Wade 4 Discovery and Shame I called my folks from college in Madison to tell them I was pregnant and my dad said, “Don’t come home.” And my mom would not buck my dad. At the time, my dad was a sheriff. He would be up for reelection and he did not want a daughter like me around. It was fine while I was class valedictorian and the shining star, but not while I was pregnant, no. —Glory FOR SINGLE GIRLS who became pregnant during these decades, the most common solution was a hasty trip to the altar and the claim that the baby’s birth was premature. One reason that the high number of pregnancies wasn’t socially acknowledged was that so many premarital conceptions were effectively covered up through marriage. On average, 50 percent of these young women were married before the baby was born, leaving only half to be recorded as illegitimate births.1 Since the average age of marriage had dropped after the war, it was not at all unusual for young people to get married in their late teens or very early twenties.
