Mature Unwed Mothers : Narratives of Moral Resistance

"I have often wondered if the opposition to women's choosing to abort a pregnancy masks a fear of women choosing to have and raise children on their own. When a woman separatesmotherhood from marriage, she claims a freedom in the realm of intimate relaƯ tionships that may be as fundamental as Freedom of Conscience or Freedom of Association. Yet, we do not usually think about women's decisions concerning motherhood in these terms. In a pair of remarkable studies begun in the 1980s, Ruth Linn-pregnant at the time, and married to a medical officer in the Israeli army-took the study of moral psychology into two highly controversial arenas of moral action: Israeli soldiers who refused to serve in Lebanon and single women who refused to remain childless. While conscientious objection to war has long been recognized as an act ofmoral resistance and courage, women who question societal norms and values linking motherhood with marriage, are typically dismissed as bad women. Rather than approaching these questions in the abstract, Linn chose to interƯ view women who made the decision to have and raise children on their own. What she found was that in the course of making this decision, women came to see themselves as moral resisters. In freeing their childbearing capability from men's control, they were also freeing their capacity to love. The very title of this book, Mature Unwed Mothers, calls us to think about what we mean by maturity on the part of mothers"--Font no determinada "This book describes the moral decision-making process toward unwed motherhood based on a fifteen-year longitudinal study of fifty Israeli single women aged 30 and over, each of whom decided to have a child on her own following a short- or long-term relationship with a male partner. The author views these women as conscious resisters to the societal script of marriage-reproduction-motherhood and documents their narratives of moral subjectivity."--BOOK JACKET. Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction: Motherhood as a New War Zone....Pages 1-10 Motherhood as a Moral Position....Pages 11-22 Motherhood as a Wish....Pages 23-39 Motherhood as a Decision-1983....Pages 41-63 Motherhood as an Experience-1990....Pages 65-90 Motherhood as Development-1997....Pages 91-107 Motherhood as a Narrative of Moral Resistance....Pages 109-128 Conclusion....Pages 129-148 Back Matter....Pages 149-170 In their search for an authentic moral self, women and men may at some point in their lives assume a position of resistance.