Post World War II American culture is promulgated with images of increased consumerism (the emerging commonalty of electric washers, dryers, and television sets), financial prosperity and home ownership, rock n’ roll, and air plane travel. June Cleaver, Donna Reed, and Jane Wyatt became the de facto images of American motherhood and wives.

While motherhood and sex were premised on marriage, an increasing number of women were having pre-marital sex. Not only was pre-marital sex culturally unacceptable, the means to prevent pregnancy were not available in many states. It was not until 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, that all married couples were given the right to access birth control. Unmarried couples were not granted that right until 1972 in Baird v. Eisenstadt.

Babies were the natural result of unprotected, premarital sex. While sex was culturally objectionable, a resulting pregnancy would be devastating. Pregnancy outside of marriage was considered something that would cause a “lifetime of shame” both for the mother and the child[1].

The couple of times I did go with my parents somewhere, I had to lie down in the backseat. We had a three-car garage and my father would pull the car from where it was parked on the left-hand side, he would back it up to the porch, and I would go right down the stairs and get in the backseat of the car. I had to lie down until we got out of my neighborhood because my parents didn’t want anyone to know I was home. I couldn’t answer the door. I couldn’t answer the phone. It was all, “what are the neighbors going to think?”-Cathy II[2]

Besides cultural scrutiny, the dominate sources of psychological and social work viewed the single mother as having psychological deficits[3]. Joseph H. Reid a prominent social worker who went onto become the director of the League of Child Welfare stated in 1964:

[A]n agency has a responsibility of pointing out to the unmarried mother the extreme difficulty, if not the impossibility, if she remains unmarried, of raising her child successfully in our culture without damage to the child and to herself . . . The concept that the unmarried mother and her child constitute a family is to me unsupportable. There is no family in any real sense of the word[4].

Additionally, single women were often not informed of any available programs to ease the financial considerations of single motherhood[5].

Families who could afford to or were able to tap into state or non-profit resources, sent their unmarried pregnant daughters to one of the more than two hundred mother’s or maternity homes which were established by organizations such as the Florence Crittenton Association of America, the Salvation Army, and Catholic Charities Other families sent their daughters to a “wage home” where a woman would provide household labor in exchange for room and board and at times a bit of a wage until she gave birth[6]. Finally, some families sent their daughters to live with other relatives or forced their daughters to hide within the home through the course of the pregnancy.

We lived in a typical Michigan two-story home with a basement. I got to be downstairs on the main level with my mom during the day and ate dinner with my father and mother, but if a neighbor care, or any company, I had to go upstairs and stay out of sight. We lived in an old house with wood floors and they creaked, so I couldn’t move. I had to go upstairs and be still. I spent most of my pregnancy upstairs. One day the little neighbor lady next door came over unexpectedly and I was downstairs and I couldn’t get upstairs soon enough. So I was hiding in the downstairs bathroom for two hours waiting for her to leave while she visited with my mother. -Barbara[7]

From this perspective, adoption became the "best thing" even though many of these adoptions could be seen as forced or as a result of coercion.

I never felt like I gave my baby away. I always felt like my daughter was taken from me. -Pollie[8]

Many of these pregnant women were told not just by family and their religious leader, but by social service agencies that adoption was the only acceptable option[9]. Between 1945 and 1973, the Baby Scoop Era, it is estimated that one and a half million babies were put up for nonfamily or unrelated adoption[10]. Due to the fact that national data was not kept regarding adoption during that time frame, the number of adoptions has been estimated to be even higher; up to four million.

The Baby Scoop Era ended in 1973 with the sharp decline in births, the legalization of abortion in Roe v Wade, the increase in birth control availability, and changes in societal norms regarding premarital sex and pregnancy. While modern adoptions are often open allowing parents to reunite or have sustained contact throughout the child’s minority, many of the adoptions during the Baby Scoop Era were closed making it difficult and at times impossible for mothers (and fathers) to reunite with their biological children.

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[1] Fessler, A. (2006). The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. (p. 9)

[2] Fessler, A. (2006). (p. 74)

[3] Solinger, R. (2000). Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade. (p. 88).

[4] Birth-" Mothers Exploited by Adoption, Disembabyment: How Our Babies Were Taken for Adoption, http://www.exiledmothers.com/babies taken for adoption/index.html (quoting Joseph H. Reid, Principles, Values, and Assumptions Underlying Adoption Practice, 1956 NAT'L CON. SOC. WORK).

[5] Fessler, A. (p. 11)

[6] Fessler, A. (p. 134)

[7] Fessler, A. (p. 74)

[8] Fessler, A. (p. 12)

[9] Fessler, A. (p. 9)

[10] Kathy S. Stolley, “Statistics on Adoption in the United States,” The Future of Children 3, no. 1, The Center for the Future of Children, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (Spring 1993), 30, figure 2, citing P. Maza, “Adoption Trends: 1944-1975,” Child Welfare Research Notes no. 9, Administration for Children, Youth, and Families, Washington D.C. (1984). Contrasted with less than 7,000 non-family or unrelated adoptions in 2014. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/prior_relation2014.pdf