The “Problem” of Teen Pregnancy and the Welfare Mother: The 1960s and 1970s

The problem of the unwed teenage mother and of unwanted teenage pregnancies have been perennial problems in sexuality education, and it is no exaggeration to say that these related “problems” called the field of sexuality education into existence, for it would have no life and history without them. As perennial problems, they have been articulated across a broad spectrum of social classes and racial and ethnic groups. But it is also true that poor black and Latina, teenage, welfare mothers have been made to represent the crisis of teenage pregnancy in its extreme, and that they, more than white, middle-class, pregnant teens, for example, have been defined as a problem population-a population whose sexuality is to be explained as the effect of a dysfunctional family structure and a vicious cycle of poverty and welfare dependency. When this new interest in the welfare mother and her sexuality began to surface in the mid-1960s, it was cloaked in a language that was ostensibly liberal, that offered help for those stuck in the vicious cycle of poverty and welfare dependency. But, as its critics were quick to point out, it blamed the victim and made them-both individually and as members of racial minority communities-responsible for healing themselves by developing “normal,” white, middle-class sexual mores, tied to two-parent family structures and normative gender roles. That would supposedly solve the problem of unwanted pregnancies and the problem of welfare dependency at the same time. The “problem” of the adolescent welfare mother, and the larger “Negro problem” were linked in these ways in federal policy for the first time in the Johnson administration, and they found expression in particular in the 1965 Moynihan Report, released by the U.S. Department of Labor as The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.1 The report located the source of the problem of poverty in the Negro family, which had been broken up during and after slavery. The rise in the number of welfare-dependent, single, black mothers that the report decried was only a sign of a larger problem that

was holding “Negro society” back. “At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family,” the report began. This in turn was producing a “weakness” in the Negro community, since the family was so important in “shaping character.” The problem, according to the report, was more specific than the Negro family-it was the lower-class, lower-socioeconomic, Negro family that was the problem. The middle-class Negro family was emulating its white counterpart, which “had achieved a high degree of stability and is maintaining that stability.”2 Interestingly, the white middle-class family that was experiencing high divorce rates is still the model of the stable family, the family that shapes the “character and ability” of young people in ways that lead to high levels of achievement and success in school and life. By contrast, the family structure of the “lower class Negro is highly unstable, and in many urban areas is approaching complete breakdown.” One of the results was that a quarter of all “Negro births are now illegitimate.” Just as bad, “almost one-fourth of Negro families are headed by females.” Note as well that while Moynihan goes out of his way to point out that the problem is with “lower-class Negroes,” the statistics are for Negroes as a whole versus whites as a whole. Differences are recognized in the black community only to have those differences ignored and erased through an analysis that focuses on race. The problem is reduced to one-dimensional racial analysis of differences between “stable,” white families and “unstable,” black families. Finally, this “Negro problem,” situated in the instability of the Negro family, is shown to have a direct state cost in “a startling increase in Welfare dependency.”3 The contradiction of such a conclusion is that the Johnson administration had overseen a massive extension of the federal welfare program through Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and was in this sense actively involved in promoting welfare dependency. But now that welfare costs were no longer so affordable, what with a war to fight in Vietnam, the report announced that a long history of Negro dependency upon the support of whites needed to come to an end, that Negroes had to become self-supporting, and that required rebuilding strong, patriarchal families that supported achievement and economic advancement. The Negro problem is thus to be solved through new means, with more and more responsibility shifted to Negroes to solve the problem for themselves rather than having to continue to rely on others to support them. Perhaps it should not surprise us now that social scientists and political leaders and

other supporters of the Moynihan Report were surprised by the intensity of the reaction from the black community when the report was issued. Moynihan and his associates spoke from the unquestioned perspective of a white, cultural elite, and part of that perspective was imagining that they were actually representing an objective, neutral, sociological analysis of the “problem.” When African Americans spoke and wrote and researched about “the Negro problem,” they presumably did so from a biased standpoint and thus what they had to say had to be understood and appreciated for what it was-their perspective. But when social scientists and political leaders, who just happened to be white, spoke and wrote and researched the “problem,” they presumably did so from the perspective of reason and science

alone, and, thus, what they had to say could be trusted. They certainly could not be accused of being racist. Quite the contrary, they maintained. They took an enlightened, social-science perspective on race in America, one that acknowledged the crippling effects of slavery and then the Jim Crow era in the South, as well as the crushing impact of generational poverty, on the “problem” the nation faced. How could “Negroes” have any problem with that? In fact, one of the key attributes of the culture of whiteness in the 1950s and 1960s was this pervasive positioning of social-science analysis by white, middle-class males as objective and unbiased. Black Americans, as the object of this white research and policy gaze, could see it for what it was-a discourse that legitimated the continuation of racial inequality in the U.S. by “blaming the victim,” as one of the report’s major critics within the social-science community-William Ryan-so aptly labeled it.4 The deficit theory of poverty and racial inequality had been woven together into a unifying narrative that explained why people were poor, why they tended to stay poor, and why African Americans in particular tended to be characterized by a pathological “culture of poverty.” A subtle but nonetheless significant shift had occurred in the way the civil-rights struggle was being framed. Whereas it once had been a battle for equality before the law, now it was to become a battle to normalize the Negro family, certainly with the support of some African Americans who held positions of power. When President Johnson went to Howard University, a historically black institution serving an African American elite, on June 4, 1965, to introduce the overall argument of the Moynihan Report and to announce an upcoming White House conference of social scientists, political leaders, and “outstanding Negro leaders” to address the problem of the Negro family, he got polite applause, but not the reception he expected. Later that fall, when the conference was held, it was a site of intense conflict among invited civil-rights leaders and administration officials. We can almost mark the date of a shift in thinking and speaking that occurred

within the black community in the U.S. and among civil-rights leaders as the time of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965. The civil-rights victories had not changed much about race in America, and the ghettoes were places of unemployment, abandoned dreams, street gangs, drugs, and hopelessness-mixed in with intense existential and visceral anger at the injustice of racial oppression, overseen by a watchful police force, in the “land of the free.” That summer, a growing realization surfaced and began to take shape among civil-rights leaders: the realization that the struggle had to take on a new form, and that this next battle would be against institutional and systemic racism and the commonsense beliefs that supported institutional and systemic racism. That meant civil-rights leaders would have to take on the white liberal ideology of colorblindness, which, in fact, hid a pernicious form of white racism, one less easy to fight than overt racism because it claimed to be scientific, a form of racism that sought to normalize racial Others, to help them overcome their “pathologies” and their linguistic and “skill deficits.” In this new context, they were increasingly unhappy with “social-work” and welfarestate approaches to overcoming the “problem” of the Negro family, but also the

new conservative approaches associated with Moynihan that advanced the argument that the problem of illegitimacy and instability in the Negro family could not be successfully addressed through more welfare programs, but rather had to be addressed through a change in attitude among Negroes. Both positions were variations on a theme of blaming the victims of racial oppression. At the November 1965 conference on the problem of the Negro family, the convening papers were revised to make them more palatable to civil-rights leaders, with some papers countering Moynihan’s view that the Negro family was undergoing “massive deterioration” and was in effect “crumbling.” Instead, these authors argued for a “plateau” theory of the Negro family that suggested illegitimacy rates in the Negro community had stabilized since 1957, but still at a far higher rate than for whites.5 One witness remembered a civil-rights leader commenting that “it was intolerable that the government had all these white men sitting around discussing ‘our problem.’”6

The black community wanted the government to do something about enforcing civil-rights laws now that they were on the book, and they wanted job-training programs, and they wanted an economic policy that created more good jobs. But most of all they were tired of being the problem and wanted whites to acknowledge who owned the problem, and who had to change their thinking in order to overcome it. One of those to criticize the Moynihan Report and reframe the “problem” it

addressed was Martin Luther King. In an address delivered on October 29, 1965, King played with the language of the “Negro problem,” reinscribing it as the “Negro’s problem,” and thereby shifting the gaze to white racism as the cause.7 He began by affirming the importance of stable families “consisting of mother, father, and child” as the “main educational agency of mankind.” An individual’s capacity to love was determined by “family life.” He recited the then already-familiar statistics from the report-the high divorce rates, the substantially higher illegitimacy rates for Negroes, the number of Negro families headed by women, and the high proportion of Negro children who as a consequence were recipients of public aid. The problem was real, and the nation had to “meet it as other disasters are met with an adequacy of resources.” But there was a danger, he warned, “that the problems will be attributed to innate Negro weaknesses and used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.” He dared to use the word “oppression,” a word the Moynihan Report avoided like the plague, to refer to the current condition of African Americans living in Northern urban slums and ghettoes, not just to the condition of African Americans in the era of slavery, or the Jim Crow era in the South. At the same time, he situated the current condition of the Negro in this American history, this “ghastly background.” Marriage among slaves was forbidden on plantations. “There were polygamous relationships, fragile, monogamous relationships, illegitimacies, abandonment, and, most of all, the tearing apart of families.” Masters and their sons felt free to use female slaves to “satisfy their spontaneous lust or, when a more humane attitude prevailed, as concubines.” King pointed to Virginia, “which we sentimentally call the state of presidents,” as among the worst slave states, where slaves were bred for sale “in a vast breeding program which produced enormous

wealth for slave owners.” This history of treating African Americans as a “breeding stock” for a vast, racialized underclass had not disappeared. Rather, it had taken on new forms. The problem was in an oppressive white mindset, and if black families had suffered greatly because of this mindset, if too many were broken and unable to sustain themselves against the forces of racism, there should be no mistake who and what were responsible for a “tragedy that utterly defies any attempt to portray it in terms the human mind can comprehend.” As for the matriarchal character of many black families, King once more framed this as the result of the “Negro’s problem.” Matriarchy had been established under slavery, and later it continued in Northern cities where women could find work as domestic servants at low wages. “The woman became the support of the household, and the matriarchy was reinforced.” The Negro male, meanwhile, was often disabled by “rage and torment” that turned inward, “because if it gained outward expression its consequences would have been fatal.” King attributed much domestic violence and spousal abuse in the black community on this black male rage and torment at their treatment in society. “In short, the larger society is not at this time a constructive educational force for the Negro.” The larger society, more than the Negro family, was “psychopathic” to the extent that it did not recognize these truths. King also called on the white community to stop “mocking” the Negro community for its unstable families, and to remember that “severe strains are assailing white family life” as well, although they had a greater impact on the Negro family. The Negro family, King concluded, is “working against greater odds than perhaps any other family experienced in all civilized history. But it is winning.” King’s words were meant to be conciliatory rather than inflammatory, but to

address the very real anger many in the black community felt because an administration that had championed civil rights seemed to be blaming the victim for continuing racial inequalities in America. James Farmer, president of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was not so conciliatory in his syndicated newspaper column. He argued that the report, though no doubt well intentioned, “provides the fuel for a new racism” built on the analysis of “Negro mental health.” Nowhere, Farmer observed, did the report speak about the mental health of a white family structure that is “weaned on race hatred and passes the word ‘nigger’ from generation to generation.” Nowhere in the report was there any understanding of how high illegitimacy rates in the black community are related to the fact that birth-control information and covert abortions are “by and large the exclusive property of the white man.” Farmer wrote that he was angry, and that those in power needed to know that the “cocktail hour on the ‘Negro Question’ is over,” that blacks were “sick unto death of being analyzed, mesmerized, bought, sold, and slobbered over while the same evils that are the ingredients of our oppression go unattended.”8 The white, male, power elite that had produced the Moynihan Report heard this message, but it heard it as perspectival discourse, in this case as representative of the perspective of a relatively small group of civil-rights activists whose anger and attitude was understandable, but hardly rational or scientific. Under the Johnson administration, what

civil-rights leaders said could not be ignored or dismissed, for the Democratic Party was heavily dependent upon a high turnout among “Negro” Americans. But white political leadership was also more dependent upon the white vote, and that meant that “standing up” to black activists and civil-rights leaders helped them among white voters. The “culture-of-poverty” discourse that emerged out of the Moynihan Report attempted to hold this fragile racial alliance together, one in which whites showed sympathy for the victims of white racism, while at the same time blaming them and calling upon them to be more responsible and less impulsive sexually. This was a secular “family-values” discourse that represented the heterosexual, middle-class, “nuclear” family as the stable grounding for social order and a public morality-the “normal” family-at a time when the white, middle-class family was itself “collapsing.” At least it affirmed for white, middle-class voters that their family type was still the cultural norm and standard, even if that norm bore little relationship to the reality it claimed to represent. For many African Americans, particularly middle-class African Americans, the culture-of-poverty rationale played into a desire to distance themselves culturally and spatially from the ghetto and the poor black masses living in poverty there, and to establish a fragile alliance with the white middle class around “family values” and “family life.” President Nixon’s election in the fall of 1968 was interpreted as a decisive shift in

American cultural politics toward the political right, and in many ways it was the beginning of a new ruling coalition and power bloc-the so-called “silent majority” of conservative, white, working-class and middle-class voters. This power bloc believed that “law and order,” along with moral standards, had collapsed in the 1960s, that “welfare mothers” were getting all the help and attention from the government while “responsible,” “law-abiding” “hard-working” citizens were paying for it, and that white people were increasingly victims of “reverse discrimination.” At the same time, the new administration was more pragmatic and utilitarian than ideological, and decidedly centrist in its politics. Indeed, in the areas of sex education and family planning, the Nixon administration was more liberal than any administration before or since-although I want to argue that this apparent liberalism was linked to a “racial hygiene” perspective that historically was quite conservative and even racist. The consensus, pragmatic politics of the Nixon administration was reflected in his appointment of Moynihan, a Democrat and close advisor to the last president, as his Counselor on Urban Affairs. Under Moynihan’s renewed leadership in urban policy, the Nixon administration began to follow through on one of the major conclusions of the 1965 Moynihan Report-that the welfare system was actually helping to produce the problem of welfare dependency and keep welfare mothers in a “vicious cycle of poverty.” Under Moynihan’s direction, the Nixon administration proposed the most radical overhaul of the welfare system ever proposed, and one that went far beyond what liberal Democrats proposed. The Family Assistance Plan (FAP) proposed to Congress by the administration would have ended the welfare system as we know it and replaced it with a federally guaranteed income for needy families with dependent children, paired with a requirement that recipients

work, except for mothers with children under the age of three. Recipients were to be allowed to keep a portion of the wages they earned in addition to the guaranteed annual income. While never enacted, Nixon’s welfare-reform proposal did establish a model for a system that would become popular in many states over the next several decades, combining work requirements with income support. To help counter criticism that they proposed vastly expanding the role and scope

of public aid to dependent children, Moynihan and Nixon countered with a strategy for reducing the need for public assistance by reducing the number of children born into poverty through family planning. This is where the sexuality of the welfare mother enters the picture again. The problem of a mushrooming welfare caseload was, in effect, to be managed by controlling the population of welfare-dependent children-through abortions, genetic screening, and voluntary sterilization. To reduce or eliminate welfare dependency, Nixon and Moynihan proposed a strategy of fighting for the rights of poor welfare-dependent mothers and unwed teenagers to have unrestricted access to family-planning services, just like middle-class and upper-class women had. They explicitly had Planned Parenthood in mind as an exemplary model of family-planning services. Founded in 1921 in Brooklyn, New York, by Margaret Sanger to bring birth-control advise to the urban poor, Planned Parenthood was, by the late 1960s, providing adults and adolescents with information and advice on birth-control options-including abortion in states where it was legal, like New York and California. After the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing a woman’s right to choose, Planned Parenthood grew to become the nation’s leading provider of family-planning services, and Nixon and Moynihan looked to it as a model of the type of program that would be needed to respond to what they identified as the most pressing social problem of our times-the problem of population growth. This was the subject of President Nixon’s special address to Congress on July 18, 1969. In that address, Nixon modified the framing of issues in the Moynihan Report. He would choose to ignore race entirely in his address, and instead focus on the problem of high birthrates among “low income women of childbearing age” within the U.S., and upon U.S. responsibility to respond to the problem of high birthrates and overpopulation within “developing” nations.9 He began his remarks by speaking of the global challenge of overpopulation, and of the need to regulate population so that it does not outstrip economic growth within the population. The current problem, consequently, was attributable to an imbalance between population growth and economic growth. High birthrates among the poorest of the world’s peoples, Nixon said, were “in large measure a consequence of rising health standards and economic progress” that allowed people to live longer and reduced the infant mortality rate. The “developed” world had, in effect, helped create this problem by promoting “social progress” through economic development in the “underdeveloped” world, and now the U.S. and other developed nations had a responsibility, the President said, to help lift the “burden of population growth” from those nations undergoing development. If “economic development falls behind population growth,” he

warned, “ [the] quality of life actually worsens.” He thus had directed the Agency for International Development (AID) to give population control and family planning high priorities, and also directed the secretaries of Commerce and Health, Education, and Welfare and the director of the Peace Corps and the United States Information Agency “to give close attention to population matters.” With birthrates remaining high and death rates dropping, the U.S., he said, would stand ready to “provide assistance to countries which seek our help in reducing high birthrates.” This assistance, he added, “can be freely accepted or rejected” by the individuals and nations that receive it. This was to be the stipulation: that no one would be forced to use birth control against their will or in opposition to their own religious beliefs. But the U.S. would actively support making family planning and birth control more widely available in the developing world. This would be done because people in developing countries, who shared a “common humanity,” had a right to birth-control and reproductive-rights counseling, but also because high rates of population growth in the developing world “threaten international stability.” When population increases outstrip economic development, the standard of living drops, and people can become more militant and even revolutionary in their demands-and thus presumably more open to communist propaganda. So birth control was a mechanism for stabilizing the global order, and allowing the development of undeveloped populations and lands to continue in an orderly manner that did not generate a revolutionary fervor. If the West was to win the Cold War with communism, it would have to make sure that the development of “undeveloped” lands and peoples occurred in ways that were not “destabilizing” of the current world order. As for the problem of population growth within the U.S., Nixon’s argument was

in all ways the same. He called upon the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the agency created by the Johnson administration to coordinate the “war on poverty,” to shift its attention to family planning for the poor. Under the Johnson administration, OEO had been actively working for empowerment of the poor, and it hired many people of color to lead the “war.” This militant activism, community-organized approach within OEO was now to be replaced with a more conventional family-planning approach, which saw high illegitimate birthrates among the urban poor as the cause of their problem, rather than as a symptom of their oppression. That cause would now be waged in the language of the right of low-income women to “adequate access to family-planning assistance.” Nixon declared that “no American woman should be denied access to family-planning assistance because of her economic condition.” By framing family planning in a rights discourse rather than a utilitarian, biopower discourse of social costs, Nixon appealed to deeply rooted American beliefs about freedom and equity. But he also raised the fear of instability among economically disadvantaged people in the U.S. if increases in population and large families kept them locked in poverty and deprived them of “quality of life,” similar to people in the developing world. The 1972 report of President Nixon’s Commission on Population Growth

(more commonly known as the Rockefeller Commission Report), further developed themes Nixon had raised in his 1969 speech to Congress and moved them in the direction of specific policy recommendations. The report recommended public and private financing of all the costs of family-related health services, including contraception, voluntary sterilization, and the “safe termination of unwanted pregnancies.” Released just one year before the U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision, the report called for the repeal of all laws that restrict abortions so that they may be performed (as in New York state) “on request by duly licensed physicians under conditions of medical safety.” As for the decision to have or not have an abortion, the report said that “should be left to the conscience of the individual concerned … with the admonition that abortion not be considered a primary means of birthrate control.” Under the category of research, the report called for the study of genetically related disorders and the development of effective screening techniques to identify genetic disorders. This would all be linked to a network of genetic-counseling services, supposedly to offer advice to prospective parents as to whether a fetus is genetically defective so that they might choose to abort it, or choose not to have a child given their own genetic profiles. In public schools, the report called for the elimination of legal restrictions on young peoples’ access to contraceptive and prophylactic services, and also the adoption of affirmative laws permitting minors to receive sex-education instruction without parental consent. Finally, woven throughout the report was the language of “sex equity.” Sex-education and family-planning agencies were to encourage young women to “choose attractive roles in place of or supplementary to motherhood,” and they should be free to “develop as individuals rather than being molded to fit some sexual stereotype” (Rockefeller Commission Report). Nixon had appointed the commission and its chairperson, and charged them

with their task; and it seems likely that they came up with pretty much what he expected them to come up with, which is to say a report that completely ignored traditional religious teaching. But even in 1972, it was not possible to completely ignore the Christian right or its growing influence in the Republican Party. So in accepting the report, Nixon made a public statement that, “I do not support the unrestricted distribution of family-planning services and devices to minors. Such measures would do nothing to preserve and strengthen close family relations.”10

Much could hinge, of course, on what the president meant by “unrestricted.” Nixon appeared to be affirming “family values,” yet his words in support of the report seemed to contradict “family values,” at least as that term was beginning to be used by Christian conservatives. This rhetorical strategy, designed to placate those on the Christian right even as the President ignored them in the formulation of policy, was a hallmark of the Nixon administration. If it were still possible to, for the most part, ignore the Christian right in 1972, it would not be possible for later Republican, and even Democratic, presidents to do so. It is also possible that Nixon’s strategy backfired to the extent that it made the Christian right more cynical and suspicious of the Republican Party and its leadership, and more certain

that a new leadership in the party would be needed in order to realize “God’s agenda” for America. Nixon would not be their man. By framing the “population problem” in terms of a woman’s right, and more specifically the rights of poor women in the U.S. and abroad, and by affirming a woman’s right to choice with regard to abortion, Nixon won the support of women’s rights and reproductive rights groups. Susan Gustavus, writing in a special issue of the Social Science Quarterly on the Rockefeller Commission Report, summed up the attitude of most women, from low-income welfare mothers to suburban professionals, that the recommendations made by the report on contraceptives, abortion, and role alternatives for women “are certainly not new recommendations to … anyone who has heard of Women’s Liberation.”11 At the same time, she expressed hope that because these recommendations were part of a government report, “they are likely to get wider exposure, gain greater respectability, and stimulate even more discussion.” Women’s liberation used a more “provocative” and less academic voice, but agreed on many of the same points. Gustavus did raise one concern. With all the report’s emphasis on choice and freedom to choose among women and adolescents, “what would we do if, given these freedoms, women still preferred the motherhood role and preferred to engage in sexual relations without the benefit of contraception?” Her point was that the report valued some choices over others. For example, the report suggested that in a family-life sex-education course in high school, girls could study the economic costs and lost-opportunity costs of bearing each child, which the report estimated at $59,000. This rather “startling” figure, Gustavus observed, is designed to “cause some girls to reflect past the immediate hospital bills or baby furniture fees,” and its manifest aim is to reduce the birthrate.12 But no moralistic appeals were to be made and the stigma of illegitimacy was to be removed. The only fault she could find with the report’s recommendations on abortion were that they carried several qualifiers, including the admonition that abortion not be considered as the primary means of birth control. That, she predicted, would run into resistance from some of the “more vehement” women in the movement, while the overall report would be “welcomed by groups currently lobbying for women’s right.”13