Grady Hendrix
speaker
39 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Grady Hendrix’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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 in 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.
Yeah, well, you know, 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 Holmeses, 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.
Yes, well, you know, these girls are so hungry for information. And who gives people information but librarians? And in the late 60s and early 70s, 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.
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 Holmes. I mean- Anne's book and Ricky Sollinger's Wake Up Little Susie are kind of the only two. And Anne 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. 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 going to 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.
Right? 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 it? 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.
But isn't birth not for the squeamish?
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 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-tos 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 if she gets comfortable with the idea of her pregnancy, it'll just go away. I mean, it really was eye-opening in all the worst ways. But one doctor said something to me that really informed how I wanted to approach the birth scenes in this.
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