Unwed Pregnancy and Radial Rhetorics of Shame

Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh was a 16-year-old high school senior in 1965 when she became pregnant. As she shared with me in an email, she was taken out of school overnight and “whisked away” to a wage home in which she did chores and babysat children of strangers. In her seventh month of pregnancy, Wilson-Buterbaugh became a nonworking resident of a maternity home and then gave birth to a child that she would “surrender” for adoption. For a white woman, an unwed pregnancy was, in the time before, during, and even after the 1960s, a mark of incredible shame to be hidden