I got a book at the library sale awhile ago and finally read it this weekend. It’s called The Tenth Month and it’s by Laura Z. Hobson. It caught my eye because it was clearly about pregnancy and when I flipped it open to the first page I read this:

The moment was to stand out forever in her memory. There she stood, alone and naked, toweling herself dry, gazing idily about the warm steamy room, then at her image in the long panel of mirror in the closed door.

Her breasts looked fuller. She had gained no weight, but her breats, always small, looked fuller. Below her navel there was the faintest globe of fullness too.

The book was written in 1970 but takes place in 1967-68. Dori is a 40-year old divorcée who has been infertile after an abortion that took place the very first year of her marriage. Now she is single, having periodic affairs with married men and here she is pregnant.

I kept waiting for her punishment to strike (it’s the late 60s after all) but throughout the book she is written as a strong, competent, intelligent woman. She has no regrets about the abortion and the doctor from whom she seeks treatment not only offers her no censure but is supportive about her decision to continue this pregnancy. Supportive, in fact, is too light a word since he helps her manage the complex organization she will need in order to keep the pregnancy a secret and then eventually “adopt” her own child a few months after it is born.

What I found most interesting about it is that other than her plans to adopt her own child, there is no mention of an adoption plan. A couple of times abortion is mentioned (pre-Roe v. Wade — I found this surprising) but not adoption and I’m not quite sure why the author left that option out. But even without that, it’s clear that if a 40-year old, college-educated, self-sufficient middle-class woman would have to go through this kind of subterfuge to parent her own child, any single woman with less means was going to have very little choice but to have an abortion (still illegal) or be forced into an adoption plan.

There’s this interesting paragraph about adoption, too, as she explores adoption laws in creating her plan.

…The public adoption agencies still clung to their old standards of what constituted acceptability in adoptive parents; the optimum still was the married couple with a reasonably good income, happy in marriage, stable in personality, still young though not so young that they had been childless for fewer than three years. But an experiment begun in Los Angeles a few years back had proved that single-parent adoptions could and did work, and that they were often the only way to place the children most optimum parents didn’t wish to adopt: the handicapped child, the Negro child, the Mexican child, the child of mixed bloods or mixed religious.

It reminded me of something Shannon once wrote. I can’t find it in her archives (maybe it was a comment on this or another blog?) but she made a joke once about how adoption an African American baby might be second best to someone and how she and Cole being lesbian parents might be second best to someone and how fine then, they’d be a nice fit for each other. Anyway, that’s what I remember and I remember chuckling but I might have that quote wrong.

The book didn’t do much for me as a novel but as a little slice of pop lit history it was pretty interesting. And then I did a google search and saw there was a made-for-tv movie starring Carol Burnett, which made me happy because I adore her. Then I found out that Laura Hobson also wrote Gentlemen’s Agreement, which became a movie that in part inspired my (gentile) mom’s future decision to do what she could to give us a Jewish identity. Hobson was an interesting and admirable woman (read that link for more info on her); I’m glad I ran across this book as my introduction to her.

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