Up First from NPR - The Girls Who Were Sent Away

Episode Date: April 20, 2025

Before Roe v. Wade, when a young, unmarried girl got pregnant, she was often sent away – to a place called a maternity home. There, she would give birth in secret, surrender her baby, and return to her life as if nothing had happened. That shadowed history is the setting of Grady Hendrix's latest horror novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. Today on The Sunday Story from Up First, Ayesha Rascoe talks with Hendrix about the truth that inspired his timely fiction — and what happens when people with little choice, discover a new kind of power.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe and this is a Sunday Story, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. You're probably familiar with the baby boom. After World War II, there was a huge spike in fertility rates. But not all of those babies were wanted. At the time, abortion was mostly illegal in the US. And so that baby boom, it also led to something that people have called the baby scoop era. Yes, that's actually what they called it.

Before Roe v Wade, there was a period from 1943 to 1973, when many unmarried women and girls were forced to give birth and put their babies up for adoption. The exact numbers are hard to know because these births often happened in secret in places called maternity homes. Grady Hendricks is an acclaimed horror writer and he made this tragic history the setting of his latest novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls.

It's a book that, in some ways, reverberates with the present. Today things are obviously different from the years before Roe v. Wade. Abortion is still a protected right in 21 states and the District of Columbia and there are abortion pills now that can cross state lines. But with the fall of Roe and the resulting abortion restrictions, some of this history, it echoes. Hendricks's novel is a spellbinding work that explores what happens when people who have been stripped of power suddenly gain it. My conversation with Grady Hendricks when we come back. Stay with us. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things and other currencies. With WISE, you can send, spend, or receive money across borders,

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Listen for original reporting and exclusive insights. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine, if you will, a show from NPR that's not like NPR. A show that focuses not on the important, but the stupid, which features stories about people smuggling animals in their pants and competent criminals in ridiculous science studies. And call it Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me

because the good names were taken. Listen to NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. because the good names were taken. Listen to NVR's, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, yes, that is what it is called, wherever you get your podcasts. ["The Good News Is Here"] Rady, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Okay, so set this up for us.

The story starts in the early 1970s with a pregnant 15-year-old girl, her very angry father at the wheel. They're speeding from Alabama to Florida. And there is so much judgment at this time for unwed mothers in general, but especially for teenage unwed mothers. Tell us who the girl is and where her father is taking her.

Her name is Neva, she's 15 and she's pregnant. And she's being taken to a maternity home in Florida. And there were about 190 of these across America. You know, they were around for a long time, but their peak was really from about 1940, 45 to 1973 when Roe versus. Wade passed. And this is where if your daughter got pregnant and didn't have a ring on her finger, you would send her.

She'd spend the last trimester usually of her pregnancy and hiding, have her baby, her baby would be taken from her and put up for adoption. And she'd return home with some kind of cover story you tell the family or the neighbors. Oh, she, you know, visited her aunt this summer, or she went to work on her French in Chicago. And she would be expected to never talk about or think about her baby again. And the girls were kept under very tight control. Like, the woman running the place where Neva ends up, she instructs the girls that they are not to talk about their real identities, they're given fake names, and they are also kept in the dark about what exactly is gonna happen to them when it's time to give birth.

They're told, oh there's no pain, you'll just go on sleep, you won't remember anything. And that's not true. Even back then, I mean they had some stuff going on, but that's not true. Yeah. Well, you know, the homes, the homes were run by, you know, the Catholic charities ran homes, the Florence Crittenden Homes, the Salvation Army, they were independent homes, and they all varied in how they treated the girls. I mean, you had homes that had nutritionists and obstetricians on staff who gave them classroom teaching, who had social workers, and then you had homes that

were almost like prisons. Money was taken from them, they were kept indoors all day, but the few common things between the homes is yes, you never used a real name, you never said where you were from, and you were kept ignorant. You know, all these girls had these due dates bearing down on them like freight trains, and they were dying to know what's going to happen. And people say, Oh, don't worry about it. That's none of your business when you know, it's kind of entirely their business. You know, the novels going along, it's all very realistic because I just, you know, these homes existed.

But then here comes this bookmobile and a mysterious librarian and this spell book for groovy witches. Yes. Talk to me about Fern, Rose, Holly, and Zinnia. That's the kind of the group, or should I say coven, that comes together and their first foray into the dark arts. Yes, well, you know, these girls are so hungry for information and who gives people information

but librarians and in the late sixties and early seventies, it was a glut of these sort of supermarket paperbacks of, you know, everyday spells and how to cast charms and how to be a sensual witch. And I thought, well, what if a librarian gave them one of these books that actually gave them what they want, which is some power and control over their lives? What if one of these books really did teach them

how to do witchcraft? And, you know, as they say, be careful what you wish for. Exactly. I mean, so they get a little into it. They do a little spell and someone feels the effects of it. But, you know, things do get rough. Witches are witches, they're going to do witchy things, and there's always a price to pay

for power. But it really seems here that more of the horror in this book is the reality that the girls are living in, where they just have zero agency over their bodies, their babies, their kids, and they're put in this position where they have to make these horrible decisions and they're just children. What kind of led you to write this kind of story? Well, two things really. I mean, one was, so when I was in my 20s, I found out that two members of my family

had been sent away to maternity homes. And they were both in their 60s or 70s. Now, they never talked about it. And it kind of blew my mind. The idea that these women I loved very much had children and were expected not to know them or see them or think about them. And for all they knew, their kids were dead or maybe they were alive or maybe they hated them or maybe they had forgiven them, but they had no idea.

And so I was sort of thinking about that for a while and really wrestling with it and trying to figure out what was that like? Why was this okay? And I read a book by a woman named Ann Fessler called The Girls Who Went Away, which is there's very few books written about the homes. I mean, Ann's book and Ricky Solinger's Wake Up Little Suzie are kind of the only two. And Ann Fessler's book is an oral history of the homes and she lets the mothers talk about their experiences. And I was really blown away. I mean, the fact that millions of kids were born in these homes and that these were kids, you know, these were girls and they were 14 and 15 and 13 years old. And we were telling them, give up your baby, never think about it again. I mean, that's impossible for a mother to do.

Give up your baby, never think about it again. I mean, that's impossible for a mother to do. And just the cruelty of it really sort of made me think, there's something here. And it took me years until I was sort of like, okay, I'm gonna try this book. And then it took me two years to write it while my editor and I fought over a lot of it and I failed to write it several times

and things just sort of went off the rails. But yeah, so that's what I was thinking to get me here. Well, I'm glad you stuck with it. And that's interesting about, you know, failing to write it, but then getting to this work. So that gives, that should give some people hope because you kept at it and you succeeded. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, and also I need to say,

you know, I am a childless middle-aged man. I have no place writing a book in which every character is a pregnant teenage girl. And so I had about 12 moms who really shared their birth stories. I mean, they let me ask stupid questions. I had about four OBs and laborists who worked with me, both men and women, who I would just keep coming back to, okay, what's the, and you know,

they really guided me through this. And so a lot of the time writing this book was trying to get that part of it right. Well, because, so, because there are obviously birth scenes in this book and they are, they're not for the squeamish, we should say, not for the squeamish. But isn't birth not for the squeamish?

It's not. No, I've done it. And I have to tell you, it's pretty, it is the best thing in the world, but it's also extremely terrifying. And so you talked about researching. Were you surprised or shocked by some of the things you learned about hospital births, especially back then, and what they were like.

Oh, sure. I mean, listen, giving birth in 1970, my hat is off to any woman who did that because they should get a Medal of Honor. You know, I had OBs telling me stories about doctors who would induce labor if their patient came in on Friday because they didn't want to mess up their weekend waiting around for her to give birth. You know, women, you know, were regularly tied down at that point when they gave birth. Girls like this who gave birth, as one OB pointed out to me, would probably just be knocked out because the doctor really didn't want to mess around with them too much and have to quote unquote deal with them. So even reading things like the Williams Obstetrics Manual, Gutmacher's Family Planning,

which was sort of the go-to's at the time, the attitude towards things like morning sickness, that's all in a woman's mind. That's just a made up problem because a woman is uncomfortable with giving birth and so she's nauseated by it. And as she gets comfortable with the idea of her pregnancy, it'll just go away.

I mean, it was so, it really was, was eye opening in all the worst ways. Um, but one doctor said something to me that really informed how I wanted to approach the birth scenes in this. It was a doctor I've known for a long time and she was telling about her OB rotations and the 90s and you know, really harrowing stories, the kind of, you know, war stories that just left my jaw on the floor. And at the end of our interview, she said something that really stuck with me.

She said, you know, I've been in the room for, I don't know, close to 90 live births, and she said, and every single one of them is a goddamn miracle. Something happens there that we don't have words for. And that really stuck with me and was kind of what I wanted to capture. Yes, it's horrifying. Yes, it's painful.

Yes, it's intense. But this is everything. You know what I mean? This is where we all start. You know, there are two people in a room and then there are three. When we come back, Grady and I talk magic. These days there is a lot of news. It can be hard to keep up with what it means for you, your family, and your community. Consider this. From NPR is a podcast that helps you

make sense of the news. Six days a week, we bring you a deep dive on a story and provide the context, backstory, and analysis you need to understand our the federal government. The NPR Politics Podcast covers it all. Keep up with what's happening in Washington and beyond with the NPR Politics Podcast. Listen every day. You want to follow what's happening in Washington, D.C., but you don't want to be scrolling your phone all day.

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right, or witchcraft, like a certain type from the spell book. But you also have root work, who do that comes out of the African spiritual traditions. How did you learn about that? Yeah, so I'm from Charleston, South Carolina. I've done some research down in the sea islands. I helped someone write a book many years ago that had some some who do in it. And I just kept researching because it was this amazing tradition, you know, voodoo and hoodoo often get confused, but they're very different.

I mean, voodoo has gods involved in the Loa and hoodoo is very much about medicine and root work and charms and healing. And, um, and so it was this tradition that I worry is going to get lost. And it's a really intense part of sort of that Sea Island, you know, South Carolina going into Georgia tradition. It's so regional and so of those islands. And it's also in North Carolina. I don't want to give away my family business, but we have some root workers in there.

It was a form of resistance. You know, Dr. Buzzard, who was a really famous root doctor, he would, when someone's son got drafted, he would mix up a tea for them and have them drink it. And what people figured later is the tea had gunpowder in it. It would give them some cardiac arrhythmia. And so they'd go into their physicals and flunk their physicals and not be sent to usually Vietnam or Korea. So there was this really amazing other element to it where there was a really real world political edge to it. One thing that this book obviously deals with is the misogyny that these girls face.

They're all shamed for becoming pregnant. The boys really face no consequences at all. But they're also told that if they just go along with the plan, willingly sign their rights away to their babies or unwillingly, then they can just go back to their lives like nothing ever happened. And how damaging do you think that sort of lie is? Oh, I mean, I think that's something that haunts a lot of these women for the rest of their lives. something that haunts a lot of these women for the rest of their lives. You know, reading Anne Fessler's book, talking to a few people, you know, you're a kid. You can barely make decisions about what to wear.

And suddenly you're being told you need to sign these papers and you have no choice. And these girls were not told their options. They were not told, you know, their legal rights. And I think a lot of them, I mean, I know a lot of them are haunted by guilt for the rest of their lives. And I've seen people reunite with their kids after being sent to maternity home. And it's incredible. It is really incredible. The the healing that's there and how something feels completed is mind-blowing. And I've seen on the other hand,

women who never saw their kids again, you know, it didn't necessarily ruin their lives, but it was always a shadow that hung over them for decades. And the fact that we did this on such a wholesale level as a society, and like you said, what made my jaw drop was how much we hated these girls. I mean, newspaper editorials about how Alcatraz should be turned into a home for unwed mothers, newspaper columnists calling these girls sick and unnatural, and no

consequences for the men. I read a lot of books of resources. I found one social worker manual, a handbook from 1974 that mentions unwed fathers in one sentence and that's it. And obviously you look at this and you think about like what is the evil in this book? These teenage girls, they're put into these positions to make these impossible decisions without all the information, without any real adult guidance. Like, is that the real evil in this story? You know, it's funny, I thought about this a lot, right? I write horror novels. I mean, I write entertainment. And in writing this, I was like, well, who are my bad guys? Who are my bad guys? Like, well, it can't be the witches. I mean, the witches are like, well, who are my bad guys? Who are my bad guys? I was like, well, it can't be the witches.

I mean, the witches are scary, but the witches are also offering knowledge and liberation. And then I thought, well, is it the people running the homes? And I thought, no, you know, the people running the homes were really convinced they were doing what was best for these girls. Is it the girls who got pregnant? No, of course it's not these girls who got pregnant.

Some of them were date raped. Some of them were molested. Some of them just didn't even know what birth control was or have access to it. It's one of those stories where there isn't a villain. There are just a lot of people who were really convinced that they were right. And that conviction did so much damage

to so many millions of people. Well, it seems like there is a lot of gray in this world that you've created because there is this possibility of freedom in the path of quote unquote darkness with the witches. And then there's the possibility of that lie that the girls are being fed that if they just go along with giving up their babies, everything will go back to normal. But you show that both of those paths are messy. Like, is that how you think about this? Yeah, I mean, I think we're all told as teenagers,

even as adults to some extent, here's the path, follow the path and everything will be fine. You won't have to worry about anything. And I think most of us know that that's just not true. And then I looked at these witches who were sort of the counterpoint to that. And what really inspired my witches was less sort of Wicca or paganism and much more. I sort of found the voice of the witches in political action literature of the late 60s and early 70s.

Witch, which was a group known as Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, all these groups that said, we are at war with the mainstream because the mainstream is leading us down a path of destruction. All these groups had the same internal debates. What is violence justified? How far can we push things? If we're at war with the mainstream society, what does that look like? What are we allowed to do? And I

think it's one thing to say, hey, I'm going off to join the Liberation Army. I think it's another thing to say, I'm never going home again and I will live under an assumed name and I will be on the run for the rest of my life. You know, it's scary. So, I mean, I think these girls are presented with two choices, and one looks very scary, and the other looks very safe, and they're both equally dangerous. Mm. And, you know, I wanted to ask you, obviously, you know,

you are a horror writer, entertainment writer, you've written books like How to Sell a Haunted House, The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, and My Best Friend's exorcism. How do you come up with your ideas? Man, they're everywhere. You know, I mean, the world is... One of the reasons I write horror is because it's about the world around us. It's not about space or another planet or a fantasy world or the far future. It's usually about the here and now and people around us. And good God, there's so many stories, you know, if you're just willing to listen.

And then once you add in that, like, you can make it not boring by throwing in a vampire or some witches or a werewolf or two. I mean, I wish I could keep up with how many books I want to write. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Kim Naderfame-Petersa and edited by Jenny Schmidt and Leona Simstrom. It was engineered by James Willetts. Big thanks also to the team at Weekend Edition Sunday, which produced the original interview with Brady Hendricks. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo

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