Pulp Fictions and Problem Girls: Reading and Rewriting Single Pregnancy in the Postwar United States

Abstract

THUS BEGAN Terrifying Ordeal of an Unwed Mother, published in True Confessions magazine in November 1949. The story recounts the travails of Norma, who, discovering herself to be pregnant, leaves her small Ohio town for the anonymity of the city. After attempting to get an abortion and considering suicide, Norma takes up residence in a maternity home for unwed mothers. The story ends with the birth of her child and Norma's indecision about whether to keep her baby or surrender him for adoption. Stories of single pregnancy had long been a staple of the mass-circulation confession magazines that began to appear in the early 1920s and multiplied in the decades following.2 Bearing titles like Thrilling Love and Romantic Story, these magazines specialized in stories of love triumphant, love gone bad, and sexual transgressions punished. Since the topic of single pregnancy lent itself to plot lines that combined the genre's characteristic and profitable mix of titillation and moralizing, stories featuring unwed mothers made frequent appearances in romance-confession magazines. Neither the subject nor the plot of Terrifying Ordeal, then, would have seemed strange to True Confessions readers. Indeed, by the 1930s and 1940s, a