Living Mistakes - Mothers Who Consented to Adoption (Paperback, 2nd edition)

This text is about mothers who do not know their children and whose children do not know them. They are the mothers of children given up for adoption. Their experience was regarded as a mistake to be hidden, a regrettable event to be forgotten, a personal problem to be solved by the state-run service of adoption. This book gives a voice to these silenced and hidden women who relinquished their children and their parental rights. Their stories are fragments of the unrecorded history of women whose children were conceived and born outside marriage. It is a history so at odds with our beliefs about women and mothers as to be invisible. In the introduction, Inglis details the developments that have occurred since 1984 when the first edition was published, and discusses the changes that society has undergone since. She reminds us that although the punitive aspect of morality and the stigma of illegitemacy has almost disappeared, single mothers remain the most impoverished group in Australia.