Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women's Adolescence. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1993 by Mary E. Odem

Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women's Adolescence. By Constance A. Nathanson (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, 1991. xxi plus 286 pp.).

Dangerous Passage is an astute sociological analysis of the contemporary crisis over adolescent pregnancy in the United States. Since the 1970s, the issue has I attracted much attention from scholars, politicians, and the press and has been linked to a wide array of social ills--poverty, welfare dependency, drugs, school drop out, and AIDS. Nathanson seeks to explain why teenage pregnancy has emerged as a major public problem of our time and why policies to address it have taken one form and not another. Informed by the idea that sexuality is a product of social and cultural forces, her study examines the struggles among medical, legal, and moral authorities to define and propose solutions to the problem posed by the unorthodox sexual behavior of young, unmarried women. For further insight into the current controversy, the author analyzes the response to "wayward" girls in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, another period when adolescent female sexuality became an issue of intense public debate.

Nathanson begins with a discussion of the demographic, social, and political factors that contributed to growing public concern about young women's sexuality in the 1970s. Changes in reproductive behavior made teenage pregnancy and sexual behavior more visible during this period. Although birth rates to female adolescents had been declining since 1957, the actual number of births had expanded due to the dramatic increase of adolescents relative to adults in the U.S. population. Furthermore, young women were adopting different and more controversial strategies to deal with nonmarital pregnancy. Many chose single motherhood or abortion instead of early marriage or putting children up for adoption.

The changes in reproductive behavior were accompanied by equally important changes in perceptions of that behavior and what to do about it. The most critical development, according to Nathanson, was the redefinition of nonmarital pregnancy from a moral to a medical problem, one that could be treated through medically-supervised contraception. The medicalization of adolescent pregnancy, she argues, occurred largely through the efforts of birth control advocates in Planned Parenthood. The organization first gained support among policy makers for its program of family planning by promoting birth control as a cost effective answer to expanding welfare rolls and illegitimacy among poor, black women. This effort resulted in an expansion of federal funds for family planning services between 1967 and 1972 and the creation of an institutional bureaucracy invested in the continuation of those services.

The construction of the problem of unwanted pregnancy shifted in response to a changing political and economic climate. In the face of growing hostility to government spending for the poor in the mid-seventies, birth control advocates changed the focus of concern from poor, minority women to middle-class, white teenagers. Drawing on new data and reports, they warned of an "epidemic" of pregnancy among middle-class teenagers and called for the extension of family planning services to adolescents. Convincing public officials of the severity of the problem proved much easier than persuading them to adopt family planning as the appropriate solution. This program faced mounting criticism from a political countermovement that aimed to restore traditional values of sexual morality and parental authority. Moral conservatives, who found strong support within the Reagan administration, defined teen pregnancy as a moral issue that should be handled by parents instead of meddling public health professionals. They promoted sexual abstinence as the best solution and argued that birth control and abortion only exacerbated the problem by allowing young women to violate moral codes without fear of penalty. At the same time, economic conservatives, eager to cut federal spending for the poor, revived the association between unwanted pregnancy and black women on welfare.

The conflicting political agendas of the various actors in the debate over teen pregnancy, the author argues, have impeded the development of effective public policies. Officials have favored providing social services to unwed mothers and their children over services for the prevention or termination of pregnancy, which they fear might be construed as condoning immorality. Current policies are further limited, Nathanson contends, by the underlying assumptions that teen pregnancy is a problem of women and not men, that there is one orthodox path for young women to follow, and that the source of the problem lies with individual young women rather than the structural conditions that shape their lives.

The author turns to an earlier period in American history when the adolescent girl became a prime target of sexual control to better understand the circumstances shaping the current controversy. As in the 1970s, the sexual behavior of adolescent women had become more visible at the turn of the century as a result of social and demographic changes. The growing proportion of young single women in the population, their migration to the cities and growing participation in wage work outside of the home gave young women an unprecedented degree of social and sexual autonomy. These developments provoked widespread anxiety in American society about the decline of traditional moral standards. Various groups, principally women reformers, physicians, politicians and business elites, sought to contain this threat through campaigns to raise the age of consent for young women, abolish prostitution and white slavery, and eliminate venereal disease.