Kristin Luker And The Negotiated Order Of

The United States Essay, Research Paper

In her book, Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy, Kristin Luker participates in the negotiated order of the United States by providing information to the information-gathering portion of the sympathetic process. Luker’s investigation of the issue of teenage pregnancy seeks not to provide information on what she perceives to be right or wrong but rather to provide the necessary background for an informed decision to be made.

Consistent with the social-constructionist theoretical perspective, Luker begins her analysis by pointing out that while the objective conditions surrounding teen pregnancy may or may not have changed, the subjective perception of the problem has changed, and in some ways, quite dramatically. Language, especially naming things, has a significant influence on our perspective. It causes us to create categories that dictate what and how we see things (Roy 12). By tracing the changes in the language used to define young/unwed parents and their offspring through various periods in the historical record, Luker demonstrates the shifts in the subjective perception of the issue of teenage pregnancy.

In colonial America, children born out of wedlock were a significant concern not only because the circumstances of their conception were considered a “sin in the eyes of the Church” but also because they often created an economic burden. Consequently, Puritanical society chose words to represent the child and its parents that carried a negative connotation. “Bastard” was the term used to refer to the child born out of wedlock; “illegitimate” was also commonly used. The mother of the child was considered a “fallen woman” and the father was often prevented from testifying in court or holding office. Parents of bastard children were considered sinners and often faced harsh punishment for their transgressions. As America moved into the eighteenth century, the immorality of extramarital intercourse became less of a concern. Instead, communities began to focus more on the economic burden imposed by bastardy. A child born out of wedlock was now termed “fatherless” or a “child of no one.” These new categories catered to the politics of the reformers of the era who saw fatherless children as victims who should not bear the brunt of their parents’ bad behavior and defended child protection on both moral and practical grounds (Luker 19). The parents of the out-of-wedlock child were no longer faced with penalties for fornication but rather with the assumption of financial responsibility for the child. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the period conventionally titled the Progressive Era, bastardy was no longer considered a moral or economic problem but rather a social problem, an index of what was wrong with society. Unmarried mothers and their children came to be seen as an increasingly appropriate group for social reform. Prostitutes, abandoned mistresses, and unmarried mothers were all considered “women in trouble,” “unfortunates,” “ruined” women taken advantage of by a “selfish, wealthy, usually urban “cad.”(Luker 20) Reformers also advocated the use of the term “out-of-wedlock” over “illegitimate” when referring to children born to unmarried mothers. For the first time, the language associated with the plight of unmarried mothers and the needs of their children spoke of compassion instead of condemnation. By the end of World War I, another shift occurred in the public’s subjective perception of unwed mothers and their situation. The theories of Sigmund Freud gained acceptance, and as a result, women were no longer seen as the victims of some social ill but rather as active participants in their downfall, often being referred to as “unadjusted girls.” (Luker 23) These changes in the language associated with the issue of teenage pregnancy illustrate the shifts in the subjective perception of the issue despite the insignificant changes in the objective conditions of the times.

As Luker seeks to further emphasize the significance of the impact of language and categories in the negotiated order, she provides examples that reinforce the idea of reification. Reification, defined by William G. Roy in his book Making Societies, is the process by which “facts that were originally merely someone’s ideas, speculations, or theories take on a reality of their own” (Roy 19). More simply put, it is the process by which things are made real. Evidence of this process and its relationship to the issue of teenage pregnancy can be found in the trend in public thought in the 1920s that drew on the work of Sigmund Freud. Prior to World War I, nonprofessionals, often religiously motivated reformers, had been most active in working to remedy the problem of illegitimacy, a problem which they attributed to social forces. Progressive reformers were successful in encouraging the community to assume responsibility for children who lacked family resources and afford them protection by the state. As a result, out-of-wedlock children became appropriate subjects of a newly professionalized concern. By the 1920s, providing for those born to unmarried parents fell under the jurisdiction of the “helping professions,” researchers, social workers, and administrators who began to apply scientific expertise to the problem of teenage pregnancy, mostly in an effort to distinguish themselves from the nonprofessionals previously asscociated