Rudy Owens’ memoir on the American adoption experience
© 2017 Rudy Owens. All rights reserved.
Once remove the stigma from unmarried motherhood and the necessity for such “rescue” work would, of course, quite vanish away. The problem would become one purely of morals and religion, with no social implications at all aside from the support of the child involved. Such a state of affairs will hardly come about in the United States in our lifetime, if ever.
—Otto Wilson, Robert South Barrett, and National Florence Crittenton Mission, 1933
My birth mother never told me where she had to live in a self-imposed exile in a Detroit suburb, in a home that would house pregnant, single white women. I later learned the location of my birth mother’s maternity home through my records I finally received from Michigan, decades after I first asked for the information. The home was located in the suburbs. From the outside, nothing could have been more middle-class and suburban. Inside lived a single pregnant woman, and likely others before and after, who made life-changing decisions. Her pregnancy ended when she delivered me at Crittenton General Hospital. The facility served as a hospital and a temporary home for single women like her, where dozens of pregnant women lived before delivering their children.
My birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital, was one of the flagship facilities created by the National Florence Crittenton Mission, a philanthropic organization that eventually played one of the most important roles in the country’s bold new experiment in expanding adoption. Founded by a wealthy New York druggist, Charles N. Crittenton, the mission quickly grew from its street-ministry grassroots serving prostitutes in New York in 1883. It was incorporated by Congress in 1898, and by 1909 it had established seventy homes across the country, just twenty-six years after its founding by the millionaire businessman.
In addition to helping prostitutes, the mission served vulnerable and victimized women as well as women who were pregnant out of marriage. It gave them shelter and medical care. In the cities where it sprang up, Crittenton homes provided safe places for single mothers to raise their infants and receive vocational education in remedial women’s occupations to help rebuild their lives. By the early 1900s, it was providing training to the new profession of social workers and working to destigmatize single motherhood to the public. The mission and its homes would soon play much larger roles.
Return to Chapter 2: The Most Suitable Plan
Read More: Chapter 4: How Scott Became Martin: A Life Told in Records