Measuring Immorality
Social Inquiry and the Problem of Illegitimacy

Examines how illegitimacy has been constructed as a social problem since the nineteenth century.

Gail Reekie (Author)

9780521620345, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 October 1998

224 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.56 kg

Why do conservative politicians and scholars in Britain, Australia and the United States continue to view rising rates of out-of-wedlock births and teenage pregnancies as a threat to civilised society? This book examines the process by which social science transforms a biological event - a birth - into a social and moral problem. Drawing on Foucault's 'archaeology of knowledge', Reekie stresses the role of statistics and other social-scientific discourses in the emergence of the illegitimacy 'problem' in the early nineteenth century and its continuing cultural significance. The book illustrates the continuity in concerns about illegitimacy, including pressure on the welfare system, fears of racial and intellectual denigration, the detrimental nature of fatherless families, and the association of rising illegitimacy with the supposed selfishness of excessively independent women.

Introduction: assessing the problem
1. Bastards and children of the parish
2. Statistics and the birth of a social problem
3. Reproducing at the nation's expense
4. Illegitimate genes and racial inferiority
5. The immorality of the white working class
6. Illegitimate infancy: a deadly risk
7. Offspring of feeble and neurotic minds
8. Fatherless societies go primitive
9. Murphy Brown, feminism and female selfishness
10. The possibilities of a postmodern illegitimacy.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB]