Love Child

Sue Elliott

Adoption is one of the great, untold stories of our recent past. It is a truly epic tale of loss, guilt, identity, family feuds, reunion and redemption. It is a subject, until very recently, surrounded by secrecy and taboos. In this enthralling memoir, Sue Elliot tells her own story of growing up as an adopted child. She details her emotional search for and meeting with her birth mother, Marjorie, the heartbreaking tale of how Marjorie came to give up Sue for adoption in 1950s England, and the shock of finding that she, Sue, wasn't the only child given away by Marjorie.Weaved throughout is the vivid, emotional history of adoption in the UK. Drawing on a wide range of intimate personal experiences, it outlines the forces that shaped 20th century adoption practice, from baby-farming, the stigma of illegitimacy, incest and the bastardy laws, to children taken by force, the Magdalene laundries, mass emigration schemes without parental consent, to modern day adoption practices, buying babies from abroad, sperm donor fathers and tearful reunions. (2005, Random House)

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

Ann Fessler

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women in America who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail. (2007, Penguin Books)

Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960

Kate Fisher

This book offers a radical new understanding of the gender relations, sexual attitudes, and contraceptive practices that lay behind the dramatic changes in contraceptive behaviour in the twentieth century. Drawing upon an extensive range of primary sources, including vivid oral history accounts, Kate Fisher places men – rather than their wives – behind the drive for smaller families. Fisher shows why couples remained attached to older practices such as abortion and withdrawal, and explains how family size was reduced in a culture of widespread sexual ignorance and marital sexual silence. (2006, Oxford University Press)

The Light in the Window

June Goulding

This nonfiction novel takes place in Ireland in 1951, where the young June Goulding took up a position as midwife in a home for unmarried mothers run by the Sacred Heart nuns. What she witnessed there was to haunt her for the next fifty years. It was a place of secrets, lies and cruelty. A place where women picked grass by hand and tarred roads whilst heavily pregnant. Where they were denied any contact with the outside world; denied basic medical treatment and abused for their 'sins'; where, after the birth, they were forced into hard labour in the convent for three years. But worst of all was that the young women were expected to raise their babies during these three years so that they could then be sold - given up for adoption in exchange for a donation to the nuns. (2005, Ebury Press)

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Half a Million Women: Mothers who lose their children by adoption

David Howe, Phillida Sawbridge, and Diana Hinines

Published by the Post-Adoption Centre, this book examines all aspects of the experience of giving up a child for adoption on the part of the birth mother: the social stigma of being an unmarried mother; the heartbreaking dilemma of deciding whether or not to relinquish the child; the isolation from parents, society and the child’s father; the years of grieving and wondering about the child, and finally the hope and fear of being traced by that child. (1992, Penguin Books) 

A Child for Keeps: The History of Adoption in England, 1918-1945

Jenny Keating

This book considers the background to the growth in popularity of adoption in Britain in the early twentieth century and analyzes the campaign for adoption legislation. It discusses the wholesale growth of unregulated adoption after the first law was passed and the gradual pressure for safeguards and secrecy in adoption. (2009, Palgrave Macmillan)

Lone Motherhood in Twentieth Century Britain: From Footnote to Front Page

Kathleen Kiernan

Over the course of the 1990s, lone motherhood has become a major political issue in Britain--but what is the problem actually about and to what extent is it new? This timely study, written by three leading experts in the field, examines the changes that have befallen the pathways leading to lone motherhood--changes in ideas about marriage, divorce, and never-married motherhood. The evolutionary policy histories relevant to lone mothers in housing, social security, and employment are also studied. The findings detailed in these pages illustrate both the complexity of the issues and the extent to which policies have reflected society's changing definitions of this phenomenon.

Mother and Baby Homes: A Survey of Homes for Unmarried Mothers

Jill Nicholson

This report published in 1968 addresses the much discussed plight of the unmarried mother and her child. The book documents Mother and Baby Homes which catered to 11,000-12,000 unmarried mothers each year, out of a total of 70,000. This ‘careful and sensitive study’ is unique in putting on record for the first time the views of unmarried mothers themselves about the care they received. The book was published as part of the National Institute for Social Work Training Series and sponsored by the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her child. (1968, George Allen and Unwin Ltd)

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The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers

Angela Patrick

This autobiography takes us to 1963, London when Angela Patrick was 19 years old, enjoying her first job working in the City when her life turned upside down. A brief fling with a charismatic charmer left her pregnant, unmarried and facing a stark future. Being under 21, she was still under the governance of her parents, strict Catholics who insisted she have the baby in secret and then put it up for adoption. Shunned by her family and forced to leave her job, Angela was sent to an imposing-looking convent for unmarried mothers in north-east London. Angela gave birth to a beautiful son, Paul, and at eight weeks he was taken from her and forcibly put up for adoption, leaving Angela bereft and heartbroken. Not a day went by without Angela thinking about him. Then, thirty years later, she received a letter. It was from Paul, and a reunion was arranged. (2012, Simon & Schuster)
 

Adoption Separation: Then and Now

Evelyn Robinson

​Evelyn’s fourth book discussing adoption, Adoption Separation includes works of forty-five parents who have lost children to adoption in seven different countries. Their stories make poignant and, at times, harrowing reading. Evelyn’s other books include: Adoption and Loss – The Hidden Grief; Adoption Reunion – Ecstasy or Agony?; and Adoption and Recovery – Solving the Mystery of Reunion. All are available on Amazon or to learn more visit www.clovapublications.com  (2010, Clova Publications)

Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963

Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher

​This book provides the first rounded, first-hand account of sexuality in marriage in the early and mid-twentieth century. These award winning authors look beyond the conventions of silence among the respectable majority to challenge stereotypes of ignorance and inhibition. Based on vivid, compelling and frank testimonies from a socially and geographically diverse range of individuals, the book explores a spectrum of sexual experiences, from learning about sex and sexual practices in courtship to attitudes to the body, marital ideals and birth control. (2010, Cambridge University Press)

​Sinners? Scroungers? Saints?

Pat Thane and  Tanya Evans

This is the first book to describe the real lives of unmarried mothers, and attitudes towards them, in England from the First World War to the present day. The focus is on England because the legal positions, and other circumstances, of unmarried mothers were often very different elsewhere in Britain. The authors use biographies and memoirs, as well as archives and official sources, to challenge stereotypes of the mothers as desolate women, rejected by society and by their families, until social attitudes were transformed in the 'permissive' 1960s. They demonstrate the diversity of their lives, their social backgrounds, and how often they were supported by their families, neighbours, and the fathers of their children before the 1960s, and the continuing hostility by some sections of society since then. They challenge stereotypes, too, about the impact of war on sexual behaviour, and about the stability of family life before the 1960s. (2012, Oxford University Press)

​The Unmarried Mother

Sheila Tofield

A moving true story about being a single mother in 1950s Britain. Sheila grew up in Rotherham, daughter of an uncaring mother who made her believe she was useless, stupid and - most painfully of all - unlovable. Her worst childhood fears where confirmed when, as a young woman, her fiancee left her without an explanation. Heartbroken and vulnerable, she was easy prey to the worst type of man. Someone who walked out when she told him she carried his child. In Fifties Britain, an unmarried, pregnant girl received not sympathy but contempt. When Sheila told her family they turned their backs on her. She ended up in a Church of England home for unmarried mothers, about to give up her child for adoption. But when she saw her daughter's sparkling eyes she knew she had to do the unthinkable: to bring up the baby on her own in a world which would condemn her for it. (2013, Penguin)