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

Ann Fessler is a Professor Emerita at Rhode Island School of Design, where she taught from 1993 to 2018. She has spent nearly four decades creating work that deals with the stories of women and the impact that myths, stereotypes, and mass media images have on their lives and intimate relationships. She has spent the last twenty-five years bringing the first-person narratives and hidden history of adoption into the public sphere through her writing and visual works. She turned to the subject after being approached by a woman who thought Fessler might be the daughter she had surrendered forty years earlier. Though the woman was not her mother, Fessler, an adoptee, was profoundly moved by the experience. The conversation that ensued shifted the focus of her work to adoption and she has since produced three films, several audio and video installations, and written The Girls Who Went Away.