ury, the immorality of extramarital intercourse became less of a concern. Instead, communities began to focus more on the economic burden imposed by bastardy. A child born out of wedlock was now termed “fatherless” or a “child of no one.” These new categories catered to the politics of the reformers of the era who saw fatherless children as victims who should not bear the brunt of their parents’ bad behavior and defended child protection on both moral and practical grounds (Luker 19). The parents of the out-of-wedlock child were no longer faced with penalties for fornication but rather with the assumption of financial responsibility for the child. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the period conventionally titled the Progressive Era, bastardy was no longer considered a moral or economic problem but rather a social problem, an index of what was wrong with society. Unmarried mothers and their children came to be seen as an increasingly appropriate group for social reform. Prostitutes, abandoned mistresses, and unmarried mothers were all considered “women in trouble,” “unfortunates,” “ruined” women taken advantage of by a “selfish, wealthy, usually urban “cad.”(Luker 20) Reformers also advocated the use of the term “out-of-wedlock” over “illegitimate” when referring to children born to unmarried mothers. For the first time, the language associated with the plight of unmarried mothers and the needs of their children spoke of compassion instead of condemnation. By the end of World War I, another shift occurred in the public’s subjective perception of unwed mothers and their situation. The theories of Sigmund Freud gained acceptance, and as a result, women were no longer seen as the victims of some social ill but rather as active participants in their downfall, often being referred to as “unadjusted girls.” (...
