Out of Wedlock Pregnancies: Attributes Influencing Time of Initial Contact With the Adoption Agency in a Study of Eighty Women Known to the Spence-Chapin Adoption Service, New York, 1962-1964
Abstract
Background of Study. Often the public ignores and distorts something about which they are ashamed in order to exonerate themselves. The public has done this to the woman who has had sexual relations outside of marriage and becomes pregnant, as it is she who has been unrealistically placed in a negatively labeled group which has by and large been both distorted and ignored. Sociologist, Wyatt Jones refers to this stereotyping as historical generalizations and says that beginning about the turn of the century there were, first, a series of morality studies that pictured the unmarried mother as a fallen woman, lacking in religious restraints and decorum. Following the First World War there were many psychometric studies, all of which showed the typical unmarried mother to be a mental defective. These studies were paralleled, and in the thirties later combined with sociological studies that depicted the unmarried mother as a product of bad environment, slums, poverty and economic instability. The unmarried mother of this period was often thought of as an unemployed immigrant girl. Shortly before 1940 the psychiatrists took over, and for ten years viewed illegitimate pregnancy as acting out behavior with a basis in incest phantasies, unresolved oedipal relationships, and confused sexual identifications. By 1950, writers acknowledged once again the social factors involved and recognized that chance too played a part in a woman becoming pregnant out of wedlock. There seems to be a growing awareness beginning in the Fifties that the problem of unmarried motherhood must be studied from a broad perspective not only to see what the present factors involved are, but to move from here toward discovering new knowledge concerning the problem and ways of handling it. Probably the most recent work has been done by Clark Vincent whose general conclusion is, "Unwed motherhood is not the result of any one personality type, infra-familial 2 relationship, or social situation."
Subject Area
Womens studies|Social work
Recommended Citation
Ware, Joan, "Out of Wedlock Pregnancies: Attributes Influencing Time of Initial Contact With the Adoption Agency in a Study of Eighty Women Known to the Spence-Chapin Adoption Service, New York, 1962-1964" (1965). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI30308723.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI30308723
