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Fiction / Women's Issues / the West
Grief and Recovery / Adoption / Family History / Domestic Violence /
Trade paperback, 8 1/2 X 5 1/2, 381 pages
ISBN: 0-9714473-2-2
LCC#: 2001095609
$14.95

Margaret Benshoof-Holler and her book Burning of the Marriage Hat, a fictionalized account of conditions of unwed pregnant women during the middle and early 20th century, were recently featured on NPR affiliate WFSS 91.9 FM's "Women's Voices Women's Lives."

I began writing this book on a journey back to Wyoming to dig into family roots and to uncover some past mysteries. On one trip back, I also wrote a journalism piece about Matthew Shepherd, the gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten and tied to a fence post and left to die in sub-zero temperatures in 1998 near Laramie, Wyoming (entitled "Love and Hate in the Equality State" and published in the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner). Not being gay myself, but a woman who grew up in Wyoming during an era when conditions for women were not the best in any location in the U.S. (this was before the 1964 Civil Rights Act had a chance to settle in to prevent discrimination against anyone on the basis of sex, race or religion and before the 1972 passage of Roe v. Wade), I had a feel for the Matthew Shepherd story. And wrote it. But, in the process of writing that piece and developing the narrator Katherine in my book, I knew there was something more that I should be writing about Wyoming--a story that had been buried.

In the process of fleshing out the narrator Katherine, I began fleshing out myself as a birthmother and coming to terms with many things that I hadn't faced exactly. This is the story of the narrator Katherine. It is also the story of approximately 2.5 million women who gave their children up for adoption in the U.S. in the 1960s --"the unwed pregnant women."

This is not a typical birthmother finds daughter kind of book, the kind of story that tends to get printed in the media. Those sensational types of stories get old and I quit reading them many years ago. This story goes deeper and turns the characters into real people. I was able to do that because I wrote it as fiction. Similar to how an actress projects her voice on stage, these characters are actually able to use their voices.

The denial of a murder in a family and the denial of the problem of a pregnant teen link four generations of Wyoming women. The symbol of the Burning of the Marriage Hat relates to the cleaning up of unresolved issues and denial within the family.

This is a story about a middle-class family in a small prairie town in Wyoming and the coming of age of a young woman during the post-McCarthy era of the 1960s. It's the story of a woman who returns to her roots to release the ghosts of her past. Set in Wyoming, known as the "Equality State" because that's where women first gained the right to vote in the U.S. and also where I came of age on the cusp of the 1960s sexual revolution, the book is also about a place.

Burning of the Marriage Hat goes deep to the root of the land, the people and family, and the narrator's own sense of unresolved issues. See Book Info, What people are sayiing, Frequently Asked Questions, and Interviews.