Dangerous Passage

Basing her work on the premise that sexuality is molded by both history and culture, Constance Nathanson analyzes the emergence of adolescent pregnancy as a public policy issue. Pregnant teenagers have received much attention from scholars, public officials, and the popular press. The author focuses on this public response: on the lay advocates, reformers, politicians, judges, physicians, professors, social workers, and journalists who have proposed solutions to the problem posed to American society by the sexuality of single adolescent women. Throughout her study, she examines how Americans think about and handle deviant behavior and social change and she considers the relationship between public outcry about sexually active adolescent women and more general beliefs about the deterioration of American society and its values.

This is a book about how social problems are defined and how various groups mobilize to remedy them. Since there is little consensus on where the teenage pregnancy "problem" lies, how it should be resolved, and with whom the responsibility of resolving it should rest, Nathanson’s purpose is to understand both the recent emergence of "adolescent pregnancy" as a public problem and the conflicts that have surrounded it by addressing these questions within a broad sociological and historical perspective. She explores how teenage pregnancy—once associated with welfare (i.e. minority) mothers—was defined as a problem and funded as a program only after it became visible in white middle-class daughters. Demographic, social, and political forces that have contributed to the late twentieth century definition of young women’s sexuality as a significant social problem are examined and placed in the context of longer-term changes in the social construction of female adolescence.

Dangerous Passage not only contributes to the understanding of current policies in the area of adolescent pregnancy, it investigates the processes of social control as they are applied to women’s private sexual and reproductive behavior.