Measuring Morals

Unwed mothers are often condemned by legislators and the public as women of easy morals who spend the rest of their lives promiscuously producing illegitimate children for the welfare rolls. Partly true; partly not. According to a recent study of 205 New York City mothers (10% of them white), which was reported last week at the National Conference on Social Welfare, fewer than half of them turn out that way. As Mignon Sauber, research director of the Community Council of Greater New York, points out, the conventional picture of these women is vastly exaggerated.

More than half the mothers in her study eventually married, and despite the stereotype of the fatherless slum family, half of them were still in touch with the first child's father or living with him. Although half the women were less than 20 years old when they had their first child, close to a third had no other children. Nearly half the mothers were not on welfare at the time the survey was made; only one-third had been on public assistance for a year or longer. And as for blatant immorality, the statistical evidence, although not clear-cut, points the other way: three-fourths of those who had more children were made pregnant by the man who fathered their first child or the man they married later, and only 4% of the girls became pregnant by as many as three different men.

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