The young women who disappeared: Kate Schatz's Where the Girls Were

Feminist writer Schatz knocks it out of the park with her debut novel about a young woman in late ´60s California who—like so many from her generation—gets trapped between the contrasting values of American counterculture and a society that denies her agency over her own body and choices.

Pub. by The Dial Press (March 2026)

The soon-to-be valedictorian at her high school, Elizabeth Baker Phillips is her parents’ pride, the natural culmination of her studiousness and a loving upbringing overlaid with high expectations. Then her path to Stanford is wrecked after she gets caught up in the blissful freedom at her cousin May’s party at San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and has a short affair with an attractive hippie. Suddenly Baker, a “good girl” who’d barely touched a man before, finds herself pregnant and lost, a situation presented with deep understanding.

Desperate to conceal their family’s shame, Baker’s mother, Rose, drops her off, without her prior knowledge, at a home for unwed mothers. Here, Baker and others are meant to spend months behind locked doors and pressured to sign their babies away for adoption; after going into labor, they’re whisked off and never mentioned again. She gets curious about all the girls made to disappear and ponders what to do next.

The camaraderie amongst the girls is suffused with warmth. Each situation is unique, but they all recognize the unfairness: they’re effectively imprisoned, while for the men, “he just gets to live his life.” Through Baker’s work as a teacher’s assistant, Schatz enhances the themes by interweaving words from the literary women Baker admires.

This isn’t a thriller, but with the heightened anticipation of Baker’s actions as her time of childbirth draws near, it often reads like one. The story offers utter believability and character intimacy, including Baker’s observations about the changing body she no longer recognizes. It’s nearly impossible to look away.

Where the Girls Were was published in March by The Dial Press/Penguin Random House, and I reviewed it initially for the Historical Novel Society. I haven’t heard much about this novel in the histfic community since its publication (maybe because it’s not the first on its subject?) and think it deserves more attention.  I’ve since read other reviews, mostly positive, which have mild critiques about the ending. I understand this, but I also understand and appreciate the author’s choice of finale. 

There have been a growing number of recent historical novels about the "Baby Scoop Era,” which spanned from the post-WWII years to the early 1970s. During this time, an estimated 1.5 million unmarried girls and women were coerced to give up their newborns for adoption, signing away their parental rights, and told to forget it ever happened. Ann Fessler’s nonfiction history The Girls Who Went Away (2006), based on interviews with many of the women affected, brought these unethical practices into widespread public view.

Other novels on the subject include:

Meagan Church, The Girls We Sent Away (Sourcebooks, 2024), set in 1960s North Carolina.

Grady Hendrix, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (Berkley, 2025) - St. Augustine, Florida, in 1970. From the title, you can guess this is a historical fantasy novel.

Kelly O’Connor McNees, The Myth of Surrender (Pegasus, 2022) - rural Illinois in 1960.

Kim van Alkemade, Counting Lost Stars (William Morrow, 2023) - 1960 NYC, told in parallel with a thread set in the Netherlands during the Holocaust.

Susan Wiggs, Wayward Girls (William Morrow, 2025) - in which young women are confined in a Catholic reform school in Buffalo, New York, during the Vietnam War years. Earlier this month, the author wrote an essay for People Magazine about the letters she received from survivors after her novel was published.