I first heard of this book some time ago, although I haven’t read it as yet. When I did, I tried to put myself in the place of such a young woman who had never been given an alternative future to consider; whose head hadn’t been filled with notions of education and escape from her small existence and exploring the big world beyond before committing to parenthood. But doing so didn’t help me understand these young women any better. All it did was make me feel sorry for them that their horizons were so limited–and, yes, a bit puzzled as to why they seemed to have the relationship process reversed–first, they have sex with a man; then, after they get pregnant, they determine from his reaction to the news whether or not he’s a “keeper.” Most of the time, predictably, he bolts, proving them right to have doubted his “keeper” eligibility, and they raise the children resulting from what is frequently a series of such relationships alone. To me, it just seems as if they’re going about it back-asswards. If you’re so afraid of divorce and abandonment, why not look for a committing type of man first, then marry him, THEN have children? It’s still no guarantee against abandonment, but it seems the likelihood of his not bolting the relationship would be greater.

I can’t blame these women for not wanting to marry every man they have sex with, or even every one who makes them pregnant. What I question is the casualness of their approach toward sex and birth control, not from a moral standpoint, but because I think it limits their options in ways that cannot be denied. The more unprotected sex a woman has with more men, the more likely she is to become pregnant by someone who’s not going to particularly want to stick around and help her raise the child. It’s very much a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As I say on another post, I’m not immune to my own problems when it comes to relationships and sexuality. But I can say one thing for my issues: they didn’t give me numerous children to rear into adulthood while I myself was still a child, and they didn’t put a permanent limit on my horizons.

I was raised in a family whose values were very similar to the WASPy middle class attitude, except that we were Roman Catholic, and mine was an immigrant family. Many young black women are raised to believe they should be educated first, and then think of marriage and children, because the thought of being young, unmarried, on assistance, and struggling was too much to fathom. Yet, there were in the community young women I knew of who fit the type described in the book. The difference is that the girls I knew didn’t believe education and upward mobility was an impossible dream. And if anything, early pregnancy would derail all the dreams our parents had for us.

So in talking about the book in class, I have found it difficult for us all to get our heads around the behavior some the young women express, of motherhood as the primary source of their identity, when these were young women barely out of high school, without well-paying jobs, who had an explicitly lackadaisical attitude towards birth control, who had sex with men first and then hoped the relationship would follow. The birth of the baby tested whether a man had staying power, and if he didn’t, they broke up, and the young women raised their kids alone.

None of us could relate, because for us, financial stability mattered, a relationship came first, before childbearing, and if a man proved himself long-term relationship material, then marriage might follow, and then children…a typical middle class attitude. The attitudes and behaviors of the women in the book also seemed to boggle the minds of the books’ authors.

My point, inasmuch as I have one, is that it’s a good start when we look at the options young women have from their own point of view rather than imposing our own assumptions. But to be effective I think we have to move a step beyond and start to question whether our assumptions about the ‘natural consequences’ of those options are really a foregone conclusion. We can change those consequences a lot more than we think.

It bothers me when people talk about the “sacrifice” of having children. Yes, as with any major decision in life, having children will limit your options in some ways. But, IMHO, the only good reason to have children is because you want to. For fun. To amuse yourself and, possibly, your partner*. Not to show how lovable or martyrlike or tough you are. If you are unhappy with the amount of time raising your child takes up and not enjoying his or her presence, for goodness sake, don’t have another one. Sacrificing oneself to childrearing is unfair to both the child and the parent.

Incidently, I’m a middle class, almost 40 year old single mother (in a committed domestic partnership.) I find option #2 the scarier of the two you mention. Not because of the possibility of divorce, but because I find the idea of marriage frightening on multiple levels.

*Of course, raising a child is a lot of work and requires you to put your needs second quite often. But many things in life are difficult.

while i am a white male, i saw this dozens upon dozens of times while working with runaway and homeless and generally wayward teenagers who are a significant subset of young women who have babies out of wedlock.

basic emotions like love and belonging to something(their own family) are usually far more important then demographics or money. that is the mistake the educated make, they are looking analytically and at policy factors instead of basic emotions. emotions that would be pretty easy to see if they talked to more poor women( at least for the subset i’m discussing.)

I am speaking as a thoroughly independent and ridiculously overeducated white European-born woman in her late thirties. I got married at 29 because that’s what you “get done” to advance the academic career and seem stable (my then-husband did it for the same reasons)–but kids? Hell, no. What about the career? The trips around the world at a moment’s notice? The coffee-infused late nights of grappling with a philosophical concept on the page? And what about the money that we’d have to set aside in order to “take care of” a child’s so-called physical, social, and educational needs? Not with our lifestyle choices.

At the same time, my then-husband’s (white) half-sister had her fourth child out of wedlock, as a conscious choice, making no bones about the expected related boost to her welfare check. So-called physical, social, educational needs … not so much. Currently, her 16-year-old daughter is also pregnant and has chosen to “do the right thing,” that is, not have an abortion, and to follow in her mother’s footsteps.

The question behind the “how do you theorize something like this” is, I think, the status accorded to what “we” choose to call “privilege” when “we” really mean “necessity” (and where the “we” really marks the privileged voice). How necessary is it really for a child to have an expensive college education, if what might potentially matter more (especially in a radical Christian context) is an “education of the heart” and the street smarts that can prevent a gang fight? How necessary is it for a parent?

I think I’m dancing around the same questions as you are, Hugo, only that I’ve seen both sides as conscious choices in action, and while I’m able to respond to my career-prioritizing lifestyle choice as a matter of course, I can’t bring myself to respond to my ex-half-sister-in-law’s one with the same nonchalance, especially since a whole potential discourse around victimhood lingers at its edges.