Advance Praise:
“Searching for answers to heartbreaking questions she never asked her mother, Heikkila brings her gifts as a researcher and oral historian to bear. The family connections lost leave a reader gutted, while reconnections made fill a reader with hope. In so skillfully pinpointing the personal within its historical context, Heikkila delivers a must-read for all those touched by adoption––and for anyone seeking to better understand a loved one gone too soon.”
Kate St. Vincent Vogl, author of Lost & Found: A Memoir of Mothers
“Kim Heikkila combines powerful and evocative memoir with deep historical research to explore the changing experiences of unwed pregnancy and adoption. Driven to understand her mother (and the depth of a secret kept for thirty-three years), Heikkila also explores her own experience as an adoptive mother in the early twenty-first century. Her mother’s writings, oral history interviews, and rigorous historical research allow Heikkila to contextualize what her mother went through, shaped by changing class, racial, and gender norms. This is a rich read, offering a unique, multivocal perspective against a landscape of dramatic cultural change.”
Sara M. Evans, author of Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End
“In this powerful, beautifully written book, Kim Heikkila recounts the dramatic and painful story of her mother’s first child, born when she was a young unmarried woman in the early 1960s. Weaving together her personal family story with her scholarly knowledge and insight, Heikkila uncovers the emotional and social toll experienced by unmarried mothers who bore not only the babies but the weight of stigma as the fathers walked away.”
Elaine Tyler May, author of America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation
Related Resources:
Star Tribune essay by Kim Heikkila, "My mother 'got in trouble' in 1960s Minnesota" (April 7, 2016)
Minnesota History article by Kim Heikkila, "Unwed Mothers at Booth Memorial Hospital, 1961–63" (Summer 2017)
Ramsey County History article by Kim Heikkila, “'Brighter and Better’: Building the New Salvation Army Rescue Home of St. Paul, 1913” (Spring 2016)
Practical Thinking 9.2 article by Kim Heikkila “To Bear the Mark: Unwed Motherhood at the Salvation Army’s Booth Memorial Hospital" (December 2014)
Broad! article by Kim Heikkila, “Sparring with Infertility” (Summer 2014, p. 14)
WCCO Television Reports with Dave Moore "Unwed Mothers" (November 1960)
