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

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In partnership with the Ramsey County Historical Society

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.

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