- Author: Kunzel, Regina G.
- Title: Fallen Women, Problem Girls - Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945
- Language: English
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication Date: August 30, 1995
■ About the Book 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.
■ About the Author Regina Kunzel, Larned Professor of History and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, is an historian of the modern United States with interests in histories of gender and sexuality, queer history, the history of psychiatry, and the history of incarceration. Kunzel’s most recent book, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (University of Chicago, 2024), explores the encounter of queer and gender-variant people with psychiatry in the 20-century US. Kunzel’s book Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2008), was awarded the American Historical Association’s John Boswell Prize, the Modern Language Association’s Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality’s Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Award, and was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize. Kunzel is also the author of Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945 (Yale University Press, 1993). Kunzel received her BA from Stanford University and PhD from Yale. She previously taught at Williams College, the University of Minnesota, and Princeton University. Kunzel has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Social Science Research Council, and is an elected member of the Society of American Historians. |
