- Author: Feder, Elizabeth
- Title: The elite of the fallen - The origins of a social policy for unwed mothers, 1880-1930
- Language: English
- Type: PhD Thesis
- Publication Year: 1991
- Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University, Philosophy
■ Abstract This study analyzes cultural definitions of the unwed mother in the United States and the process by which emerging conceptions were incorporated into a social policy of supervision. To both evangelical charity workers and social workers, the unwed mother was never simply a woman who had given birth outside of legal wedlock; the meaning of her experience was culturally constructed so that she became the symbolic repository for a discussion of the proper ordering of society. By describing the methods by which various parties drew distinctions between legitimacy and illegitimacy, normal and deviant, this work illuminates the production and uses of social dualities.
Both the language of evangelical domesticity and social workers' arguments in behalf of the public good led to policies governing maternity outside wedlock that reinforced the "naturalness" of motherhood and the existing social and economic arrangements of the family. Shifting public debate away from mothers' needs toward children's rights and public health enabled social workers to extend their professional authority to the "illegitimate family" and facilitated passage of laws in the 1910s and 1920s that united the state's power of enforcement with practices forged in the evangelical maternity home. Policies such as mandatory breast feeding, public guardianship of illegitimate children, and court enforced paternal accountability all expressed humanitarian and liberalizing aims while simultaneously extending social regulation. They represent early examples of the modern disciplinary state.
The study also considers the unwed mothers' experiences and actions in their own behalf. Maternity home case records challenge the stereotypes of these young women from which public policy was created, highlighting their partial and expedient nature.
The study indicates that the modern American welfare system was not simply the result of the usurping of an old system of alliances by a new one. Social policy represented the outcome of negotiations between evangelicals, social workers, and the unwed mothers themselves. In tracing the transition from evangelical charity work to professional social work, private to public welfare, and religious to secular conceptions of reform, this study demonstrates that important vestiges of older patterns persisted.
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