Becoming an Unwed Mother: A Sociological Account

Most unmarried women who engage in sexual intercourse do not become unwed mothers; they use contraceptives, secure an abortion, or get married before the baby is born. What happens to the minority of women who bear illegitimate children? This book is the first study to describe in detail the actual situation of unwed motherhood, as opposed to the causes and pathology of deviance. Based largely on observation of middle-class white girls in a psychiatrically oriented maternity home and lower-class black teenagers in a day school for unwed mothers, the study focuses on the unwed mother’s moral career as it is shaped by social agencies. The author shows how these agencies operate to reconstruct a mother’s vision of herself as a good girl, restoring her from deviance to the status of an innocent who made a mistake thereby leaving her vulnerable to a repetition of that mistake. The topic is expanded to include general questions of sociological importance. The author’s clear, jargon free prose makes the book especially attractive to social workers, clinical and school psychologists, community and public health workers, and teachers and students of the sociology of deviance.