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. Prudence Mors Rains is
retired Professor of Sociology at McGill University, Montreal. She
graduated from Lake Forest College and received her M.A. and Ph.D.
degrees from Northwestern University. She has been a recipient of a
National Science Foundation dissertation research grant. Her
professional interests lie in the areas of deviance and social
control in regards to woman and youth as well as qualitative
methods, specifically ethnography.
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