BOOK REVIEW: LOOKING FOR JANE, Heather Marshall
“Just tell them you’re looking for Jane.”
Imagine a world where panels of men decide a woman’s fate. Imagine a time when women couldn’t have credit cards in their name. Imagine a world where women depended on backroom butchers and bleach. You, too, would be looking for Jane.
LOOKING FOR JANE is not a book about abortion. It’s about motherhood and all the messiness, complications, and joy that comes with it. It’s about a woman’s right to choose. About preserving a woman’s dignity.
“Just tell them you’re looking for Jane.”
Told through alternating timelines from the 1960s, touching down in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and culminating in the 2000s, it is a perfect web of three women’s tightly woven arcs––Angela, Evelyn, and Nancy bound up in secrets, betrayals, and twists where we are introduced into the Jane Network where women can pursue safe abortions.
The story opens with a prologue dated 2010, when “a truly extraordinary letter was delivered to the wrong mailbox.” From here, Marshall takes us on a harrowing ride when “its contents wouldn’t be discovered for another seven years. And that letter would change three women’s lives forever.”
In 2017, Angela Creighton is trying to get pregnant after several miscarriages. Every time a pregnancy fails, the stakes heighten as Angela and her wife’s dream of motherhood is threatened.
Circumstances put the misplaced letter from 2010 into Angela’s hands. Although not addressed to her, Angela opens the letter and is thrust into the world of adoption in the 1960s and the St. Agnes Home for Unwed Mothers with its militaristic cruelty shrouded as righteous intent.
In successive chapters, we are quickly immersed in the worlds of the three women while they navigate through the complications of pre-marital sex, rape, police raids, and the social norms and political realities of their time.
However, I don’t want to reduce the bigger questions to sensational plot points. The story asks more significant questions about abortion, adoption, and the high-risk search for birth mothers. What’s it worth to find yourself?
As a Torontonian, I couldn’t help but be pulled into the local scene where she mentions–– Fran’s Diner, Sam the Record Man, Harbord Street, and Eatons. As one of the characters faces the illegalities, risks, and lack of options in her pursuit of choice, as she subways through the city, I can hear the disembodied voice of the TTC announcement—“The next station is Ossington, Ossington Station.”
I loved this book and the somewhat painful reminder of our history. However, I am deeply grateful for the women and men such as Dr. Henry Mogentaler, who paved the way for legalization for future generations of women.
We no longer have to look for Jane.