Strong Portraits and Stereotypes: Pregnant and Mothering Teens in YA Fiction

In recent years scholars have brought to light the difficulties adolescent girls face in their in-school and out-of-school lives. The report How Schools Shortchange Girls (AAUW, 1995) summarized findings about the decline of academic achievement experienced by adolescent females. Orenstein's SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap described the great risks of stress, depression, unwanted pregnancy and substance abuse adolescent girls face, and the ways these problems are exacerbated, not addressed, by most schools.

For girls who are already mothering or pregnant these stresses must be that much greater. Whether they are studying in traditional public schools or in teen parent programs -like the program where I taught during the early 1980s-mothering and pregnant teens have needs that are difficult for teachers to address. One way to address these needs, and to encourage pregnant teens to look with a critical eye at a society that is both fascinated by them and intent on demonizing them (Luker 80-81), is to make it possible for such girls to read and discuss, with a feminist and culturally critical critique, old and new young adult literature about young women in situations similar to theirs.

What are some of the ways pregnant and mothering teens, in particular, might use young adult novels on this subject? I believe, with Meredith Cherland, that novels can be used by readers for a variety of purposes: readers can imaginatively rehearse new ways of being in the world by identifying with characters who have more power in the fictional world than the reader has in hers (Cherland 166, 167). Readers can be nurtured and cared for, in a way, by books that bring them into "another kind of female community capable of rendering the so desperately needed affective support" (Radaway 96). Readers can be helped to think critically about gendered expectations (Cherland 174) when texts are mediated through thoughtful discussion. The image of the pregnant teen and the teen mom has become a focal point where societal anxieties about female power and about poverty, sex, youth and race have coalesced (Luker 12-13). By reading and critiquing selected novels about teen pregnancy, pregnant teens can learn to critique and to complicate the stereotype of the wild, unintelligent, lower-class teen who becomes pregnant. They can also learn to challenge the stereotype of the teenaged welfare queen, thus developing, perhaps, some intellectual armor against those who see young mothers only in these stereotyped ways.

I read the texts discussed herein thinking primarily of the ways pregnant and mothering teens I've taught might respond to them, but it's clear that many of these novels were not written for pregnant or mothering teens. Thus girls who arc not pregnant and boys who are not fathers can learn from reading and discussing these young adult books, too. Having boys and girls thoughtfully read and discuss books about teen pregnancy is one way of speaking to the suggestions outlined in the AAUW publication Girls in the Middle: Working to Succeed in School, which calls for teachers to develop opportunities for boys and girls to explore and discuss gender issues (in Sprague & Keeling, 641). Seeing the complexities of sexual situations from the viewpoint of female teen characters could provide thoughtful boys with new ideas about relations between the sexes. Boys might be interested as well in arguing against some of the ways male characters are depicted in these novels. And since most of the novels available on this subject seem written for not-yet-sexually-experienced girls, any one of the books discussed herein, and any one of those in the annotated bibliography attached, would prove fruitful for all-girl talks about sexuality, responsibility, societal expectations, and other painful and confusing topics girls must think about as they work toward becoming women.

Choosing Focal Novels

Of the many fine YA novels on the topic of teen pregnancy and parenthood that have been published, I've chosen to look in depth at six realistic novels written between the years of 1967 and 1999. In part I've chosen these particular books to trace the ways in which presentations of the female character, depictions of relations between young men and women, and attitudes toward early sexuality have changed over the years. In part I chose some of these books because they were ones that the teen moms whom I taught particularly liked. Others I chose because I wish I'd had them to use when I taught those girls. As I read these books, I tried to imagine how my past students might respond to them. I took notes of a reader-response sort, paying particular attention to any stereotypical images of the pregnant teen the novel might present, and trying to determine who the implied reader of each novel might be.

Though about a third of the students I taught during my time working with young mothers were African American, I've found only two YA novels written by and about African American women dealing with early sexuality and pregnancy. In "Images of Black Females in Children's/Adolescent Contemporary Realistic Fiction," Deirdre Glenn Paul indicates that young adult and children's novels featuring White heroines refer to sexuality and bodily development more than twice as often as do novels featuring African American heroines. Paul suggests that this "sexual conservatism" "might be a backlash from previous myths about adult Black female sexuality" (62). She suggests that this conservatism might be found particularly in children's and young adult literature since that literature is intended to serve an educative function. (63). At least one of the African American writers I study here has had to defend herself against charges of feeding into this and other stereotypes of female African American teens (Porter 214).