Product Description

This book is a social and cultural history of out-of-wedlock pregnancy in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Regina Kunzel focuses on 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 the unmarried mothers themselves-and she shows that the struggle among these groups illuminates important issues in the interplay of gender, benevolence, and professionalization during this era.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #440704 in Books
• Published on: 1995-08-30
• Released on: 2009-09-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 276 pages

Customer Reviews

Touchy topic
Summarizing Regina Kunzel's thesis in "Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945" is not an easy proposition due to the complexity of her arguments. In fact, the title of the book only describes part of the story. The author traces the importance of three female elements within the confines of institutions devoted to caring for out of wedlock mothers. The first element describes the importance of the Protestant women--Kunzel calls them evangelicals--who founded and managed a chain of homes for unmarried women in the late nineteenth century. A second element, the social workers, begins to enter the picture in a big way after the turn of the century. Finally, Kunzel studies the actions of the mothers living within these homes. Relying on a variety of sources--including letters, case files, professional journals, and the records from the various homes--the author finds that facilities for unmarried women helped shape the identities of all three groups in important ways. She goes even further by claiming that homes for unmarried mothers served as a nexus for gender, race, and class issues prevalent in the wider society.

Kunzel starts her book with an examination of the evangelical women involved in the Salvation Army and the Florence Crittenton Mission, two of the largest Protestant organized shelters for out of wedlock mothers. The women behind these first efforts to help single mothers practiced a form of "benevolent" care that "promoted sisterly bonds across lines of class and reputation, and promised to redeem "fallen women" through domesticity, religion, and womanly sympathy" (35). These female workers relied on a theory of "seducement and abandonment," which almost always placed the blame for illegitimacy on men, to raise funds and to explain away behavior that society universally condemned. Protestant women believed that keeping the mother and the child together would achieve the purpose of building families, an idea of central importance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Social workers, most of whom were women trained in professional schools, made serious inroads into the Protestant homes after the turn of the century. Kunzel argues that these new professionals approached unmarried mothers with a cool objectivity that directly opposed the emotionally based care practiced by the evangelicals. Scientific methodologies bolstered by the collection of quantifiable data formed the core of the new gospel preached by the social workers, and the history of professional social work inside evangelical homes is in part a history of conflict between these two groups of women. Seducement and abandonment as causes of illegitimacy went by the wayside, replaced with questionable psychiatric theories that on the one hand labeled lower class women "feebleminded" and "sexual delinquents" while calling middle class white single mothers "neurotic." In other words, social workers not only placed the onus for illegitimacy on the women, but also made class distinctions in diagnosing causes of out of wedlock births. By giving themselves over completely to professionalism, these women hoped to develop a new gender identity that de-emphasized the societal view that reform work was largely work suited to females.

Kunzel does an exceptional job examining how mothers in the homes responded to the efforts of both the evangelical reformers and the social workers. The author contends that acts of rebelliousness against house rules, escape attempts from the institutions, and a tendency to lie to social workers about the specifics of their conditions all constitute an attempt on the part of these women to make an unwanted pregnancy meaningful to their own lives. That society refused to listen to or take these stories seriously, argues Kunzel, is beside the point. What is important is that unmarried mothers were not passive elements within these homes.

The efforts of social workers to change the methods of treatment in the homes for mothers mirrored what professionals were trying to do in orphanages at roughly the same time. In Chicago, for instance, orphanages discovered that funding organizations like the Community Fund never hesitated to use the disbursement of money as leverage to bring about policy changes favorable to professional social workers. Kunzel describes a similar process in her book, but this time it was something called Community Chests. These organizations sought to take control of privately organized reform houses, and they faced tough challenges from the Protestant women running the institutions. Despite the hostilities engendered by this interference, both orphanages and homes for unmarried women accepted some changes in their overall methods, even going so far as to hire social workers to take part in rehabilitation as long as the professionals allowed the Protestants in charge to retain ultimate control.

One question that comes to mind after reading Regina Kunzel's study involves other religious reform homes. What exactly happened in institutions founded by other religious faiths, namely ones run by Catholics? Since it is impossible to imagine that Catholic women never gave birth to illegitimate children, where did they go for assistance? Moreover, a home for Catholic out of wedlock mothers would probably have nuns serving in the roles evangelical women played in Protestant institutions. A whole host of questions arises. Did the Church finance Catholic institutions and exert control over them or did the managers raise funds at the local level? What did the nuns running the homes do that was different than the Protestants? Were there similarities? Did social workers make headway into Catholic homes for unmarried women? If so, did professionals seek the same goals that Kunzel documents in her book? These intriguing questions are worth investigating if the records exist and are open to researchers. Despite the limited scope of the book, Kunzel's solid research goes a long way in explaining how social workers managed to bring yet another reform movement into their orbit.