: Anne Overbeck
: At the Heart of It All? Discourses on the Reproductive Rights of African American Women in the 20th Century
: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
: 9783110399547
: Family Values and Social ChangeISSN
: 1
: CHF 75.20
:
: Geschichte
: English
: 261
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

The structure of the African American family has been a recurring theme in American discourse on the African American community. The role of African American mothers especially has been the cause of heated debates since the time of Reconstruction in the 19th century. The discourse, which often saw the African American family as something that needed fi xing, also put the issue of women's reproductive rights on the political agenda. Taking a long-term perspective from the 1920s to the early 1990s, Anne Overbeck aims to show how normative notions of the American family infl uenced the perspective on the African American family, especially African American women. The book follows the negotiations on African American women's reproductive rights within the context of eugenics, modernization theory, overpopulation, and the War on Drugs. Thereby it sets out to trace both continuities and changes in the discourse on the reproductive rights of African American women that still infl uence our perspective on the African American family today.

Introduction


Fig. 1: Title image for textbook chapter on “Crime and Criminal Justice,” 2005, copyright with Sean Cayton/The Image Works.1

In 2005, two social work professors, Philip R. Popple and Leslie Leighninger, published the sixth edition of a textbook titledSocial Work, Social Welfare and American Society.2 Printed by Allyn& Bacon, one of the leading publishers of higher education textbooks in the United States, the book provides a survey of the history of the American welfare state and gives an overview of current problems and challenges ahead. The cover image for the book’s chapter on “Crime and Criminal Justice” depicts a young black woman holding an infant in her arms. The woman is standing in front of a wire fence topped with barbed wire. She is wearing what looks like a prison uniform. It is a picture of a delinquent mother, not one of maternal bliss.

This book looks into the forces – political, legal, social, and discursive – that came together over the course of the 20th century to make an image of a black woman holding a young child a credible and logical introductory image to a textbook chapter on crime and criminal justice.

The ability (or lack thereof) to form stable family bonds and its detrimental consequences for society has been a recurring theme in the American discourse on the African American community. The role of African-American mothers especially has been the cause of heated debates since the time of Reconstruction in the late 19th century. Even though generations of white upper-class and upper middle-class children were brought up by black nannies, black women were repeatedly blamed for their inability to raise their own children to become proper citizens. The inability to conform to normative notions of the American family was at the heart of the future of the African American community.

The discourse, which saw the African American family as something that needed fixing also put the issue of women’s reproductive rights within these families on the political agenda, and made it subject to intervention from outside. This book will follow the negotiations on African American women’s reproductive rights from the debates on the eugenic quality of African American children in the 1920s and 1930s, to the question of whether the black family could be made fit for modernity in the 1940s. It will also consider the height of the controversy about population control and the welfare state in the 1950s and 1960s. It will end its analysis in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the v