Question about the BSE?

I'll always remember the time my mother wanted to get her tubes tied. She had already had 3 kids and adopted me so more kids the old fashioned way just wasn't going to happen. Anyway, she got it all checked out and arranged with the Doctor but before he would do it my mother had to get my father to sign a paper saying he was aware of the surgery and that he consented to it. Needless to say, my mother came into the house, walked over to him and said two little words to him......."sign it!!!!"

He did.

And that was in 1977 actually.

Not necessarily an adoption story but still in keeping with the points of your first paragraph.

I agree that you've gotten some excellent responses. If I understand correctly, you are not questioning why/how it happened, but how some mothers were able to parent their children in spite of the social pressure?

I don't think there was a time frame that was set in stone as to when a single mom could/would become the supporter ,or when the stigma would wear off. It would depend on her age, education, experience and most importantly - did she have help from a friend or family member in the way of daycare?

Were they in a small town where everyone knew everyone's business and passed judgment on a regular basis, or in a large city where they could blend in ?

Some single moms WERE perpetually dependent on a parent or spouse because their self esteem was totally shattered having been made to feel that they had scandalized their family or community. Many of us had a subconscious inner drive to make sure we appeared respectable thereafter, and that often meant jumping into marriages that weren't in our best interests.

Some of the moms I know who did manage to do it on their own, quite frankly came up with a lie to tell neighbors and potential employers so as not to bring attention to the fact that they had a child while unmarried. The one I heard the most was that they had a husband away in Viet Nam or deceased.

It's only natural for those of you who weren't a part of that period in our history to wonder how it was even possible that that this woman's abuse issue was allowed to take place.

But it did.

You have been given a lot of really good answers already. I suppose that some of the situations could be considered "individual" as well. I have heard of mothers who kept babies in the 1950s and eventually got married to someone.

But otherwise, they were always dependent on family to help them, until the child was grown ...or at least until the child needed less care. They wouldn't be self-supporting for the reasons already given by other answerers here.

Women in general during BSE times, and before(except for WW2 when the men were away fighting) had a hard time finding decent employment and were discriminated in education as well.

The US Civil Rights laws of the 1970s, and 80s were the change that outlawed the discrimination, but family pressures can still be powerful. Unmarried mothers and fathers are still vulnerable and there are still bad laws on the books.

ETA: one thing to keep in mind also is that if a mother and her family were keeping a child in the 1950s, and the mother actually could get a job..say, at a factory...CPS was less voracious and powerful than it is today. So, they had at least a chance of being left alone by the gov't, depending on where they lived. Today, CPS is much larger and more powerful.

When I was growing up my best friend's older sister got pregnant. The sister was a good bit older. It was a huge scandal. In fact, I wasn't supposed to play over at their house for awhile because the sister kept the baby. Her mother forbid her to, but she showed up at home with the baby and they let her in. As far as I know she didn't have trouble getting a job. She worked as a secretary. She moved out and got her own apartment before the baby was a year old because she used to fight a lot with her mother. But she still had her mother watch her baby during the day. I'm not sure about credit cards because back then we all used cash and checks a lot more. I do know that when a woman got divorced or widowed back then the bank would often yank your credit cards right away, but the reason given was that you didn't have a source of income not so much that you were single.

The biggest issue that my young, big ears heard about was that she had a tough time socially. Everyone got used to her bringing her baby around like she was just a regular baby and not a scandal, but dating was a problem. Nice boys didn't want to bring her and her baby home to meet their family. The other kind of men wouldn't leave her alone.

I know of several women in my a family who had children out of wedlock and kept their children. Some had their children in the 1950's. The 3 I personally know of, were able to find housing on their own, but lied and said that they were widowed. As far as people forgetting the stigma associated with having a bastard child, well...my a family STILL talks about those women in a negative light, and one of those women is dead.

The other 2 went on to marry, and their spouses raised the child as their own. Keep in mind there was no child support enforcement back then, either. If you did not have a family to help you, you were pretty much s.o.l. It was also next to impossible for a women to go to college after her child had been born.

Social stigmas were major forces for women surrendering. While it was possible for them to get jobs, remember that women made much, much less then men did back then. There was no ERA in place.

I will echo what Randy said about his mother. I had my third child at the age of 22, and had been married since I was 18. We knew we did not want anymore children after our last was born. We also knew our last child would be delivered via c-section, so it made perfect sense to have a tubal ligation at the same time. This was in 1988. I STILL had to have a note from my husband stating that it was also his desire to have MY tubes tied. 1988. For realz. The notion that women are property and could not do anything without a man is not as antiquated as we think.

I don't think that you can completely put a specific date on the stigma and independence of women. I had a baby out of wedlock in the mid 80's. My child was taken for adoption primarily because I was not married and family shame. I guess it really depends on the community that you reside and what is deemed acceptable. I consider what I went through as the BSE era. From talking with an adoption worker, within the last 5-10 years there have been an explosion of adoptees coming of age to make contact with there biological families. They have been bombarded with reunions because the state that I resided in claimed many baby's for adoption during the 1980's.

My adoptive mom had a child out of wedlock in 1950 (my bdad actually). She was 18. Her mother had a lot of money and was very influential in the small down they lived in. My amom's mother, first tried to get the boy to "do the right thing", but he left town instead.

So my amom's mother got her a job in the local packing house (big farming area, packing house needed help ALL the time) My amom worked there until she her her baby and her mother watched him while she worked after he was born (as a waitress).

My amom did not move out on her own until her baby was 8 months old. At that time she married a man much older than she was. He never adopted her son, but her son did take her new husband's name and that was the end of it.

In fact I never knew the story until I was in my 20's and my great grandma (amom's mom) had alzheimers and let it slip. I asked my amom about it ahd she had a fit that I had been told. She told me it was none of my business (except it is because that means even who I thought was my paternal grandpa was a lie..more lost heritage and medical history)

I am pretty sure my bdad went to his grave never knowing the man he thought was his father wasn't. And my amom always refused to tell me the name of the man who got her pregnant (my biological grandfather)

So altho she wasn't forced to surrender her child, I think she always felt some stigma. I mean she married the first guy who came along (she admited she never loved him) just to give her child a name and herself some symbolance of respectablity. All of her life is was a sore spot.

ETA: About consent when geting a tubal...I got my tubes tied 2 years ago after my 5th bio kid was born. All of my pregnancies were high risk due to my having an incompetent cervix and yet I STIL had to have my husband sign the papers to consent (wtf???)

In the UK single mothers could rent housing, get jobs, get welfare, get any type of account, all mothers no matter what their circumstances got Child Benefit and get free medical help which everybody is entitled to because of the NHS. However BSE still happened here and lasted till the early 80's despite abortion being legal since 1968.

There was no need for it to happen but it still did because young single mothers were coerced by their parents who didn't have a clue of the damage they did.

I have given many pieces of my BSE experience before, in quite a few answers at YA..so don't think I will repeat once again...much the same as any other "white" former unwed mother here during that time.

But I will address the "chattel" that married women were for many years to their husbands. I would have my last baby in 1972. During that pregnancy I determined I would not have anymore children, as my female body acted quite adversely to BC pills, *foam* was a joke and condoms...well, never mind. When I told the doc (while I was pg) that I wanted a tubal ligation immediately after this baby was born...you would have thought I had just spoken blasphemy! Automatically, the doc wanted to know what my *husband* thought about this, what were my husband's concerns, wants and desires for more children. I was 25 yrs old at that time, this was my 5th pregnancy and I was stunned that what I wanted for myself, for my female body had lower priority than my husband's concerns about my body and reproductive activity...his was top billing according to the doc. Much like Randy's story...is how I went home with papers in hand. Me asking my husband...Will you have a vasectomy...he said..word for word...NO! This is how God made me, this is how I stay! Well good...then sign these f**kin' papers, because I am done producing children. He balked a little..but he did sign. The day after my baby boy was born..Bye-Bye fertility, Hello Sterility!!! And I was happy as a lark...the best thing I ever did for my female self.

Now here is the difference..a few years later my best gal friend was now divorced, a single mother woman working with 3 children to raise. And let me tell you she had a tough row to hoe...having to take an apartment, that was really below par..because she was a single mother with 3 kids and of course getting paid a lot less than a man would have in the same job..bookeeping. She was scared to death of getting pg, should she decide to have sex with a man. So she went to a clinic, stated her case and bingo! bango! got herself "fixed" and needed no man's "consent" to do so. She wasn't "chattel" thru marriage anymore. She eventually changed jobs and made more money...but she also had to work longer hours to make that extra money. Child support laws were not what they are today and she did not have the money for a lawyer to keep dragging her ex-husband back to court. Her husband would not pay the child support...simply because he felt that he was giving money to *her* and there were no lawful consequences back then for him to be in fear of.

Anyway...back then...women did not have the "rights" they have today....plain and simple...whether one was not married, married, divorced or widowed. Yes, there were always exception to the rules...but the general rule was.. women were assed out when it came to being a mother with children.

There were many more factors that kept women from parenting on their own than simply the Sexual Revolution of the 1970's. There were Civil Rights laws that had not been passed until that time, the ones that allowed women to work in their chosen professions, get jobs, get birth control, get credit. Many of the laws that enabled women to parent on their own are listed here: http://www.babyscoopera.com/

Until these laws were passed, unless a woman had support or a husband, she was pretty much at the mercy of the men in her life. She could work at jobs that would help to support her, and some women even were self-supporting, but the men controlled her destiny. You mentioned "her parents" but the mothers were women,too, and while they had considerable influence with their husbands, and many even ruled their domain, the legal power was with the husbands and the fathers of the women. A woman who was "unmanned" was very vulnerable, even widows and divorced women.

A HUGE factor was parental support. That is one cultural reason why 80-90% of white unwed mothers lost their babies to adoption while African American mothers did not -- the multi-generational families traditional in A-A communities enabled mothers to keep their babies. Grandma and aunts would be there to help with childcare while mother worked. Generations worked together with childcare and wage-earning. Where-as in White families, parents often pressured their daughters to surrender and would NOT support the mother. The white stereotypical family being two married parents and a child, the grandparents of the baby were often nowhere to be seen, having incarcerated their daughter in a maternity facility (a.k.a. maternity home, baby farm, etc.) in order to ensure her baby was surrendered. She was emotionally cut-off/banished from the family she was raised in.

Values changed during the 1970s, in part because of higher divorce rates leading to more single parents due to divorce - there was social pressure to reform laws to support divorced parents, and this had a "trickle over" effect to never-married mothers. Still, however, there is stigma, and in some places even today it is next to impossible for an unwed and unemployed/under-employed mother to keep her children-- women are surrendering second and third children today due to financial coecion as they can only afford to raise the first one. This is a huge abuse of human rights and you can blame mid-1990s "welfare reform" for much of it.

btw, more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_scoop_era

ETA -- re women and jobs. When my mother got married in 1958 (at the age of 40), she was fired from her job as the financial manager for a construction company. There was no other option.. She did not see it as being fired, as it was "the norm" for that era and she knew it was coming. She has never questioned it. (The company even threw her a good-bye party and gave her a gift!). Where she lived, no-one would employ a married woman. Being a single mother would have been just as bad.

ETA2 -- let's not forget the common scenario where the girl's mother would pretend it was HER baby or the baby was given to a relatives (aunt, married older sister, etc.). No legal adoption would take place and so the "records" showed the girl had kept her baby when in fact it was taken from her by her own mother or a relative, to be raised as her "sibling," "cousin," etc."