History Revealed: Booth Girls

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

History Revealed Series
Program Date: Thursday, April 8, 2021
Video on YouTube

In partnership with the East Side Freedom Library & Roseville Library

“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.”

Past History Revealed Programs
More videos of some of our past History Revealed programs are available on the RCHS YouTube channel.
Ramsey County Historical Society Youtube Channel

To purchase titles from the History Revealed series, or other books of interest, see our partner, Subtext Books at https://subtextbooks.com/