Before Their Time: Four Generations of Teenage Mothers

Four generations of black women from the same family--all of whom became teenaged mothers--discuss their childhood memories, sex lives, work lives, and struggles as young mothers

A million teenagers become pregnant each year. Giving this statistic a human dimension, family therapist Sander ( Working with Teenage Fathers ) supplies the words and experiences of four minority women in one family from New York City. From four generations spanning the early 1900s to the late 1980s, the women detail their emotional histories and sexual activity. Although the focus is on the youngest, Leticia, the older family members, particularly the grandmother and great-grandmother, emerge as resilient women still imbued with their Southern heritage of valuing church and family. The stories are poignant and textured, centering around the frustrations of being poor and black, subject to family stresses, including abuse from men who often vanish abruptly from the women's lives. This collective testimony illuminates cycles of dependency in a personal way.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Sander, a therapist and associate director of continuing education at Sarah Lawrence, records the stories of a young black woman, her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother as they tell of their childhood and of raising children as teenage mothers. Looking back on their early lives, all four generations speak of their need for male companionship after their fathers left their respective families, and their lack of confidence that they could succeed without their fathers. The bulk of Sander's interviews are with Leticia, who became pregnant with her first child at 16. Now 20, she is currently enrolled in a YMCA program to prepare young mothers for their high-school equivalency tests. Her resilience is impressive as she talks about her life: her parents' divorce when she was three, ten years of sexual abuse by her stepfather (which further destroyed her confidence), a severe beating by her crack dealer that sent her to the hospital and convinced her to drop her habit. Leticia boasts of her role at the YMCA--``They see me as a leader here''--but as she begins to reveal the overwhelming stress of keeping an apartment for her children, she confides, ``I don't know where they get this feeling from here, that I'm in charge or something...I don't feel that way.'' Later, after Leticia loses custody of her son to her boyfriend's family in a court case, Leticia's grandmother voices the suspicion that Leticia deliberately lost the case in exchange for money to buy crack. Sander concludes that she, too, is overwhelmed by Leticia's life, but insists ``there is no choice but to try'' to help to reduce teenage pregnancy rates. The answer, she says, is to expand the role of the public schools to offer poor teens health care, birth control, counseling, and concrete alternatives to repeating the patterns of their families. Sander's interviews stand as a powerful testimony for urgent action, and her recommendations seem right on the money. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.