A Novel Tracks the Fallout of Free Love, and the Girls Who ‘Went Away’

In 1968, a “good girl” is squeaky clean. She studies hard, follows the rules, gets into college and doesn’t embarrass her parents. She doesn’t lie or drink or do drugs. She doesn’t participate in the Summer of Love or experiment with any of its alternative ways of living. She definitely doesn’t have premarital sex, get pregnant and upend everyone’s meticulously laid plans for her future.

For Elizabeth “Baker” Phillips, the main character in Where the Girls Were, Kate Schatz’s first novel, being a good girl is her everything. And it’s stifling. When Baker lets loose for the first time ever, joining her cousin at a New Year’s Eve concert in the Fillmore, she succumbs to the romance of the night and sleeps with a handsome young stranger.

“Five radiant weeks” and a handful of furtive encounters later, the high school senior discovers she’s not the only one on his mind. Not long after, she must face the fact that her tiredness, nausea and sore breasts are not just symptoms of heartbreak.

It’s hard to imagine this world now, from a distance of nearly 60 years. The pill existed, but was mostly prescribed to married women; it wouldn’t become legal for unmarried women in all 50 states until 1972. Roe v. Wade didn’t strike down state abortion laws until 1973. Nobody mentions condoms anywhere in the book.

Despite her school smarts, Baker is woefully unaware of the mechanics of sex and the dangers of pregnancy. (She knows, she tells her paramour, “a whole lot. And hardly anything at all.”)

One of the few options available to unwed mothers in 1968 were private maternity homes, where families sent their daughters under the pretense of study abroad programs or extended visits to distant relatives. The girls gave their babies up in closed adoptions, often never speaking of their pregnancies again.

Schatz’s own mother was one of these young women. It was her tearful story of two secret pregnancies that sparked Schatz’s research into what would become Where the Girls Were (out March 3 from The Dial Press). Known for her “Rad Women” series and Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book, written with W. Kamau Bell, Schatz comes at this project with real feminist bona fides.

Her historical novel is both educational and a form of wish-fulfillment. Through Baker, and the friends she makes in a San Francisco maternity home, Schatz offers representation to the millions of American women who “went away,” while also granting her main character agency few actually had.

The novel captures the widening gap between the suburban formality of Baker’s world and the social upheavals happening on the nightly news. Baker drafts an anti-war editorial; students riot in Paris; RFK is assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel. But at home and at the home, an old-fashioned stiffness prevails — the girls obey a dress code and don fake wedding rings for their trips outside. (Baker is blocked from leaving the premises because her mother fears she’ll be recognized.)

Much of Where the Girls Were is about Baker finding the language to describe her situation to herself. Is she still a good girl? Ruined? Unfit? Can she simply return to her previous plans when the pregnancy ends?

She writes about all of this in her journal, but we’re not privy to those sentences. Instead, we get clipped, euphemistic letters to and from home. Schatz shows how silence and secrecy, especially within a family, allow people to make the same mistakes generation after generation.

A dark mystery at the maternity home ultimately unlocks some of Baker’s resolve, with no small amount of inspiration from Jane Eyre. Less satisfyingly, Schatz lets Baker remain indecisive about motherhood until the very end of the novel. It’s an approach that doesn’t quite fit with the intelligent, sensitive character we’ve come to know. Baker’s uncertainty feels more like the author not wanting to impose a decision onto this teenage everygirl.

We would expect teenagers in 2026 to have more resources at their disposal, but political and societal strictures are working very hard in the present to dissolve reproductive rights. Not long ago, we might have read Where the Girls Were and remarked on how far we had come. Now, we will read Where the Girls Were and wonder just how much of our future will resemble the darkest periods of our past.

Kate Schatz’s ‘Where the Girls Were’ is out from The Dial Press on March 3, 2026. Schatz will be in conversation with Caro de Robertis on March 3, 7–9 p.m. at Booksmith (1727 Haight St., San Francisco), with additional events in Santa Cruz and Alameda.