Misconceptions: Unmarried Motherhood and the Ontario Children of Unmarried Parents Act, 1921-1969 (review)

Lori Chamber's examination of the Children of Unmarried Parents Act (CUPA) is a salient reminder that laws intended as reforms may well institutionalize existing gender and class power relations, or come to contradict the intentions of their creators. The CUPA was intended to provide unwed mothers with a mechanism to secure support for their children from the putative fathers. However the state, guided by the Children's Aid Societies, decided which cases were worthy of being taken up, while the women bore the costs of legal proceedings. Moreover, women also risked losing their children as the CUPA gave the state more legal means to step in and act as the guardian of children deemed neglected.

Chambers makes a convincing case that the Children of Unmarried Parents Act not only failed to substantially improve the lives of children, but that it stigmatized, humiliated, and penalized the mothers of these children, and often left them impoverished, or pressured them to find another male mate simply in order to survive. Since the formal case law about CUPA offers little information on the actual implementation of the act, Chambers utilizes the case files of women applicants as her major source, combining both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the files to determine the backgrounds of women involved, their treatment at the hands of authorities, and the outcomes for the women and their children. Using a substantial number of cases, she creates a statistical profile of the women; some of her findings, such as the higher numbers of Aboriginal, Black, and ethnic minority women who lost custody hearings, are not surprising, but the statistics are still very useful in highlighting some of the contradictions in the implementation of the act. For instance, social workers, judges, and other commentators (especially before the Second World War) portrayed these unwed mothers as young, single, delinquent, and promiscuous women, yet in fact, the majority were women from 'informal' or common-law marriages trying to secure child support.

Most of Chambers evidence comes from her in-depth analysis of the cases. Chambers is aware of the limitations of these files, filtered as they were through the views of social workers who created them, but she does not see them only as examples of the discursive creation of the 'unwed mother.' Rather, she assumes that she can also read them to extract women's own understandings of illegitimacy, and in some instances, women's resistance to the ideological construction of them as irresponsible women and deficient mothers. While the files do not represent the experiences of all unwed mothers, only those who tried to use the courts to secure support, they are a rich source of evidence that allows Chambers to put a human face on the CUPA, relaying women's own interpretations, their frustrations, suffering, and anger in a manner that statistics never could capture.

Chambers is able to provide a thorough overview of what the predominant patterns in the files were: how families intervened, how the putative fathers reacted (often not very responsibly), and how women were judged by the authorities. From these, she draws conclusions about the ideological assumptions about sexuality, the family, marriage, and also working-class women's labour, that underpinned the act's enforcement. Indeed, it was ideology about gender and sexuality, particularly what Chambers describes as the enduring double sexual standard, that actually guided the implementation of the CUPA. This is not to say that class, ethnicity, and race did not matter: As she shows, the vast majority of women forced to use this act came from poor or working-class backgrounds, and the ideal mother was imagined by social workers as white, Anglo-Saxon, and English-speaking.

One of the questions raised by this book is the immensely powerful role seemingly played by social workers as the law's right-hand gatekeepers of social norms. Perhaps their...