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During the first half of the twentieth century, out-of-wedlock
pregnancy came to be seen as one of the most urgent and compelling
problems of the day. The effort to define its meaning fueled a
struggle among three groups of women: evangelical reformers who
regarded unmarried mothers as fallen sisters to be saved, a new
generation of social workers who viewed them as problem girls to be
treated, and unmarried mothers themselves. Drawing on previously
unexamined case records from maternity homes, Regina Kunzel
explores how women negotiated the crisis of single pregnancy and
analyzes the different ways they understood and represented
unmarried motherhood. Fallen Women, Problem Girls is a social and
cultural history of out-of-wedlock pregnancy in the United States
from 1890 to 1945. Kunzel analyzes how evangelical women drew on a
long tradition of female benevolence to create maternity homes that
would redeem and reclaim unmarried mothers. She shows how, by the
1910s, social workers struggling to achieve professional legitimacy
tried to dissociate their own work from that earlier tradition,
replacing the reform rhetoric of sisterhood with the scientific
language of professionalism. By analyzing the important and
unexplored transition from the conventions of nineteenth-century
reform to the professional imperatives of twentieth-century social
welfare, Kunzel offers a new interpretation of gender and
professionalization. Kunzel places shifting constructions of
out-of-wedlock pregnancy within a broad history of gender,
sexuality, class, and race, and argues that the contests among
evangelical women, social workers, and unmarried mothers distilled
larger generational and cross-class conflicts among women in the
first half of the twentieth century.
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