The Girls Who Went Away (12 page)

—Diane I

It was not always parents or boyfriends who were against marriage as a solution to the dilemma. Some young women were determined not to marry, despite pressure to do so.

Mothers can tell that something’s wrong by the look on your face. Mine said, “What’s wrong?” “Nothing.” She called me into the bedroom, “What’s wrong?” I said, “I’m pregnant.” She said, “You’re the only one in the family that has ever gotten pregnant out of wedlock,” which was a lie. My mother made me feel like a bag of shame. She wanted me to marry him. She said, “Marry him, marry him. Get us out of this mess.” But I didn’t want to marry him.

My father said, “Get out of the house—I want you out of the house.” So my mother bought a Greyhound bus ticket so I could go to my grandparents in Brooklyn. They’re from the old Yiddish world, from Poland. I was their first grandchild and my grandmother loved me very much, but she could not look at me.

My boyfriend sent me a ticket to come back. He picked me up and had arranged for a justice of the peace to marry us. I was in high school and I’m thinking, “This is not the way I pictured my life.” I mean, I was supposed to go off to college and do better than this. I think he was working in a snack shop. I remember thinking, “This is supposed to be the happiest day of my life and I feel trapped.”

Then there was a knock at my boyfriend’s door and it was my father and mother. My father said, “Sheryl, I don’t want you to rush into this. If you still want to marry him in a year, yes, but don’t do it now.” I thought, “Daddy, just get me out of here.” I don’t remember exactly what happened in the next few days or weeks but my mother kept saying, “Are you sure you don’t want to marry him? That’s what women do.”

—Sheryl

I had this idea that I couldn’t tell anyone. I thought I would be arrested, or they would contact my boyfriend’s family and I would be forced to marry him and I didn’t want to marry him. I didn’t know if I ever wanted to marry anyone. I had not seen that marriage had done much for my mother.

—Toni

I had graduated and I was going with this guy. My mother and father knew his whole family and everybody thought he was Mr. Wonderful. He’s the one who got me pregnant. But he had slapped me and I didn’t want to be with him if he could be that mean. I told him the baby wasn’t his. I knew that my mother would make me marry him and his family would make him marry me and I didn’t want that kind of a marriage.

—Bonnie

Although the discovery of a daughter’s pregnancy was a shock for every family, for the women who were not going to get married the ordeal was all the more traumatic. Those young women were made to suffer a latter-day
version of social shunning. Once private sexual behavior was made visible and public by pregnancy, it could not be denied. Given the social stigma of unwed pregnancy at the time, members of the community who wanted to be perceived as maintaining a higher moral standard had to refrain from associating with a pregnant girl. Accepting her condition or helping her keep her child might be perceived as condoning her actions. Most members of society felt they must distance themselves in order to make their position clear. In one of the strictest forms of banishment, high schools and most colleges required a pregnant girl to withdraw immediately. It was not until Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 that federally funded high schools and colleges, by law, could not expel a pregnant girl or a teenage mother.
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I got called down to the office at school and the principal said, “There’s a lot of gossip about you being pregnant. We figure that you’re about three to four months and you may not return to school until you have a doctor’s note saying that you’re not pregnant.” The gym teacher helped me clean out my locker and drove me home, and the school called my mother and told her at work.

I had been this girl who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t do anything wrong. I took care of my kid brothers and sisters, and everybody’s parents wanted their daughters to be with me. Now, when I walked down the street, all the parents made their daughters cross the street. They couldn’t walk on the same side of the street as me. A sense of shame and humiliation permeated the entire family.

—Margaret

For every woman I interviewed—even those whose parents showed them a great deal of compassion—the news of their daughter’s pregnancy was a wrenching shock. Many girls’ parents were overtly disgusted or infuriated with them. But perhaps even more disturbing, many would not even discuss the situation with their daughters. Some families made their daughters hide in the house so their pregnancy wouldn’t be seen, drawing the drapes and making them duck down when they were in the car. The girls were made to feel that they had shamed, if not ruined, their entire family.

I called my dad and said, “I’m pregnant.” And he said, “Oh, no.” We lived about an hour and ten minutes from my college, and he came to get me. I remember vividly that we did not say one word to each other the entire trip. Not one single word. A block from home he said, “We still love you.” And the minute he opened his mouth I started bawling.

I went in the house and my mother was nowhere to be found. I just sort of wandered around and put my stuff away and I remember going upstairs and walking in her bedroom and she was ironing with her back to me. The TV was on, so I sat on the bed and chitchatted a little bit, but she wouldn’t turn around. She just ironed away. Finally she turned to look at me and her lip and her chin were kind of quivering and she said, “I don’t know how this happened. We took you to church.” I just looked at her and said, “I wasn’t thinking about church.”

—Linda III

My mom took me to her ob-gyn. After the exam the doctor said, “Do you want to tell your mother or do you want me to?” About thirty minutes later, my mother came out. She was teary-eyed and said, “We’ll get through this. We’ll talk to your daddy.” I was crying and hysterical, thinking, “Oh, my God. What am I going to do? I’ve just ruined my whole family.” My dad came home at five-thirty, and I guess my mother told him. He came in and he had tears in his eyes and…this is very hard for me to talk about because it still hurts. He said, “We’re going to take care of this. You don’t to have to worry about a thing.” My dad had been commuting back and forth from Fort Worth to Dallas and he made the decision that this would be a good time for us to move to Dallas so that nobody would know.

During the time I was at the maternity home, my mother would come and take me to Dallas to see the new house they had moved to while I was gone. When we got to the neighborhood, I would have to get down on the car seat and hide. Mother would come down the alley, open the garage door, pull the car into the
garage, close the door, and then I could get up. All the curtains would be closed in the house so nobody could see me. My sister and brother were told that I was staying in Fort Worth to finish my schooling and everybody in Fort Worth thought I was in Dallas.

—Nancy II

The couple 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 take 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

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 eat dinner with my father and mother, but if a neighbor came, 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

Meanwhile, the young men who had fathered these children largely escaped social condemnation. They were not expelled from school, and they were generally not treated with scorn, not stigmatized, and not considered a disgrace to their families. Most parents supported the double standard by
holding their daughters, but not their sons, accountable, and school administrators reinforced the notion by allowing the young men to proceed as if they were not involved. Their role in the pregnancy wasn’t publicly visible, thus they were not publicly condemned. Tens of thousands of girls were asked to drop out of sight, while their sexual partners, who had been so eager to couple, escaped recrimination. Some of the young men did, however, suffer emotional consequences. Several of the women I interviewed relayed stories about how their boyfriends’ lives had been adversely affected by the pregnancy and breakup.

Last summer I heard from my son’s father and he had a terrible life, spiraling downward from this experience. He ended up cutting himself off from his entire family. He felt like he was a screwup and couldn’t do anything right. He ended up in Vietnam and he’s one of those people who were adversely affected by it. That set the tone for his whole life.

—Laurinda

I lived in a small town in North Dakota. I was just about to turn seventeen and my boyfriend was nineteen and a freshman in college. We had been dating for about a year and talking about getting married after we both finished school. Then we realized that I was pregnant and we decided we’d just get married right then. He went out and bought an engagement ring and a wedding ring for me. But our parents wouldn’t sign the necessary papers to allow us to marry.

He said he went through two years of pure hell. He started drinking very heavily and did things during those two years that he won’t even talk about. He went through a period of extreme rage. He would not accept money from his parents or go visit them because he was so angry. He said at that time I was his whole life and that had been taken from him and he didn’t know how he was going to go on.

—Connie III

The insidious nature of the double standard, which continues today, has even been apparent in the studies that try to determine why teens become pregnant. Many studies over the years have tried to identify the predictors of teen pregnancy and most have looked for answers in the young woman’s psyche or personal circumstances, rather than looking equally at both parties responsible for conception. Studies have examined factors such as the young woman’s psychology, her economic conditions, her age at first menses, her relationship to her parents, her religion or lack thereof, her educational aspirations, her history of sexual abuse, her love for her partner, and her use or nonuse of birth control. And though these indicators offer insight, they are only half of the picture. Little attention has been directed toward the young men who are equally responsible. Few have speculated that a young man impregnating a girl is a sign of his neurosis, his low self-esteem, his need for affection or attention, or a sign of his need to prove his virility. In fact, several of the young men implicated in these stories impregnated more than one girl who was subsequently sent away.

When I had been divorced from my second husband for a couple of years, I contacted my daughter’s birth father. I was feeling strong: “I am woman, hear me roar.” I was out in the working world again, I was making money, I was supporting my family, I was taking care of business and, damn it, I was going to take care of that, too.

I looked him up and I called his house. I pretended I was JC Penney’s and I needed to speak with him. I got him on the phone and I said, “This is Barb and I’ve got some questions to ask you. I want to talk to you—when can you meet with me?” This is embarrassing now.

It was the first time I’d seen him in all those years. I said, “You know, we have a daughter together somewhere out there and you never acknowledged it. You walked away, you never talked to me again, you left me. Why?” Well, turns out he had two other women pregnant at the same time. One was a girl I used to go to Brownies with when I was a little girl; the other one was married to somebody else. The girl I had been in Brownies with was further along than I
was, so he married her. The babies were about three months apart. He was a nineteen-year-old boy with three pregnant girlfriends.

—Barbara

The standards of the day dictated that a young woman was responsible for stopping the advances of a young man. Thus she was ultimately responsible both for his behavior and for her pregnancy if it occurred. It was “her own fault” if she got pregnant. Occasionally, the young man’s family took the blame a step further, suggesting that the girl was trying to trap their son. Perhaps their son wasn’t even the responsible party.

In fact, before the 1970s the most reliable blood tests available could not absolutely prove paternity. The best they could do was eliminate 40 percent of the male population from being the father based on blood type. Tests developed in the 1970s could exclude about 80 percent of men. It was not until the 1980s that DNA testing could determine a 99.9 percent likelihood of paternity. Since there was no way to prove fatherhood with absolute certainty in the 1950s and 1960s, if a man denied fatherhood his proclamation often went unchallenged. But very few boyfriends of the women I interviewed denied their role in the pregnancy. Since most of the young women’s families wanted to keep their daughter’s pregnancy a secret, and did not want her to keep her child, proof of fatherhood was not a primary concern. They tried to settle the matter with as little fuss as possible. If the young man’s family was involved at all, they often offered to pay some of the maternity-home expense and considered that the end of their involvement, and of their son’s responsibility.

My boyfriend talked to his parents and then he came over to our house. They wanted me to see their doctor because they thought maybe I wasn’t really pregnant; maybe I was just trying to get him to marry me. He went home and his parents took him back to the University of Florida that night. He called me sobbing, saying, “My parents won’t let me get married.” His mother called my mother and said, “I just wanted you to know if there’s anything that we can do to help you, or if you need any money, we will be glad to give it to you.”