Read A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s for Free Online

access to birth control.
    In many states, it was illegal for a woman to wear men’s clothing, and every state in the union had “sodomy” laws that criminalized sexual relations other than heterosexual intercourse. In California, oral sex, even between a married couple, carried a potential jail term of fourteen years.
    Abortion was still illegal everywhere, except to save a woman’s life. In 1962, local Phoenix television celebrity Sherri Finkbine, a married mother of four and pregnant with her fifth child, discovered that thalidomide, the sleeping pill she had been prescribed, was known in Europe to have caused crippling and life-threatening fetal disorders. Her doctor recommended a therapeutic abortion, but when Finkbine went public with the news about the risks of thalidomide, the hospital canceled her appointment. Finkbine was forced to go to Sweden for the abortion, where doctors determined that the fetus was too deformed to have survived.
    Few women had the resources to get around the laws by flying to Europe. Experts estimated that a million or more illegal abortions a year were performed on American women, with between 5,000 and 10,000 women dying as a result. Such abortions accounted for 40 percent of maternal deaths.
    Unmarried women who became pregnant and gave birth faced extreme social stigma, especially in white communities where the new but still tenuous prosperity of the 1950s had created a burning desire, as one woman told me, to “fit in so you could move up.” In her words, “having an unwed child in the family just shut you right out of respectable society.”
When her own daughter got pregnant, this woman pressured her to go away, have the baby in secret, put it up for adoption, and come back pretending that she had been visiting relatives.
    That this was common is confirmed by the testimony Ann Fessler recounts in The Girls Who Went Away . More than 25,000 babies a year were surrendered for adoption in the early 1960s, many because young women were persuaded they had no other option. As one later told Fessler: “You couldn’t be an unwed mother.... If you weren’t married, your child was a bastard and those terms were used.” “Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to keep the baby, or explained the options,” said another. “I went to the maternity home, I was going to have the baby, they were going to take it, and I was going to go home. I was not allowed to keep the baby. I would have been disowned.”
    Before World War II, maternity homes had encouraged unwed mothers to breast-feed after birth and did not pressure them to give away the child, but in the postwar era the philosophy had changed. While young black women who had babies were considered immoral, young white ones were considered neurotic or immature, and by the 1960s many homes put tremendous pressure on them to give up their children. One woman recalled, “I was not allowed to call the father of my child. Even when we would write letters, they would read them. They would either cut out things they didn’t like in them, or they would cross through what they didn’t like. If the letter really upset them, they would throw it away in front of us or tear it up.”
    If a woman did keep a child, she and her child faced legal as well as social discrimination. Many companies refused to hire unwed mothers. Children born out of wedlock had the word “illegitimate” stamped on their birth certificates and school records. They had no right to inherit from their fathers, to collect debts owed to their mother if she died, or even to inherit from the mother’s parents should the mother predecease them. Until 1968, the child of an unwed mother could not sue for wrongful death if the mother was killed by medical malpractice or employer malfeasance. Until 1972, “illegitimate” children who lived with their
father could not collect workers’ compensation death benefits if he died on the job.
    There was seldom justice for women who were raped.