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A mother was not permitted to "discard" her child, but was expected to "retain supervision of it and to preserve it for the instinct of motherly love." At first, adoption services were not widespread, so most mothers took their children home. Many of the children ended up in orphanages. By 1910, however, adoption became prevalent, and nearly 100 percent of the women gave their babies up for adoption, most of them through the Children's Home Society.

In the 1920s, says longtime child advocacy volunteer Judy Harrison Barry, the Florence Crittenton Home began a partnership with an agency that similarly served African-American girls. The relationship was a natural evolution, Barry says, because of Florence Crittenton Home's close ties to the local churches, including African-American churches.

By the 1950s, African-American leaders were serving on Florence Crittenton's Board of Directors. A decade later, the Home was fully integrated. According to Barry, there was no one incident that led to integration: "It was never really an issue" -- no one had ever applied before. Once the Home began an outreach campaign to let African-American women know they were welcome, a church referred one woman, and then another. They were simply admitted.

Judy Aulette, a professor of sociology and women's studies at UNC-Charlotte, says that ideas and attitudes about sex outside of marriage "became more liberal in the last half of the 20th century." Little research on the subject exists prior to the Kinsey studies of the late 1940s, says Aulette, but evidence shows that in the early 20th century, when the Crittenton homes were founded, "women were much less likely to be sexually active outside of marriage, and men were "somewhat' less likely," which led to the severe condemnations endured by unwed mothers of that era.

By the time Lisa Field attended what was then called the "Florence Crittenton Unwed Mothers Home" in 1973 at the age of 15, the "overwhelming majority" of mothers at the Home were putting their babies up for adoption. The waiting list to get into the Home, while still significant, had shrunk as abortion became legal. Fewer women were carrying their babies to term and, as a result, weren't seeking the assistance of Florence Crittenton.

Field was living with her parents in Sumter, SC, and heard about Florence Crittenton through a friend in Charlotte. He had seen a group of five pregnant girls walk by, and asked where they were staying. Her parents brought her to check out the Home and, after telling neighbors that Field was going to summer camp, took her to stay there until her baby was born.

Field remembers sharing a room with two other girls and performing chores such as setting tables for breakfast. They did not, contrary to rumors, wear uniforms. Field was taught things like leadership and pre-natal nutrition and at one point was elected President of the Month, chosen to represent the women's concerns to the agency's administrators.

"It was very structured -- not a resort," Field recalls. The women at the Home, who ranged in age from 13 to mid-30s, all were anonymous, known only by their first names and the first initial of their last names. Mail was handed out with names and addresses crossed out to protect anonymity. Many of the women were embarrassed, if not humiliated, by their pregnancies.

The feelings of shame, however, "changed once we got there," Field says. The women met with counselors who supported the women as they made their own decisions about whether to keep their babies.

"I was never embarrassed about (the pregnancy)," Field recalls. "I just realized I didn't have the maturity to be a mother at the age of 15." Her father, however, would not return her calls while she was at Florence Crittenton, and has not spoken about it since.

Changes in Attitudes
Today, studies reveal that women and men are equally likely to have sex outside of marriage. More than 50 percent of couples, Aulette says, live together prior to marriage. "They see marriage as an alternative, but not the only alternative to having a private life together." Twenty-eight percent of white women give birth outside of marriage, and 63 percent of black women give birth outside of marriage. One factor not taken into account, Aulette cautions, is whether these women are getting married -- to the fathers, or to other men -- after their babies are born.