Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds

Gender, Race, and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens

Wendy Luttrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317958437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Student Life

Focusing on fifty girls enrolled in a model public school program for pregnant teens, Luttrell explores how pregnant girls experience society's view of them and also considers how these girls view themselves and the choices they've made. Also includes an 8-page color insert.

Part I
Sexuality, Pregnancy, and Schooling

CHAPTER 1
Separate and Unequal

To the real question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” I answer seldom a word. And yet, being a problem is a strange experi- ence.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Everyone has an opinion about teenage pregnancy and why it is a problem. It is straightforward, said former president Bill Clinton: “Teenage pregnancy is just plain wrong.” But personal opinions, cultural prescriptions, and political rhetoric are not enough, especially for educators whose business it is to understand the “strange experience” of being a “problem.”

Teenage mothers’ motivations have already been scrutinized in ways that are racialized, class-blind, and, in far too many cases, stigmatizing.¹ But how do pregnant girls themselves experience disparaging public attributions and directives that they are “babies having babies” or are “looking for love” in ways other than so-called normal mothers? This book examines the experience of being a pregnant teenager as a struggle between a girl and her world, not simply within an individual girl. This distinction is ever so important if we are to avoid pathologizing and stigmatizing the life choices and trajectories of poor and working-class girls. Rather than focusing on individual girls and their “problem,” my aim is to consider the cultural and psychological mine fields through which they must walk, particularly within school settings.

Rerepresenting the Pregnant Teenager

This identified problem group—pregnant teenagers—is highly visible in the public imaginary and in political rhetoric about what is wrong with America. In terms of the dominant image that gets evoked, the “pregnant teenager” is seen as a black, urban, poor female who is more than likely herself the daughter of a teenage mother. She is probably failing in school, has low self-esteem, sees no future for herself, and now must deal with the untimely end of her youth and face the harsh realities and responsibilities of adulthood. Research about this group, whether the researcher acknowledges it or not, must engage in, and respond to, these dominant discourses and representations of the “pregnant teenager.”² It is not as if one can present a distinct “narrative” or set of alternative images about teenage pregnancy without engaging the dominant discourse. Moreover, there is a class- and race-based history of teenage pregnancy that shapes how these representations are understood by different groups of Americans. Kristin Luker (1996) examines this politically charged history in her book, Dubious Conceptions, and explodes many myths. She shows that “teenage mothers” are no more common today than in 1900; that despite the dominant image, pregnant teenagers in America today are more likely to be white than African American; and that the greatest increase in “unwed mothers” is not among teenagers, but among women in their mid-thirties. Most important, what most characterizes American culture since colonial times, according to Luker, is the tenacious hold of racial stereotypes and the scapegoating of pregnant teenagers for social ills.

These politics of representation are further complicated by the force of personal feelings. In addition to conflicting messages, images, and expectations about becoming young mothers, there are psychologically particular ways in which girls make meaning.³ Pregnancy presents a girl or woman with the unique challenge of becoming conscious of two people living under one skin. I like the way Joan Raphel-Leff, in her book Pregnancy: The Inside Story puts it:

In pregnancy, there are two bodies, one inside the other—a strange union that recalls gestation of the pregnant woman herself in the uterus of her own mother many years earlier. When so much of life is dedicated to maintaining our integrity as distinct beings, this bodily tandem is an uncanny fact. Two-in-one body also constitutes a biological enigma, as for reasons we do not quite understand, the mother-to-be’s body suppresses her immunological defenses to allow the partly foreign body to reside within her. I suggest that psychologically too, in order for a woman to make the pregnancy her own, she has to overcome threats posed by conception.

(1995: 8)

Raphel-Leff calls this the inside story of pregnancy and argues that it differs for each pregnancy; every mother (no matter what her age) infuses the experiences of pregnancy with her personal feelings, hopes, memories, and powerful unconscious mythologies.

Meanwhile, there are external, “public” interests that also infuse the meanings an individual woman attaches to this two-in-one relationship between herself (woman) and inside other (fetus). Indeed, competing meanings of pregnancy continue to be debated within the law, especially regarding women’s reproductive rights. Regardless of one’s position on these issues, the point is that there are interests beyond the individual pregnant woman that mediate how she makes sense of her pregnancy. And whether she is consciously aware of it or not, these “outsider” interests affect her “insider” experiences. Is the pregnancy legitimate or illegitimate, planned or unplanned, wanted or unwanted, natural or inseminated, in or out of wedlock? In short, individual girls or women are not “free” to forge their own distinct relationships with the other they carry.

All of this is to say that this duality—the inside and outside story of pregnancy and the blurred boundaries between self and inside other— complicates the already politically charged problem of how to represent pregnant teenagers. Each girl holds personal images, ideals, associations, and feelings that are unique to her alone and that are part of a system of regulation and social control. This is where we must start when we consider how the PPPT girls live the personal and cultural phenomenon and social “problem” called teenage pregnancy.

“Use Theory, Don’t Let It Use You”⁴

The “teenage pregnancy is just plain wrong” perspective is, sociologically speaking, a deviance theory. And, to paraphrase sociologist Howard Becker (1986), for deviance theorists, the important question, the question most worth asking, is, “Why would girls do a wrong thing like that?” The favored way of answering this question is to find a psychological trait (i.e., girls who get pregnant are “looking for love” or have low self-esteem) or a social attribute (i.e., urban poor and working-class girls who have low aspirations for the future) that differentiates girls who do get pregnant from girls who don’t. The underlying premise is that “normal” girls wait until they are older, financially secure, and, preferably, married to have babies. And, those girls who do get pregnant as teenagers are not just “different” but “wrong” in one way or another. Meanwhile, boys, and their part in this phenomenon of deviance, drop out of the picture.

All this being said, I didn’t realize the extent of and tenacious hold of deviance theory until I began to explain my project and present conference papers on my preliminary findings. It seemed next to impossible to move beyond the scripts and stereotypes of my audiences: Were these pregnancies planned? Were the girls knowledgeable about or practicing safe sex? Did these girls ever think about having abortions or about giving their babies up for adoption? Were these girls having trouble in school? Had their mothers been teenage mothers? What about the boys? Do any of the girls plan to marry their babies’ fathers? It seems like having a baby for some of these girls was like having a toy, and that their motivations were somewhat selfish. It was next to impossible to move away from public discussions scrutinizing the girls’ motivations, in ways that sometimes felt like a modern-day version of the Puritan’s public stockades. I still remember my moment of frustration when responding to an audience member’s question, “So, what do you think is the underlying reason these girls have babies?” I replied, “I’ve worked with fifty girls and there are at least fifty reasons.”

Thinking about my own distinctive motivations and feelings about each of my three pregnancies, I wondered aloud, “Do you think there is one underlying reason that an adult, married woman has a baby?” And then it dawned on me that I was missing an opportunity to reframe the terms of debate. What if I could find a way to turn these audience questions of “judgment” into questions of interest about the girls’ self and identity-making? This is, after all, the art of ethnography—taking something that is perceived as “strange” and making it “familiar” to audiences who might otherwise cast aspersions on groups unlike themselves.

It is in this spirit that I have taken a person-centered approach to ethnography, attempting to develop an experience-near way of describing and understanding the PPPT girls’ personal and cultural meanings of pregnancy. Rather than providing an aerial (or experience-distant) view of a community or culture, person-centered ethnographies attempt to “tell us what it is like to live there” (experience-near) (LeVine 1982: 293). Person-centered ethnography has important parallels with psychoanalysis. Indeed, “experience-near” and “experience-distant” are borrowed from psychoanalyst and theorist of selfhood Kohut (1971, 1977), as noted by cultural anthropologist Doug Hollan (2001) in his review of recent trends within person-centered ethnography. Kohut (1971, 1977) used the distinction to describe “his own (experience-near) efforts to ground psychoanalytic theory in the language and subjective experience of the analysand from the more abstract (experience-distant) metapsychological theorizing of Freud” (Hollan 2001: 49). Person-centered ethnographers and psychoanalysts share a similar goal. Both wish to engage people to talk about and reflect upon their subjective experiences.⁵

Cultural anthropologist Robert LeVine, who first coined the term person-centered ethnography, offers a way to learn about subjective experiences and distinct social worlds through what he calls “canonical narratives (cultural dramas)” (1999: 23). Analysis of cultural dramas and people’s forms of self-presentation focuses on three things. The first is to identify and compare the constellation of emotions—including those emotions that can be expressed and those that must be suppressed; second, is to identify cultural patterns and continuities of meaning that occur within and across the narratives; and finally, to uncover social divisions or cultural conflicts and corresponding inner personal conflicts that individuals seek to manage or resolve through these narratives and forms of self-presentation.

I adapted LeVine’s method for my purposes. I was interested in what I could learn about the PPPT girls’ social worlds and subjective experience of being a “problem” through the “cultural dramas” they told. I searched for different ways that the girls could narrate their experiences—through informal classroom conversations, through the self-representation activities, journal writing, and formal interviews. I sought to identify and compare the constellation of emotions, continuities of meaning, and recurring conflicts and responses that were expressed within and across the girls’ varied forms of self-representation.

Person-centered ethnography also requires an experience-near relationship between the researcher and researched, including an awareness on the part of the ethnographer that his or her own subjectivity (emotions, presumptions, and preoccupations) shapes what she or he hears, sees, and understands about the other.⁶ I have written elsewhere about how my own biography, identities, social position, and experiences in the field shaped what I have been able to know about the subjects of my research (Luttrell 1997, 2001). But my work with the PPPT girls posed new dilemmas, which I discuss in Part III.

Centerville and the Piedmont Region

The aerial view of Centerville, a mid-size industrial city in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, shows two things in common with other towns in the region: both a railroad and a highway cut through it. But, what it is like to live there is distinctive and depends upon whether one is white or black, Christian (or not), and how long one’s family has resided there. Centerville has close to 200,000 residents, most of whom are employed in either manufacturing or service jobs. Over the past twenty years Centerville’s population has almost doubled; today, it boasts of being large enough to provide the cultural diversity of an urban center, yet small enough to offer a hometown atmosphere.

Black and white communities, dependent in different ways on the textile mills and the tobacco factories until the 1980s, have given way to a somewhat more diverse set of communities tied to the booming computer, medical, and pharmaceutical industries. Hispanics and Asians now make up close to 10 percent of the population, with the rest being divided evenly between whites and African Americans. Centerville’s historically thriving middle-class African American community sits alongside a working-class community of African American service workers, who are gradually losing their long-held jobs to contract service workers. These contract workers are, increasingly, migrants from Mexico who have decided to settle in the area after having begun their sojourn to the United States as farm laborers in the neighboring agricultural counties. Meanwhile, drug traffic and trade, made more possible by a nearby interstate highway, have created havoc within a once stable and more prosperous African American working-class community. Old and middle-age African American residents remember a thriving downtown neighborhood bustling with black-owned businesses that represented hope for its industrial workforce, especially those whose families had escaped the harsh life of tenant farming. Centerville residents, black and white alike, worry about violence and crime on city streets, warning newcomers away from certain downtown neighborhoods. Several of the PPPT girls had lost family members in drive-by shootings that occurred in low-income housing units in which the victims were either living or visiting friends. The homicide rate is staggering for a town this size. At the same time, Centerville has numerous lively and engaged citizen groups and active religious communities, including a Catholic parish, two Jewish congregations, a mosque and Muslim school, numerous Protestant mainstream churches, and a strong evangelical movement.

The housing pattern in Centerville is segregated, largely according to both race and class. Most white, middle-class professionals and middleclass African Americans live in the areas surrounding the largely abandoned downtown district. White, working-class people who used to work in textile or tobacco are being pushed out of their mill homes as middleclass professional newcomers (from other parts of the United States and world) move into city and county neighborhoods. Giant shopping malls now line what was once a two-lane highway between Centerville and the nearby town, causing residents to complain about traffic once unheard of for these parts of the Piedmont region. Whereas it used to take twenty minutes, at most, to travel from one end of town to another, now it can take forty minutes, and it is best to get on the highway.

Over the past twenty years, the look and pace of life in Centerville has changed. For some, these changes have brought prosperity, for others poverty, and for everyone, more diversity. But, there are stark vestiges of racial segregation, especially in the city schools and when one uses the sorely inadequate bus system, which is the PPPT girls’ main mode of transportation.

The Piedmont Program for Pregnant Teens

Today I joined the PPPT girls for lunch in the cafeteria at a table that is the farthest from the cafeteria line. The table sits close to the door leading out to the annex building, which houses the PPPT program.

“This is the table we always sit at,” explains Cheri.

With the exception of one boy who waves to Shanille, there is no interaction between the PPPT girls and the other students.

Shanille doesn’t wave back to the boy and Cheri asks, “Why? He’s cute.”

“I don’t pay attention to that nappy-headed boy. The other day he said he wanted to feel my stomach. I told him he wouldn’t be feelin’ nothin’ when I was finished with him,” replies Shanille.

Ms. Nelson had told me that the girls would have much to say about getting hassled by their peers. One particular example she gave occurred yearly on school picture day. Students enrolled at the high school are called into the auditorium and sit in rows according to their home rooms. Each home-room class is called onto the stage where the photographer, who is set up with lights and backdrop, takes individual portraits. The PPPT girls are assigned the back row of the auditorium. When they are called to the stage, numerous “students, I should say boys,” according to Ms. Nelson, start hooting and hollering insults as each PPPT girl walks across the stage. Despite teachers’ admonitions, this shaming practice continues year after year. I ask why the photographer can’t set up the equipment in some less public space and Ms. Nelson replies, “tradition, that’s always how it’s been done. It breaks my heart to watch it. I don’t think it is worth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Part I. Sexuality, Pregnancy, and Schooling
• Part II. Pregnant with Meaning
• Part III. Notes to and from the Field
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Self-Representation Discussion Guide
• Notes
• References
• Index