The 6 Women Behind Me

When Hilda McGrath Smith discovered her newborn baby girl was missing in 1921 she was devastated to learn that her husband had given the baby away two days after her birth. The twenty-nine-year-old mother had four older children and a cheating husband so suffered what we know today as postpartum depression. When she confronted her husband he angrily forced her into his automobile and drove her to the Salem Oregon state Mental Hospital and had her committed. She was to be incarcerated there for the rest of her life until her death at age eighty-four. This was not an uncommon way that husbands got rid of wives instead of divorcing them in the early 20th Century.