ABSTRACT
The psychological literature supporting definitions of unwed mothers as not-mothers, the interest of many white couples in obtaining newborn babies, and post-war concepts of family helped social workers accept new ideas about the disposition of illegitimate white babies. And they would no longer be expected to pay for their illicit sexual experience and illegitimate pregnancy by living as ruined women and outcast mothers of bastard children. After the war, state-imposed breast-feeding regulations and institutional policies asserting the immutability of the white unwed mothers relationship to her illegitimate baby became harder to sustain in the face of a complex and changing set of social conditions. Public policies could and should be used to punish Black unmarried mothers and their children in the form of legislation enabling states to cut them off from welfare benefits, and to sterilize or incarcerate 'illegitimate mothers'.
