Introduction

In 2005, two social work professors, Philip R. Popple and Leslie Leighninger, published the sixth edition of a textbook titled Social Work, Social Welfare and American Society.2 Printed by Allyn & Bacon, one of the leading publishers of higher education textbooks in the United States, the book provides a survey of the history of the American welfare state and gives an overview of current problems and challenges ahead. The cover image for the book’s chapter on “Crime and Criminal Justice” depicts a young black woman holding an infant in her arms. The woman is standing in front of a wire fence topped with barbed wire. She is wearing what looks like a prison uniform. It is a picture of a delinquent mother, not one of maternal bliss.

This book looks into the forces – political, legal, social, and discursive – that came together over the course of the 20th century to make an image of a black woman holding a young child a credible and logical introductory image to a textbook chapter on crime and criminal justice.

The ability (or lack thereof) to form stable family bonds and its detrimental consequences for society has been a recurring theme in the American discourse on the African American community. The role of African-American mothers especially has been the cause of heated debates since the time of Reconstruction in the late 19th century. Even though generations of white upper-class and upper middle-class children were brought up by black nannies, black women were repeatedly blamed for their inability to raise their own children to become proper citizens. The inability to conform to normative notions of the American family was at the heart of the future of the African American community.

The discourse, which saw the African American family as something that needed fixing also put the issue of women’s reproductive rights within these families on the political agenda, and made it subject to intervention from outside. This book will follow the negotiations on African American women’s reproductive rights from the debates on the eugenic quality of African American children in the 1920s and 1930s, to the question of whether the black family could be made fit for modernity in the 1940s. It will also consider the height of the controversy about population control and the welfare state in the 1950s and 1960s. It will end its analysis in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the vilification of black motherhood reached its height during the “Crack Baby Crisis” even though black women also tried to gain ground in claiming sovereignty over their own bodies.

1Concepts and Terminology

The terms used to describe the use of contraceptive methods, services and devices has changed over the course of the 20th century. “Birth control” was the term most often used by scientists, social workers, club women, and other activists in the field before 1930. By the 1930s, “family planning” or “planned parenthood” took its place to de-emphasize the coercive element that parts of the American population associated with the early advocates of the use of contraceptives. These two terms also catered to middle-class values by putting the family or the parents, rather than pregnant women, at the forefront of the debate. By the mid-1960s, this argument was reversed by replacing “family planning/planned parenthood” with “reproductive rights”; the emerging feminist movement emphasized the rights of the individual woman to govern her own body.3 By the late 1970s and early 1980s, some women’s groups, physicians, and social workers introduced the term “reproductive health.” This allowed them to distance themselves from the radical feminist discourse of the 1960s and 1970s that also included the debate on abortion rights. In addition, the new term made it possible to include the issue of contraceptive methods, services and devices in the larger discourse on women’s health.4

In this book, I will use the terms “birth control” and “family planning” interchangeably and throughout all periods covered to describe services and devices that enabled women to control their fertility. Even though “birth control” went out of fashion in the 1930s, it reemerged with the debate on the “birth-control” pill. The use of the term “family planning” never ceased, as it allowed politicians, scientists, and activists to talk in a desexualized way about the issue. However, “reproductive rights” and “reproductive health” were terms not in usage until the 1950s and 1970s respectively and will be used accordingly. An exception is the title of this book where the term “reproductive rights” was chosen to emphasize the fact that the debate on contraceptive services and devices throughout the 20th century was not only relevant in biological or economic terms, but always mirrored the debate on the role of black women in American society.

When talking about African American women, race is a central analytical category. However, it is a complex term. In her influential essay “African-American Women’s History and the Meta-Language of Race,” the African American historian Elisabeth Higginbotham describes the confusion that befalls scholars “when pressed to define it.”5 They struggle, according to her comparison, to reach beyond the type of definition by Justice Potter Stewart, who, when asked to define “obscenity” in a Supreme Court case, said: “I know it when I see it.”6 Several historians have used race as a category to explain the subordination and dominance of one group over another. Others have called it the “ultimate trope of difference.”7 I will follow the definition of both Barbara Fields and Elisabeth Higginbotham.

Barbara Fields stressed that race is neither a biological nor a “trans-historical” or “metaphysical” category, but needs to be analyzed through its historical context and use.8 Elisabeth Higginbotham’s definition stressed the overpowering strength of the concept in what she calls the “meta-language” of race:

Race not only tends to subsume other sets of social relations, namely, gender and class, but it blurs and disguised, suppresses and negates its own complex interplay with the very social relations it envelops. It precludes unity within the same gender group, but often appears to solidify people of opposing economic classes.9

I will use the term race while bearing both Field’s and Higginbotham’s reservations in mind. Race is a social construct put to political, social, and cultural use by different actors of US society to address the supposed needs of a part of American society. These actors may define themselves as part of or as different from a certain racial group. The category of race needs to be handled cautiously as it subsumes other categories such as class and gender, either in the speech of the interpreter or the historical actors themselves.

In describing the African American community, I will use the terms “black” and “African American” interchangeably and will apply them to historical actors who identify themselves as members of the black community or are defined as such by others.10 The term “white” and “mainstream society” will be used in a similar manner.11 Whereas the term “mainstream” can carry the risk of reinforcing existing structures of dominance and repression, here the term will be used instead to illuminate the relationship between minority and majority actors. It will be specifically employed as an analytical category, with the awareness that it postulates the existence of a (monolithic) majority norm.

The obvious pitfall when analyzing the discourse on reproductive rights of African American women is to limit these women to their role as (potential) mothers and their role within their community or the American nation, rather than the role they played as individuals with individual sets of rights. Both current scholarship12 and the historical actors13 struggled to separate the fate of individual black women from the role they played within the family structure of the African American community. This book examines the discourses on the reproductive rights of black women, not black mothers. It addresses why and when women failed or actively avoided talking about themselves as individuals with rights separate and independent from their own community, social network, and their role as mothers within that community.

Finally, this book will talk about the African American family against the backdrop of what came to be known as the isolated white middle-class nuclear family. The sociologist Talcott Parsons had introduced the term “isolated nuclear family” in 1942.14 In his analysis, life in an industrialized society had led to increasingly specialized gender roles, assigning women a place in the home and men the role of the breadwinner....