- 저자: Heikkila, Kim
- 제목: "Everybody thinks it's right to give the child away" - Unwed Mothers at Booth Memorial Hospital, 1961-63
- 게재지: Minnesota History 65, 6: 229-241
- 발행연도: 2017
- 발행기관: Minnesota Historical Society Press
■ 요약
입양인으로 성장한 저자(Sharon Lee Moore)는 미혼모였던 자신의 어머니의 삶을 추적하기 위해 19세기 중반 미혼모들을 수용했던 부스 메모리얼 병원(Booth Memorial Hospital)의 역사를 조사하기 시작한다. 이 과정 중 저자는 흥미로운 자료를 발견한다. 1963년 10월 미네소타 대학교 사회사업학과 교수인 지셀라 코놉카와 조수 버니 매 차키가 33명의 미혼모 당사자를 인터뷰한 자료였다. 당시 미혼모 담론을 지배하던 사회복지 전문가들의 관점이 아닌 미혼모 당사자의 목소리를 접하며 이들의 입양 결정은 아기에게 최고의 성공 기회를 제공한다는 믿음에서였고, 이러한 믿음은 당시 미국 미혼 백인 임산부에게 주어진 문화적 편견과 제한된 선택권을 반영한 결과였다는 사실을 알게 된다.
■ 서문
Sharon Lee Moore, the young woman who entered Booth that day in 1961, was my mother. She was nearly nine months along by the time she turned herself over to the Salvation Army staff and social workers who would usher her through the final days of her pregnancy. She delivered her baby, a girl, on January 16; then surrendered her for adoption so that, as she would write many years later, the child would not “start life as an ‘illegitimate’ little person doomed to failure because of me.” She named her baby Lynette, counted her fingers and toes, and then let her go. Several days later, she left Booth emptyarmed and heavy-hearted. For the next 33 years—through marriage to my father, my birth on Mother’s Day 1968 and that of my brother in 1970, and a 20-year career in marketing at Carlson Companies—she carried her burden in silence. Then, in 1994, “Lynette” found her birth mother, releasing our mother from her secret.
(중략)
After my mother died, in 2009, I realized that I had squandered the opportunity to ask her more about her adoption decision. Instead, I began researching the history of Booth Memorial Hospital and its onetime residents in hopes that learning more about them would help me know my mother better. In the process, I found a unique source: interviews conducted by University of Minnesota social work professor Gisela Konopka and her assistant, Vernie-Mae Czaky, with 33 “Booth girls” in October 1963. These interviews feature the voices of the unwed mothers-to-be rather than the social welfare experts whose perspectives typically dominated public discourse about single pregnant girls and the organizations designed to serve them.4 Unlike the retrospective accounts written by these birth mothers decades later, the Konopka interviews provide a glimpse into a crucial moment in time for these young women as they teetered on the edge of a culturally proscribed motherhood. They show girls looking to the future as they made the difficult decision to surrender, believing that separation afforded the best chance of success for their babies. They also make clear that this belief reflected the cultural biases and limited choices available to single, white pregnant girls in midcentury America. Following the advice of parents and social workers and cognizant of the double standard that held girls, but not boys, responsible for upholding traditional standards of sexual propriety, the young women who surrendered their babies often felt they had no other choice.
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