This is the story of rural white unwed mothers from Maine and Tennessee who, beginning in the 1870s, took advantage of the increased access to urban areas to find opportunities and support not available in their own communities. Although Maine and Tennessee differed in their economic and political structures, the rural communities from which these women came were remarkably similar. Isolated, rural communities everywhere in the United States shared a reliance on family and community that required hard work and neighbourliness. While men were by custom and law the heads of their households, women and children were valued for their labour, without which the family could not survive.

Between 1870 and 1950 the support and control of unwed mothers in the United States shifted from local communities to a network of social work professionals who counselled single pregnant women in more than 200 unwed mothers homes. Where once young women were kept in line by the oversight of older women who offered assistance but who also paid attention to any form of deviant behaviour, by 1950 trained professionals met with young women under conditions of extreme privacy and offered them choice but also emphasized the best interest of the child. Women in the late nineteenth century were likely to live with, or in close proximity to, their children born out of wedlock; women in the mid-twentieth century were as likely to give their children up to adoption and renounce any attempt to contact them again.