard. You couldn't afford to have somebody care about you because you weren't really allowed to care about yourself. I didn't want people feeling sorry for me. I just wanted to survive. I

My dad was giving me a kind of pep talk and my mom had a smile on her face, but she just looked like she wanted to cry. She's looking at this little girl holding a stuffed animal on her way to deliver a baby. I can't even begin to imagine.

It's very hard to explain—part of me had enough indoctrination to believe I was not a mother. They make that very clear: "You're not a mother. You are too young. You are a bad person. You got pregnant and you aren't married. You are not entitled to this baby. You're gonna give this baby a chance in life." Part of me accepted that wisdom, but then there was the other part of me that had feelings that I wasn't supposed to have. So

I didn't want anybody to see me walking out of the hospital with this baby. We got into the car and my mom said, "What's wrong?" I said, "I'm afraid that someone's gonna come take the baby." I was waiting for the police to come. Giving up my first son had left such an imprint. It was trapped in my brain…I was not allowed to be a mother. Society

I was allowed to hold her just once. They didn't want you to bond at all with the baby. Some women chose not to see their babies. I just could never imagine that. I wanted to see that face. I'll never forget it as long as I live. You never forget that face. —

She said, "You know, if we're gonna have a relationship I want you to know who I am. I'm gay." I said, "I don't care." And I really don't care because, oh God, if you can find love you're lucky.

We were not criminals. We're mothers. The difference was I was not an authenticated mother. I was an illegal mother. I was a denied mother. And I had to come home and live my life after being robbed of my child. It's as if I was an unwilling accomplice to the kidnapping of my own child. So you have to live with the trauma of losing your child and then you have to live with the trauma of knowing you didn't stop it. How do you do that?

I remember thinking I wished it was a boy, because boys can't have children. I thought, "I gave birth to a little girl who's going to have to go through this, that poor little thing." I had always thought boys had it better than women. All my life, you know? And that whole experience made me feel even more so—that it's the girls who get punished, the girls who suffer through all of this stuff, and the girls who can't talk about it.

I continued going to school for a period of time until it became more difficult to hide it. The faculty decided that I was becoming disruptive to the schooling process and a bad example. It was determined that I would leave school. "I was not welcome there" was what I was told. My