Misconceptions: Unmarried Motherhood and the Ontario Children of Unmarried Parents Act, 1921–1969.

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

Intended to provide single moms with way of accessing financial support for their children from erstwhile dads, the CUPA was a big disappointment. Part of the problem was mindset. While the legislation directed moms to contact their local Children’s Aid Societies, social workers, most of them women, tended to believe men when they claimed that they were not a child’s dad, particularly in cases when moms had not cohabited before pregnancy. Besides, if they made it too easy for moms to get financial assistance, that would just encourage more bad behavior. But another part of the problem was structural—since there was no other provision of state support for single moms if dads did not contribute financially, and since moms’ poverty often damaged the well-being of their children, allowing the CAS to scoop them up and adopt them out, and since CASs were also the primary agencies through which adoptions took place, they almost had a vested interest in ensuring that single moms did not receive the financial support they required.

In making her case, Chambers, a professor of Women’s Studies at Lakehead University, has meticulously analyzed 4,023 case files created by social workers in various Ontario Children’s Aid Societies, supplementing this analysis with extensive research into other archival records, legislation, cases, and secondary literature. The end result is a book that not only analyzes and critiques the CUPA but also explores the experiences of the unmarried mothers regulated by this legislation. We read, for example, of the circumstances that led to their pregnancies in the days when birth control and abortion were illegal and of the subsequent challenges in raising a child in poverty.

In writing of those experiences, Chambers gives voice to thousands of women whose tales have remain untold until now, and one ends this book appalled that the situations described existed in the lifetimes of many of us and, despite some advances, angry that child poverty continues to this day. This book will generate a paradigm shift for all those who think that easy moralizing is the way to rationalize our community’s social problems.