"Booth Girls: Pregnancy, Adoption, and the Secrets We Kept:by Kim Heikkila, PhD  

"Booth Girls" is a thoughtful, multigenerational story of contested motherhood, equal parts biography, oral history, history, and memoir.  

Kim Heikkila’s mother had a secret: in 1961, two years before her  marriage, she became pregnant. After several months hidden in her  parents’ attic bedroom, she gave birth to a daughter at the Salvation  Army’s Booth Memorial Hospital, a home for unwed mothers in St. Paul,  and surrendered her for adoption. Kim’s older sister reunited with her birth family in the 1990s. 

Kim’s  mother wrote about these experiences, but after she died, Heikkila still had questions. Using careful research and sensitive interviews with  other “Booth girls,” she tells the stories of the Booth hospital and the women who passed through it—and she learned more about her own  experience as an adoptive mother.  

Kim Heikkila, PhD, is an independent scholar and president of Spotlight Oral History. She has also taught courses on US history, US women’s  history, the Vietnam War, and the 1960s at colleges and universities in  the Twin Cities area. She is the author of "Sisterhood of War: Minnesota  Women in Vietnam." To purchase titles from the History Revealed series, or other books of  interest, see our partner, Subtext Books at https://subtextbooks.com/.

View the video here: https://youtu.be/0ixCE5DqqlI