Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945. – book reviews

Despite the rich collection of current literature addressing the role of women in shaping social welfare policy in the United States, Regina G. Kunzel breaks new ground in her history of maternity homes for unmarried mothers from 1890 to 1945. She deftly demonstrates the centrality of gender to the culture of professionalization, the public discussion of sexuality and the development of welfare policy. Based chiefly on institutional records, professional journals and casework files, this intelligent narrative also details the gender conflict among evangelical women, social workers and unmarried mothers as each group sought to realize distinctly different goals.

In the late 19th century, white middle-class evangelical women created a network of maternity homes under the auspices of the Florence Crittenton Mission, the Salvation Army and various religious denominations. Evangelical women encouraged mothers to keep their babies, often placing new mothers as domestic servants in middle-class homes. In melodramatic terms, evangelicals viewed unmarried mothers as passive victims of evil men and emphasized womanly sympathy and religious training as redemptive tools, while at the same time translating “feminine” virtues into social policy and staking their own claims to public work and space. The script of seduction and abandonment of good girls by male villains also allowed evangelical women to confront both the sexual vulnerability of women in the new urban society as well as the disturbing sexual mores of the working-class women under their care.

Beginning in the 1910s, the emerging profession of social work fiercely challenged the gendered rhetoric of sympathy, sisterhood and sentiment voiced by evangelical women. Women social workers turned from the older tradition of female reform to the legitimizing rhetoric of science and the esoteric language of “casework” in an attempt to advance their professional status. Creating new scripts to explain out-of-wedlock pregnancy, they characterized unmarried mothers first as “feebleminded” and later as “sex delinquents.” Thus, like the evangelical women they displaced, social workers also created definitions of unwed mothers that allowed them to confront a working-class female sexuality increasingly incomprehensible to middle-class observers. Social workers subjected unwed mothers to a battery of tests and interviews, maintained a “scientific” emotional distance from their charges, and invented elaborate diagnostic schemes to justify their claims to professional legitimacy. But in the process of establishing their scientific expertise through denunciation of old fashioned female benevolence, women social workers joined their male colleagues in posing professionalism and femininity as mutually exclusive. Ironically, the new female professionals participated in the process of gendering professionalism in a way that equated professionalism with masculinity.

Meanwhile, unmarried mothers employed strategies to ensure their own ends within the maternity home regime. Although there is clear evidence of mutual respect between many mothers and maternity home workers, many other unwed mothers experienced their confinement as incarceration. Before single mothers gained more leverage in the 1940s, due to increased opportunities for women workers, maternity homes habitually censored mail, proscribed rigid standards of dress and conduct, and allowed women to leave the home only if properly chaperoned. Kunzel describes the complexities of the unwed mothers’ resistance and accommodation to demands that they conform to middle-class codes of respectability and morality. Case records show unmarried mothers creating their own narratives designed to improve their chances to obtain the help they needed. Tales abound of pregnancies caused by drugs, drink and knock-out drops, or by rape and incest. Their self-representations ranged from experiences of sexual coercion to bold claims of sexual agency. Relying on each other as allies and instructors, unwed mothers constructed their own identities rather them assume those constructed for them, even though they were not recognized as reliable narrators or legitimate authorities of their own experience.

The emergence of the Children’s Bureau in 1912 and the growth of Community Chest financing of maternity homes greatly increased the power of social workers to influence maternity home policy once controlled by evangelical women. Holding budgets as bargaining chips, especially during the depression years, Chests required maternity homes to cooperate with local casework agencies or hire their own social worker. As social workers became more dominant, maternity home policies shifted to de-emphasize religion and to require shorter stays. Privileging the interests of the child over those of the mother, social workers, who had earlier pathologized unwed mothers as unfit, pressured unmarried mothers to place their babies for adoption and worked closely with adoption agencies. Critical of crude arguments based on social control, Kunzel again focuses on the contested and incomplete nature of the transfer of power from evangelicals to social workers. She also emphasizes how social workers continually questioned their own scientific claim to objectivity – a failing that would have been abundantly evident to their clients. While evangelicals and social workers struggled for control of maternity homes, unmarried mothers continued to determine for themselves their own best interests.