Becoming an Unwed Mother

A Sociological Account

Prudence Mors Rains

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138519268
• eBook ISBN: 9781351327787
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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 psychiatricallyoriented mater nity 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.

I


The Situation of Moral Jeopardy

1
Sexual Careers

It is most favorable for the sexual initiation if, without violence or surprise and without set procedure or calculated delay, the young girl slowly learns to overcome her modesty, to know her partner, and to enjoy his love-making .... The initiation is facilitated as it loses its tabooed aspect, as the girl feels more free with respect to her partner. . . .

Simone de Beauvoir

The Second Sex ( 1952 : 365-566)

Most of what has been written about unwed mothers has been concerned explicitly with cause, and implicitly with pathology—with the special features which distinguish unwed mothers from other girls. I have signaled my general intention to deal in this study with the consequences rather than the causes of illegitimate pregnancy. This chapter stands as a partial exception to that intention, however, for it presents a way of understanding the sources of illegitimate pregnancy which does not invoke notions of pathology. As an alternate way of dealing with the question of cause, the chapter is speculative; as a way of presenting the moral aspects of normal sexual careers, and as a way of locating the special concerns of girls who become pregnant, it is descriptive.

Because I have drawn on a variety of studies, it will be useful to preview the major points.

First, most girls in the course of their lives prior to marriage alter their moral standards and sexual behavior, generally becoming more permissive. This process can be viewed as an anticipation of marriage, as a coming to some terms with intimacy and sexuality.

Second, the central moral experience of premarital sexual careers is that of ambivalence and guilt which is imposed not so much by external norms, but by the experience of acting in ways which girls themselves have only recently regarded, and perhaps still regard, as unacceptable. Premarital sexual careers are, in this sense, experienced as deviant careers.

Third, the central problems of premarital sexual careers are the closely interwoven problems of self-respect and reputation. Girls must reconcile their behavior with a view of themselves as essentially respectable and, in order to do this, must maintain their reputation in the eyes of others as essentially nonpromiscuous.

Fourth, the conventions and common practices of dating and of premarital sexual activity can be viewed as social structures which allow girls to maintain a view of themselves as reasonably conventional, reasonably virtuous, and morally respectable persons while nevertheless participating in activity which exceeds their current moral standard. These conventions, by neutralizing internal disapproval, allow such participation. One of these conventions, having to do with contraceptive use, is relevant to the issue of illegitimate pregnancy.

The fifth point, therefore, is that illegitimate pregnancy, particularly among middle-class girls, can be understood as a product of reputational concerns which all girls share and not the product of any particular deviant motivations among those who become pregnant.

My intent in the following elaboration of these points is to provide a description of what is, for those girls who become pregnant and go on to have an illegitimate child, the first phase of their moral careers as unwed mothers.

Premarital Sexual Careers

Moral discussion of premarital sexual experience typically polarizes around the issue of sexual intercourse, treating this issue as the prime moral question facing unmarried girls and as the source of most of the moral uncertainty girls experience in the course of their premarital sexual careers. Moral recommendations, whether made by liberal or conservative critics of the current sexual scene, are addressed to this particular source of uncertainty. Too exclusive a focus on sexual intercourse, however, obscures the extent to which all girls share similar moral experiences in coming to terms with intimacy and sexuality regardless of the modesty or permissiveness of their moral standards or sexual behavior.

On the one hand, champions of premarital sexual freedom, believing that the sexual revolution has occurred or ought to, tend to overlook the difficulties and ambivalence currently experienced by girls in arriving at a liberated view of their own sexuality. For while some girls in this society may grow up in circumstances which favor an open avowal of sexual freedom, most do not.

Current adult opinion opposes premarital sexual intercourse; even student opinion, which is more permissive, does not favor it. Ira Reiss, who has undertaken the most recent national sample survey on the subject, reports 86 per cent of the adults surveyed held a standard for young people which excludes intercourse even for engaged couples. For a sample of high school and college students he reports 68 per cent of the females and 55 per cent of the males as holding a similarly restricted standard. (Reiss, 1967 : 26-27)

A girl who does participate in full sexual relations before she marries does so surrounded by what is, at best, unsupportive opinion which must be handled if she is to feel at ease with her behavior. While many girls do manage to come to an open and unconflicted acceptance of premarital sexual intercourse, most are not likely to have begun their dating careers with this view and will have experienced uncertainty in reaching this view.

Even an open and genuine acceptance of premarital sexual intercourse does not eliminate all sources of moral conflict in premarital sexual relations; such a position simply opens a new set of moral issues—for example, the exclusiveness of one's sexual relationships.

On the other hand, maintenance of high moral standards does not eliminate moral conflict or bypass problems of respectability, although this is implied in the recommendations of spokesmen for a more conventional morality. Even mild forms of sexual activity raise problems of respectability and reputation; the risk of seeming loose, fast, promiscuous is present even in such innocuous matters as appropriate dress and demeanor, and is made particularly salient by the ambiguity of norms for activities falling short of sexual intercourse. A girl who never accepts sexual intercourse for herself must nevertheless concern herself not simply with the moral matter of being respectable, but with the practical matter of seeming respectable¹—fitting even quite acceptable behavior to a sense of right occasion and potential reputational consequence.

Partisans of a strict moral standard also tend to overlook the extent to which even the most modest girl will experience some necessity to alter the moral standards of her early youth and, in making this transition, will experience some uncertainty about what specifically constitutes a high moral standard.

Ira Reiss observes that most (85 per cent) of the girls in his sample began their sexual careers with a standard which allowed kissing only, but that by the time they were twenty-one, nine out of ten of these girls accepted either petting ( 65 per cent) or sexual intercourse (25 per cent). Most girls in his sample experienced at least two shifts toward a more permissive standard during their premarital sexual careers. Reiss observes further that 87 per cent of the girls in his sample had at one time felt guilty about sexual behavior they later came to accept (Reiss, 1967 : 106-21).

While girls may experience such specific issues as sexual intercourse as moral problems, the previous evidence suggests that, in a larger and more structural sense, all girls share one moral experience regardless of the modesty or permissiveness of their standards and behavior.

The central figure of premarital sexual careers is the experience of coming to view as acceptable what was previously viewed as unacceptable, of acting in ways which are not yet acceptable to oneself but which will come to be acceptable. Premarital sexual careers, involving changes of this kind, are a kind of deviant career—not so much in the sense that cultural standards are violated, but in the sense that the participants find themselves violating their own standards and therefore put themselves in the position of having to agree with potential criticism. That is, most girls, regardless of the standard they hold upon marriage, will have experienced some guilt, some sense of moral vulnerability by virtue of acting in ways which they themselves have only recently regarded, or perhaps still regard, as unacceptable. At a number of points in their premarital sexual careers, most girls are likely to feel susceptible to criticism should their behavior be singled out for question or comment. It is in this sense that the link between reputation and self-respect is particularly close in periods of transition between standards, for it is at these times that a girl will feel least certain of the Tightness of her behavior and be most vulnerable to others' definitions of the kind of person she is.

Because of the privacy and circumspection which surrounds premarital sexual exploration, relatively few girls experience the kind of direct confrontation with full public knowledge and comment on their behavior that is experienced, for example, by girls who become pregnant. The genuine shock which these girls report upon finding themselves pregnant suggests in fact that many girls not only manage to avoid a direct confrontation with the opinions of others but also manage to evade a confrontation with their own ambivalence. That is, most girls are able to sustain a view of themselves as essentially respectable while nevertheless acting in ways which they themselves regard as nonideal and morally dubious.

Researchers into other areas of deviant activity, activity which strikes us as a good deal more deviant than premarital sexual exploration, have pointed to the ways in which persons are able to evade a deviant self-conception. Albert Reiss ( 1961 ), for example, discusses the ways in which young male homosexual prostitutes structure their homosexual activity so as to define themselves as casual entrepreneurs rather than as homosexuals or prostitutes. The definition of self as essentially conventional structures unconventional activity.

David Matza and Gresham Sykes (Sykes and Matza, 1957; Matza, 1964), in their reflections on juvenile delinquency, suggest that an important factor in facilitating this sort of uncommitted deviance is in fact the availability of some set of justifications or qualifications which serve to neutralize internal disapproval in advance of the act. They provide a lengthy analysis of the ways in which delinquents justify, excuse, mitigate their acts, drawing their justifications from the very legal code they violate. Matza and Sykes are careful to stress that this legalistic talk is not mere rationalization after the fact; it is rather a way of neutralizing internal disapproval before the fact, and therefore a kind of limit on possible acts. Techniques of neutralization both allow and structure participation in unconventional activity by persons who regard themselves as conventional.

Applying this framework to premarital sexual careers, the conventions of dating and of premarital sexual exploration can be viewed as social structures which allow girls to sustain a view of themselves as reasonably conventional and essentially virtuous. These conventions, shaped to the requirements of reputation-maintenance, serve to neutralize the internal disapproval a girl may feel in anticipation of nonideal conduct, thereby supporting one of several possible definitions of the girl and her situation.

The conventions used here as examples include the condition of love, the dating pattern of serial monogamy, the arrangement of sexual participation in qualitative stages over time, the maintenance of technical virginity, and the structured use or nonuse of contraceptive methods. Not all girls will pattern their sexual participation in these ways; obviously some of these conventions characterize some stages of sexual participation and not others. Those girls who do pattern their sexual participation in these ways, however, will be more likely to maintain their reputations as essentially nonpromiscuous in their own and others' eyes. For these conventions preserve the reluctant stance toward sexual expression expected of unmarried girls in this culture.

The Condition of Love

The major technique of neutralization is love, and its conventional source is marriage. That is, love is the condition which justifies and allows participation in what has previously been viewed as unacceptable sexual activity— whether kissing or sexual intercourse. The notion that love legitimates sexual expression derives from the view that sexual relations are the major way in which husbands and wives express their love for each other.

There is a great deal of evidence that for girls there is a strong relationship between being in love and shifts toward more permissive behavior and more permissive standards. Ehrmann ( 1960 : 337 ) feels this to be the most significant finding of his study of premarital dating behavior. Ira Reiss observes, for his sample, that only 40 per cent of the girls whose standard included only kissing had been in love, while 60 per cent of those who accepted petting and 78 per cent of those who accepted intercourse had been in love (Reiss, 1967: 114).

It is possible to view this link between love and sexual expression as natural, at least natural to women. However, it is also useful to see that the requirement of love serves reputational purposes. That is, there are a number of ways in which the requirement of love as a justification for sexual expression protects girls from imputations regarding character.

First, a girl's reputation probably depends not so much on her own standard as it does on the relationship between her standard and the standard expected of her by the boys she dates. It is not unlikely that she will date boys who hold a more restrictive standard for her than she may hold for herself. It is also likely that she will not necessarily and initially be able to infer a boy's standard from his behavior. Conditioning sexual expression on love has the important consequence of giving a girl time to assess the boy and his standards for judging her.

Love is a mutual relationship involving mutual concern. The requirement of love for any sexual activity therefore has the second consequence of allowing the girl to have more control, in a more pleasant manner, over how sexual activity advances than she might otherwise have. The accusation of sexual teasing is more likely to be applied to a girl who will participate in sexual activity up to a point with a casual acquaintance than to a girl who acts the same way with a boy she loves and who loves her.

Third, the requirement of a love relationship tends to insure secrecy about the specific nature and extent of sexual activity, mirroring the kind of privacy which bounds marriage. As the relationship deepens and sexual intima...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• title
• copy
• ack
• Introduction
• Part One: The Situation of Moral Jeopardy
• Part Two: The Process of Moral Reinstatement
• Part Three: Accommodations to Illegitimacy
• Appendix: Methods
• Bibliography
• Index