Believe it or not, this is really how it was. It was considered in bad taste to parade around pregnant in front of a class of schoolchildren.
That rationalization is as (il)logical as the other one; I’ve heard it for Spain at a time and in locations where the majority of women worked outside the house (in factories, as servants) after their marriage. Apparently it was unacceptable for the cook to be unmarried (often the husband would be part of the same household’s service), and for teachers to be married unless it was to the Lord (nuns). Pointing this out always results in lots of ahemming and eyecrossing. They’re not reasons, they’re rationalizations for prejudices with no real logic to them.
My mother in law has told me that my husband’s father “married” her in what turned out to be a fake ceremony, and after she mentioned being married to his commanding officer at a cocktail party, found out her new husband had a wife and family back home. By this time my MIL was already pregnant with my husband; my MIL’s “husband” was transferred to another post and she never saw him again.
Pretty common situation, unfortunately. My MIL, sadly, did not learn to question her boyfriends closely about their background. The next guy she met and got pregnant with turned out to be a career rapist, who was caught and incarcerated while MIL was left with the two kids she had with him. She never had a clue until she was subpoenaed during the rape trial.
In my own family, I learned the day my mom died that I have another aunt and likely cousins out there somewhere. We’d always known that my grandmother was married before she met Grandpa, and that my Mom’s oldest sister was from that marriage. What I didn’t know was that Grandma had another daughter from that first marriage, who was raised by one of my Grandma’s sisters. Furthermore, my grandparents didn’t marry until sometime around 1948, IIRC. By that time they had three adult children together - beyond shocking in those days. Hell, they had grandchildren by the time they got married. I guess Grandma’s first husband passed away so they could legally marry. Bizarro, especially for my very upright Yankee grandparents.
I just remembered another one and it’s really bad. In the 90’s I worked with a guy named Don Collier III. I never cared for him much. He was kind of squirrelly, not a very good engineer and, worst of all, sold Amway. The Amway wasn’t even the worst part as you shall soon see.
I ran into him maybe three years ago and we chatted for a bit. He had two or three young kids, all under six years old.
Last year he made the news. He was arrested in an international sweep of child pornographers. He not only possessed child porn. He traveled to Europe to help make and distribute it. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Read more here (pdf) if you can stomach it.
That’s how I found out that my grandfather was one. He died, we went up for the funeral, we were in the funeral home for the visitation, and at one point my dad said, “The Masons are going to come in now.”
I didn’t think anything of it, because there were some friends of the family named the Masons. But no, in trooped a bunch of old men in unusual suits who did a little ritual that involved cedar branches and a lot of gestures. (I don’t really remember the details.) It was all over pretty fast, and that’s how I found out that Grandpa was a Freemason.
I suppose it’s no big deal – his kids obviously knew, and it’s not like it’s some sort of deep dark secret or something that affected anyone but him.
The only other thing I can think of is how strange it was to find out that Dad had been married before my mom, which he told me when I was around 14 or so. There were no children and they were only married for a short time, but still.
I know of a woman whose brother came out and he caught absolute hell for it – thrown out of the house, lived on the streets, the whole nine yards. She’s also gay (I swear there’s a correlation between being evil homophobic assholes and having all your kids be queer), and she’s legally married to a woman – and she still hasn’t told her parents yet. They do Christmas and everything, all the while claiming to be just roommates.
With what he went through, her brother doesn’t blame them.
(At this point, I imagine it’s one of those tacit secrets that’s obvious to everyone but nobody discusses because they don’t want to deal with it – but it’s not my family, and for all I know the parents really are that wilfully blind. It wouldn’t be out of character; they’re not exactly Mr. and Mrs. Mental Health.)