I mean back in the olden days, when having a baby without being married was considered a disgrace?
There was a 15 year old girl in my neighborhood who went away to care for a “sick relative.” She came back six months later with a newborn baby, claiming the relative had died in childbirth, and her family was taking in the child. We all nodded our heads and did the wink*wink thing, pretty sure the 15 year old had had the child.
Did any of you older Dopers have an experience like that?
when i was a kid there was an older kid here and there whos male donor “died in vietnam” although there was never any trace of the father in the house … in certain parts of the country if someone like that showed up the kid was probably related to us somehow …
EDIT: I realized that my contribution was not really what the OP was after. Sorry.
A friend of mine, who’s about my age (so, born in the mid-1960s) was born in England, to English parents. My friend was born fairly shortly after his parents were married; his parents then had two more kids, as well.
About a decade ago, his parents finally revealed to him (and his siblings) that they had another, older sibling. My friend’s mother had gotten pregnant while she and her future husband (my friend’s father) were dating. They weren’t in a position to get married at that time, and she gave the child (a daughter) up for adoption.
In fact, the only reason that it was even revealed to the family at that point, ten years ago, was that the daughter had gone on a quest to find her birth mother, and had finally located my friend’s parents.
Small town Wi, in 1979 a (senior) classmate of mine got pregnant. Carried the child to term, attending class all the way. The father was there, too. Funny thing, no one seemed to care one bit. I can’t say if the girls talked behind her back, but I never heard anything, whispered or out loud.
They never got married. I think both still live there. Kid’s pushing 40 by now. Wonder what became of her.
Maybe we were on the front lines of the tolerance revolution, I don’t know.
Yeah, quite a few. In fact, my mother was one. And, although I didn’t know it at the time, a number of women my mother’s age, and even her mother’s age were single mothers. While I know there’s the stereotype of the family being ‘disgraced’ from such an atrocity, I never personally heard any such gossip. Usually there wasn’t much to gossip about. Everybody knew who the baby daddy was, and in general the grandparents still wanted to give the child the best opportunity possible.
Obviously I didn’t know them ‘back in the day’, but my grandmother’s cousin, so… first cousin twice removed(?) was born to a single mother, back in the '40s. She was adopted, by a family who then moved next door to my Great-grandparents, which is probably the only reason anyone talked about it, as Great Grandpa thought it was a good plan to tell his son that the girl next door was actually his cousin before they got too close.
In later years the family admitted the relationship more openly- from what my Great Uncle said, possibly because she looked so much like them that Great Grandpa admitting that his sister had a child out of wedlock was better than people thinking he had an affair with the neighbour… I’ve never heard anything else about what happened to her birth mother over it all though.
The child emigrated to New Zealand as an adult, but I met her on a visit to the UK a few years back, when she came to my Great Uncle’s 80th birthday. They’re the only two of that generation left now.
There were at least 3 girls in my early 60’s high school class who got pregnant and left school before graduation. Two of them were not really surprising, but the third was a “good girl” who was academically near the top of the class. The first two have been through multiple marriages, but the third is still married to the original father.
Stuff happens.
I certainly knew of “shotgun weddings,” including two girls who were classmates.
At my high school graduates there was a rumor that five graduates were pregnant, plus an underclassman (woman.)
There was a high school friend of mine who ended up with a child. I think the father was never in the picture.
It was after I graduated, so I didn’t know the details, but she raised her daughter on her own.
I just found this out on my last trip to the States last year, but when my mother’s aunt got married she and her new husband quickly moved to Las Vegas with her husband, where they discovered that she had a “honeymoon baby.” The baby was born nine month later, but for a long time the aunt was too sick before she was well enough to come back to Idaho to bring her baby.
Skip forward many years, and my mother’s cousin went to obtain a copy of his birth certificate so he could get a passport, only to be told that no records of this birth existed in the county he was born. Finally, he discovered that he was actually born several months earlier than what his mother had claimed.
He died very young, in his 40s, and his wife “outed” her mother-in-law by having his real birthday listed at his funeral, which the aunt took offense at.
My sister got pregnant in her teens in the late 70s, and she went to live with our aunt in another city. She gave up the baby for adoption. It was supposed to be a closed adoption, but on one of the papers she had to sign, the adopting family’s name was listed. She later tracked down the girl but has never contacted her, instead just following her on Facebook.
There was a girl who rode my school bus in middle school who had a baby. She was in my grade and the baby’s father (who also rode the bus with us) was in the next grade up. He was kind of a “bad boy”.
I don’t remember having any negative opinions about her, though. Could be I did at the time and I just don’t remember. I do remember that she impressed me as being pretty smart and “grown up”. I don’t know what happened to her.
There were a couple of other girls that I went to school with who ended up having babies while we were still in school.
My oldest sister wasn’t married when she had her first kid. She wasn’t a teen and her boyfriend wasn’t a neglectful layabout. But they didn’t have a lot of money. This would have been in the mid 90s, so I don’t know if this counts as “back in the day”. My parents weren’t thrilled but I don’t think they saw it as a “disgrace” (well, maybe a little). They got eventually got married. Their marriage lasted 23 years.
A high school friend of mine got pregnant and disappeared for a semester. Her baby was raised by her parents, as her baby brother.
I knew a girl had a kid in the 80’s when she was 14. She stayed in school: the nuns were supportive.
Going back further, before my time, there were a lot of single mothers in Aus and France and England in the 1920’s, and a fair number in the 1950’s. I wonder if the whole “unwed mother” thing was really a feature of 1960’s America, rather than “before”.
There was absolutely a tremendous stigma for being an unwed mother in Ireland, which was, of course, historically a very conservative (and devoutly Catholic) country. There were workhouses (the “Magdalene Laundries”) in which “fallen women” – including prostitutes, but also including women who had gotten pregnant out of wedlock – were effectively imprisoned. Some of the laundries operated well into the middle part of the 20th Century.
My Mothers older sister had a baby boy. She was never married. She raised the child with help from grandparents. He was the family bastard and not because of his birth issues. He was a hateful man, all in all.
(Would’ve been in the 50s)
Too late to edit:
This article in the Independent discusses homes for unwed mothers in England during the 1950s, and describes the social stigma that such mothers faced at that time. It describes young women who were disowned by their families, and pressured to give their babies up for adoption after they gave birth – though, to be fair, the article also notes that unmarried cohabitation was not uncommon in England in the 19th Century.
My dad’s oldest sister “had” to get married in the 40s, and many years later, my mom told me that my uncle was not my cousin’s father. I think that might explain why that aunt and her family lived so far from the rest of us. I expect my grandparents were none to thrilled with the situation.
My youngest sister got pregnant her senior year in high school (1982/83) and gave up her son for adoption because my parents made it clear that they would not raise the child, and my sister was too immature to do it herself. I’d considered adopting him, but I was in the Navy at the time, about to deploy to Sicily.
About 3 years ago, she finally met her son (and granddaughter) and shortly thereafter, the whole family met him and his adoptive parents. We’re all FB friends, tho I think my mom is still a bit embarrassed by it all, staunch Catholic that she is.
I mean, I was born in 1967 so ‘back in the day’ has its limits but a few.
A friend of my older sister was pregnant at 15 by another 15 year old. She had the baby and finished high school. Both sets of parents kept them from marrying while in high school. I don’t know if they ever did. This would have been about 1976 or so.
A friend of my mom in the mid-70s had a kid my age. Not only a single mother - if she was my mom’s age she would have been in her mid-to-late 20s when she had him - but he was biracial. Even in progressive Los Angeles that raised eyebrows at the time. I never though about it. I just knew he was kid my age with my same first - and rare at the time - name.
My now-deceased former Mother-in-Law. When we were cleaning out her home to help her move to a retirement community we found a letter from an adoption agency in LA telling her how the baby she’d given up had found a good home. A picture was included. She would have been about 33 or so in 1964 when she had the baby. It cost her a career - she was a nurse in the USAF and they booted her - and she had to do some quick job shifting to keep things together. Still, she did it.
So, three tales of unwed mothers in the 1960s and 1970s. Three women and three very different stories.
I don’t know what era you are considering “the olden days”. If 1978 qualifies then I was one of those single mothers. I got pregnant in the winter of my junior year. I was able to finish the school year. I’m not sure how many of the kids knew other than my friends that I told. No one ever said anything to me. My boyfriend had already graduated and was in community college. Our daughter was born at the end of September. So I could have gone back to regular school, but at that point, I didn’t feel like I fit in. I felt I didn’t have anything in common with the other kids. I had already grown up. There was a teen parent school in town that I attended for senior year. I finished up my credits in January. I was able to graduate with my regular high school class in the spring.
I had a very supportive family, although my dad was not happy in the beginning. That was probably the hardest part of the whole thing…telling my dad. But it didn’t take long for him to come around. His granddaughter was the apple of his eye and she loved her Papa. My daughter and I lived with my parents until I finished business school and got a job. My boyfriend lived with his mom until he finished school and got a job. We got married when our daughter was 3 and bought our first home. We’re still together 37 years later. Our daughter will be 41 (!!!:eek:) this fall. She has 4 kids of her own.
We survived it. But if it wasn’t for my wonderful family, it would have been really hard.