Eighteen-year-old Chris and his girlfriend Helen struggle to cope with two shocks that change their relationship and their plans for the future; the discovery that Helen is pregnant and the reappearance of Chris's mother who left the family when he was ten.

In 1956 the worst thing a teenage girl could do was to become pregnant. Joanna, Prissy, Jessie, and Mary become lifelong friends when they are incarcerated in the Frances Weston Home for Unwedmothers in Knoxville, Tennessee. Together they endure the culture of shame and soul crushing tactics dispensed by the Catholic Nuns who coerce the teenagers into relinquishing their illegitimate babies. The four young womens' vow of friendship bonds them as they...

France in the 1950s. Set in a provincial town called Chateauroux. Rachel and Pierre, although from different social backgrounds, fall in love.

"The baby abandoned on the doorstep is a phenomenon that has virtually disappeared from our experience, but in the early modern world, unwanted children were a very real problem for parents, government officials, and society. The Unwanted Child recreates sixteenth-century Nuremberg to explore what befell abandoned, neglected, abused, or delinquent children in this critical period." "Joel F. Harrington tackles this question by focusing on the stories...