I hope Caroline is still alive and I hope her daughter found her. One of my oldest friends who is turning 80 just told me that she had a baby that she was forced to give up for adoption. And that daughter contacted her in the last couple of years. She was so grateful to finally know the daughter. I will send this to her.
Chilling. Bone-shaking. It reminded me of my own tumescent ignorance as a boy. My father said, “if you use your pencil, just be sure it has a rubber eraser”. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about until, in the midst of having intercourse in my 20’s, I realized that I wasn’t wearing a condom.
But it’s so much simpler for boys. “Just don’t knock anyone up”. Even if you did, the consequences were easily mapped. Deny and make them prove it. Marry and get a job. Man up and pay child support.
From pre-pubescence, girls live with the mystery every day of every month. And from the first menstruation the consequences of a rape or a mistake or an intention are so much greater and more complex.
Men can be barnyard animals. And they can choose not to be. Women cannot. Whether they miscarry, abort, give up or keep, the connection remains. The emotional cord is never cut.
It saddens me, but doesn’t surprise me. Checking to see whether my comment was posted, there is not yet one other posting from a
man. I wrote a memoir called “Men as Friends”. It didn’t sell. I didn’t care. The message was my medium.
Women have come a long way. It saddens me that men haven’t. Instead, they’ve become more warlike. Too frightened of their own vulnerability to welcome it.
According to a J–erk who just popped up on my feed in a post with over 2.5k likes, saying nobody wants to read something that doesn't solve a problem. He literally said: 'that’s why you’re failing on Substack.'
The very next second, I’m here reading this magnificent piece, which doesn't solve a single thing for me. Yet, the minutes I spent reading it were far more enjoyable than the time wasted on Mr. J insulting everyone—including myself—who simply look to tell a story about life, just like this one. While Mr. J stays busy chasing formulas, some of us are still searching for beauty.
This is excellent writing, thank you. Your words are a true gift.
I loved this piece and it touches me how much you cared about Caroline and thought deeply for decades about her welfare. This post speaks volumes to me about how you understood Caroline — and cared about her.
Gosh, she was a child who just didn’t know or understand everything about the complexities of sex, and the opposite sex.
It takes time. We fall down.
I was a “Caroline girl” as well, pregnant at 15. When my baby was born the OBGYN asked me if I’d like to watch the birth? He had mirrors.
Me, a budding young scientist, agreed. And all the paper-signing in the world could not take that baby out of my arms after witnessing her birth. And no, my life was not easy. It was hard for a long time, before it did became easier.
Here’s applause to all the frightened and shamed Carolines out there.
We elders are here for you with wisdom and compassion.
Oh ... Fantastic! I was transported into your life (and the lives of so many, many, many other women) through your words. Thank you so much for sharing this marvellous piece.
It makes me realise (and I do hope men will read this too) why we are seeing so many memoirs: women need to let out the bottled up rage. They need to scream their affront for the injustice done to their very beings. And we are all screaming with you.
Damn, this is powerful. I went to high school a bit later, 1968-71, but I still knew girls who "disappeared" when they "got in trouble." And to think the patriarchy trolls are trying to drag us back under.
A powerful and profound story, and so true. As a girl 'raised in the wake-up days of the 1970s women’s movement', I have many friends who had been given up, given away, in those days of judgment and shame and financial impossibilities for single mothers. There are thousands of heartbreaks in every story like this, and millions of reasons not to relinquish our freedom, our choices, our love.
The London Daily Mail recently published a series of articles on the trauma suffered by unmarried mothers from the 1950s through the 1970s. The crime, as it was understood then, was simple: sex outside marriage. The punishment was less simple. The blame fell almost entirely on the girl, even when the circumstances were less than voluntary. In the 1960s, even providing contraceptive information could be illegal. A pharmacist in Toronto was jailed for selling condoms in those years. Today they are sold in high school washrooms. Progress has its own ironies.
In both Canada and the United States, women confronted a moral order suspended in a sexual time warp. Nice girls were not supposed to know about sex, much less about preventing pregnancy. Ignorance was considered virtue.
One of the stories in the Mail concerned a girl in Lancaster. Susan was thirteen when she became pregnant. Her boyfriend was fourteen.
“The headmistress at my school realized I was pregnant,” she said. “Neither of us had any idea.” That, in itself, says everything. She was sent to St. Monica’s Mother and Baby Home—described less as refuge than as a workhouse—and afterward subjected to two years of strict supervision. Her boyfriend received six months in borstal prison.
At first, I assumed Susan had been treated harshly because she was young and defenseless. It became clear as I read on that her treatment was not exceptional. England, for all its claims to civility, differed little from North America in those days. In 1968, Jennifer Evans, from a wealthy family in North London, said she was forced to give up her child. Her parents might easily have supported her. Instead, they sent her to a home for unmarried mothers run by the Church of England. She sounded educated, self-possessed, even confident—which makes it all the more striking that she surrendered her child.
In my own experience I discovered some assistance did exist for women who wished to keep their babies. When my own daughter was born in London in 1965, the authorities asked what I intended to do. I told them I was keeping her. That was the end of the matter. No committee interfered. And later I was able to put her in a wonderful local day care nursery for working mothers in unfortunate circumstance, for illegitimate children or for working mothers with husbands in prison.
The Victorian obsession with orphanages did not succeed as a social experiment. Reformers believed if abandoned children were placed in orderly institutions, they might grow into productive citizens rather than drift into the ranks of street urchins. Dickens himself was skeptical. Many orphanages, he observed, were private institutions financed by charitable societies, religious groups, and ethnic organizations. They were often run by poorly paid caretakers who had little patience—or sympathy—for the children in their charge. Therefore, unlikely these institutions would transform neglected children into model citizens.
In general pregnant girls just disappeared into institutions run by religious organizations. My friend Cy’s mother ended up in a Church of England home for unwed mothers. The Mail articles suggest several possibilities for why Cy was placed in an orphanage. Authorities may have intervened if she was judged unfit—receiving male visitors, for instance, being sufficient evidence of moral instability. Or she may have wished to marry a man unwilling to raise another man’s child. Neither scenario was uncommon. That says more about the times than about Cy’s mother because it’s hard to believe a mother would voluntarily surrender her child? Nothing would have induced me to do so.
In France, in 1967, a friend in Normandy told me, quite calmly, that it was time her daughter married. She was seven months pregnant. No one appeared embarrassed. Many couples in France never married at all. There was little advantage for women in doing so, since in marriage women lost their autonomy. And under Napoleonic law, children born outside marriage hold the same legal status as those born within it. No puritan theatre there. Nor, it seemed, in Italy. In the early 1970s, my neighbor—a restaurant cook—discovered her fifteen-year-old daughter was six months pregnant. The family, as well as the daughter, disapproved of the father. The child, however, was accepted and raised within the family. All of it handled with a degree of humanity that, elsewhere—particularly in America—was often in short supply.
Thank you. I was born in 1955. Pow on your description of the examination table. It helps make sense of my aversion to male doctors.
Pow! My mother bore two boy babies before I was born- both out of wedlock. Her father was nowhere to be found. Birth Father number one was her high school competitive roller skating partner whose parents dissuaded him from taking responsibility. Mom’s mother did not send her away, however the baby and family dog died tragically in a house fire. Birth Father number two we know nothing about. She carried the child and gave him up for adoption. Then there was me- child of my mother’s first and only marriage. One of the great horror stories of life is the vulnerability of young women in the hands of clueless men.
Oh Caroline. Born at the wrong time, along with every other woman throughout history who was raised in the patriarchy. Can we just move beyond that now, for the sake of everyone?
We are aware and, like the proverbial toothpaste, we can't be stuffed back into that blindness. Whatever problems we have, we now KNOW. And that's powerful.
I felt cramping around my ovaries reading about her gynecologist visit…
I got pregnant by my first boyfriend of 12 years when I was 20. My younger boyfriend said his life would be over if we had the baby. I followed my single mom’s advice and had an abortion, which was one of the saddest experiences of my life.
But I truly believe that the baby’s soul came back to me as my healthy, sweet, smart, and beautiful girl, whose loving father adores her and gives her the best life possible.
My husband’s best friend was adopted, and he’s had a good life and never felt the need to look for his biological parents. My friend, who lost his baby son to illness, later discovered he had another son he never knew existed. The grown son found him, and now they’re building a relationship.
In my research for a novel set in the eighteenth century France I've come to learn about sage-femmes (midwives) who lived and worked in communities of women. They were involved in all aspects of fertility and used abortificants because the seed in the womb was not yet ensouled. The seed would shift and be released and the soul would wait for the right time. When my son was only just verbal (and a chattery new verbal boy of eighteen months) he said he had waited a long time for me. Another time, my middle brother asked his older brother, whether he remembered when they were flying around in the sky waiting to come down to me. They talked with this kind of knowing, a knowing they have lost now. Remembering it now, I realise it fits with the sage-femmes belief about 'ensouling'.
Harrowing and familiar. I will mount horse, take a couple of flintlocks, kill Uncle Buck and scoop up Caroline and her baby. I will thunder home to a ranch where all those missing girls and their stolen babies live. Oh the adoptive mothers can come and play with us. We will all be free.
I hope Caroline is still alive and I hope her daughter found her. One of my oldest friends who is turning 80 just told me that she had a baby that she was forced to give up for adoption. And that daughter contacted her in the last couple of years. She was so grateful to finally know the daughter. I will send this to her.
I hope Caroline had that experience, too.
I read this twice, in honor of all those girls who “disappeared” when I was in high school.
Insanely powerful story. Literally could not stop reading until the end. Maybe because it's all so damn true. Thanks for sharing it.
Chilling. Bone-shaking. It reminded me of my own tumescent ignorance as a boy. My father said, “if you use your pencil, just be sure it has a rubber eraser”. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about until, in the midst of having intercourse in my 20’s, I realized that I wasn’t wearing a condom.
But it’s so much simpler for boys. “Just don’t knock anyone up”. Even if you did, the consequences were easily mapped. Deny and make them prove it. Marry and get a job. Man up and pay child support.
From pre-pubescence, girls live with the mystery every day of every month. And from the first menstruation the consequences of a rape or a mistake or an intention are so much greater and more complex.
Men can be barnyard animals. And they can choose not to be. Women cannot. Whether they miscarry, abort, give up or keep, the connection remains. The emotional cord is never cut.
That last paragraph is so so true.
It saddens me, but doesn’t surprise me. Checking to see whether my comment was posted, there is not yet one other posting from a
man. I wrote a memoir called “Men as Friends”. It didn’t sell. I didn’t care. The message was my medium.
Women have come a long way. It saddens me that men haven’t. Instead, they’ve become more warlike. Too frightened of their own vulnerability to welcome it.
A male reader here…thank you for stepping up and commenting. You are so right about the unfair imbalances.
Welcome aboard Kent.
Sorry. Kurt. I’ve got vision problems—literally. Hopefully not metaphorically.
Hah! No worries. Thanks for catching it.
Thank you for being a good man who is aware. Good men listen, learn, care.
🙏🏻🪷
This is fierce and wise and wonderful. Brilliant.
I have to tell you, that description is one that is perfect to me! It's exactly what I want(ed) to be.
According to a J–erk who just popped up on my feed in a post with over 2.5k likes, saying nobody wants to read something that doesn't solve a problem. He literally said: 'that’s why you’re failing on Substack.'
The very next second, I’m here reading this magnificent piece, which doesn't solve a single thing for me. Yet, the minutes I spent reading it were far more enjoyable than the time wasted on Mr. J insulting everyone—including myself—who simply look to tell a story about life, just like this one. While Mr. J stays busy chasing formulas, some of us are still searching for beauty.
This is excellent writing, thank you. Your words are a true gift.
Eff that guy!
I loved this piece and it touches me how much you cared about Caroline and thought deeply for decades about her welfare. This post speaks volumes to me about how you understood Caroline — and cared about her.
Gosh, she was a child who just didn’t know or understand everything about the complexities of sex, and the opposite sex.
It takes time. We fall down.
I was a “Caroline girl” as well, pregnant at 15. When my baby was born the OBGYN asked me if I’d like to watch the birth? He had mirrors.
Me, a budding young scientist, agreed. And all the paper-signing in the world could not take that baby out of my arms after witnessing her birth. And no, my life was not easy. It was hard for a long time, before it did became easier.
Here’s applause to all the frightened and shamed Carolines out there.
We elders are here for you with wisdom and compassion.
What a scene. Of course you couldn't give up that child.
Heartbreaking story. I so appreciate its craft and content.
Thanks for reading.
Oh ... Fantastic! I was transported into your life (and the lives of so many, many, many other women) through your words. Thank you so much for sharing this marvellous piece.
It makes me realise (and I do hope men will read this too) why we are seeing so many memoirs: women need to let out the bottled up rage. They need to scream their affront for the injustice done to their very beings. And we are all screaming with you.
Damn, this is powerful. I went to high school a bit later, 1968-71, but I still knew girls who "disappeared" when they "got in trouble." And to think the patriarchy trolls are trying to drag us back under.
A powerful and profound story, and so true. As a girl 'raised in the wake-up days of the 1970s women’s movement', I have many friends who had been given up, given away, in those days of judgment and shame and financial impossibilities for single mothers. There are thousands of heartbreaks in every story like this, and millions of reasons not to relinquish our freedom, our choices, our love.
The London Daily Mail recently published a series of articles on the trauma suffered by unmarried mothers from the 1950s through the 1970s. The crime, as it was understood then, was simple: sex outside marriage. The punishment was less simple. The blame fell almost entirely on the girl, even when the circumstances were less than voluntary. In the 1960s, even providing contraceptive information could be illegal. A pharmacist in Toronto was jailed for selling condoms in those years. Today they are sold in high school washrooms. Progress has its own ironies.
In both Canada and the United States, women confronted a moral order suspended in a sexual time warp. Nice girls were not supposed to know about sex, much less about preventing pregnancy. Ignorance was considered virtue.
One of the stories in the Mail concerned a girl in Lancaster. Susan was thirteen when she became pregnant. Her boyfriend was fourteen.
“The headmistress at my school realized I was pregnant,” she said. “Neither of us had any idea.” That, in itself, says everything. She was sent to St. Monica’s Mother and Baby Home—described less as refuge than as a workhouse—and afterward subjected to two years of strict supervision. Her boyfriend received six months in borstal prison.
At first, I assumed Susan had been treated harshly because she was young and defenseless. It became clear as I read on that her treatment was not exceptional. England, for all its claims to civility, differed little from North America in those days. In 1968, Jennifer Evans, from a wealthy family in North London, said she was forced to give up her child. Her parents might easily have supported her. Instead, they sent her to a home for unmarried mothers run by the Church of England. She sounded educated, self-possessed, even confident—which makes it all the more striking that she surrendered her child.
In my own experience I discovered some assistance did exist for women who wished to keep their babies. When my own daughter was born in London in 1965, the authorities asked what I intended to do. I told them I was keeping her. That was the end of the matter. No committee interfered. And later I was able to put her in a wonderful local day care nursery for working mothers in unfortunate circumstance, for illegitimate children or for working mothers with husbands in prison.
The Victorian obsession with orphanages did not succeed as a social experiment. Reformers believed if abandoned children were placed in orderly institutions, they might grow into productive citizens rather than drift into the ranks of street urchins. Dickens himself was skeptical. Many orphanages, he observed, were private institutions financed by charitable societies, religious groups, and ethnic organizations. They were often run by poorly paid caretakers who had little patience—or sympathy—for the children in their charge. Therefore, unlikely these institutions would transform neglected children into model citizens.
In general pregnant girls just disappeared into institutions run by religious organizations. My friend Cy’s mother ended up in a Church of England home for unwed mothers. The Mail articles suggest several possibilities for why Cy was placed in an orphanage. Authorities may have intervened if she was judged unfit—receiving male visitors, for instance, being sufficient evidence of moral instability. Or she may have wished to marry a man unwilling to raise another man’s child. Neither scenario was uncommon. That says more about the times than about Cy’s mother because it’s hard to believe a mother would voluntarily surrender her child? Nothing would have induced me to do so.
In France, in 1967, a friend in Normandy told me, quite calmly, that it was time her daughter married. She was seven months pregnant. No one appeared embarrassed. Many couples in France never married at all. There was little advantage for women in doing so, since in marriage women lost their autonomy. And under Napoleonic law, children born outside marriage hold the same legal status as those born within it. No puritan theatre there. Nor, it seemed, in Italy. In the early 1970s, my neighbor—a restaurant cook—discovered her fifteen-year-old daughter was six months pregnant. The family, as well as the daughter, disapproved of the father. The child, however, was accepted and raised within the family. All of it handled with a degree of humanity that, elsewhere—particularly in America—was often in short supply.
Yes, it is/was universal. Women in many societies have been killed for this "crime." I recommend Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These.
Thank you. I was born in 1955. Pow on your description of the examination table. It helps make sense of my aversion to male doctors.
Pow! My mother bore two boy babies before I was born- both out of wedlock. Her father was nowhere to be found. Birth Father number one was her high school competitive roller skating partner whose parents dissuaded him from taking responsibility. Mom’s mother did not send her away, however the baby and family dog died tragically in a house fire. Birth Father number two we know nothing about. She carried the child and gave him up for adoption. Then there was me- child of my mother’s first and only marriage. One of the great horror stories of life is the vulnerability of young women in the hands of clueless men.
Oh Caroline. Born at the wrong time, along with every other woman throughout history who was raised in the patriarchy. Can we just move beyond that now, for the sake of everyone?
Honestly, how far have we come?
We are aware and, like the proverbial toothpaste, we can't be stuffed back into that blindness. Whatever problems we have, we now KNOW. And that's powerful.
I certainly talk openly with my daughters, as a way of being a cycle-breaker. Thank you for this amazing essay, which I will save and reread.
Thank you!
I felt cramping around my ovaries reading about her gynecologist visit…
I got pregnant by my first boyfriend of 12 years when I was 20. My younger boyfriend said his life would be over if we had the baby. I followed my single mom’s advice and had an abortion, which was one of the saddest experiences of my life.
But I truly believe that the baby’s soul came back to me as my healthy, sweet, smart, and beautiful girl, whose loving father adores her and gives her the best life possible.
My husband’s best friend was adopted, and he’s had a good life and never felt the need to look for his biological parents. My friend, who lost his baby son to illness, later discovered he had another son he never knew existed. The grown son found him, and now they’re building a relationship.
I pray for everyone’s happiness 🫶🏼
In my research for a novel set in the eighteenth century France I've come to learn about sage-femmes (midwives) who lived and worked in communities of women. They were involved in all aspects of fertility and used abortificants because the seed in the womb was not yet ensouled. The seed would shift and be released and the soul would wait for the right time. When my son was only just verbal (and a chattery new verbal boy of eighteen months) he said he had waited a long time for me. Another time, my middle brother asked his older brother, whether he remembered when they were flying around in the sky waiting to come down to me. They talked with this kind of knowing, a knowing they have lost now. Remembering it now, I realise it fits with the sage-femmes belief about 'ensouling'.
Wow… that’s amazing that you witnessed that, and I believe we are souls without egos until around 3 years old.
Somehow, my ex-boyfriend and I both knew the baby was a girl.
Harrowing and familiar. I will mount horse, take a couple of flintlocks, kill Uncle Buck and scoop up Caroline and her baby. I will thunder home to a ranch where all those missing girls and their stolen babies live. Oh the adoptive mothers can come and play with us. We will all be free.