This article examines why pregnant and mothering students did or did not stay in high school to see whether schools violated Title IX legislation by not providing equal educational opportunities. Examining life-story interviews conducted in 2002–2004 with 62 black, white, and Latina pregnant and mothering students in Connecticut, the author found that (1) while school policies and faculty were often hostile and unreceptive, mothers who dropped out were usually disengaged from school before pregnancy; (2) the presence or absence of school-based day care was a critical factor in school outcomes; and (3) alternative programs for pregnant and mothering students were experienced differently depending on whether students came from urban or nonurban school districts. In conclusion, the author argues that when our attention shifts from teen mothers to the problems of underfunded and overburdened schools, we are confronted with the larger systemic problems of economic and racial segregation and consequently educational inequality.

This study explores the relationship between child sexual abuse and adolescent motherhood, using a life story interview method. The sample consists of 27 mothers participating in a home-visitation parenting program for mothers at risk of child maltreatment. The failure to articulate the violation of child sexual abuse and to appropriately construct blame resulted in a range of self-destructive behaviors, some of which placed mothers at greater risk of teen pregnancy. Repressed feelings associated with the trauma often resurfaced with motherhood as victims re-experienced their innocence and vulnerability as children.

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This article analyzes the moral tones of public emigration stories through an exploratory analysis of newspaper stories published between 1990 and 1993 in a region in Poland with a century‐old tradition of out‐migration. Media stories are fertile ground for examining values and myths because they negotiate between the micro‐level process of individuals constructing meanings and the macro‐level process of political economies producing meanings. I identified two sets of contradictory stories: (1) stories about the sending country cast emigrants as either home builders or home wreckers, and (2) stories about the receiving country depicted America as either Horatio Alger's land of possibility or a morally degenerate place where greed corrupts the soul. To explain these contradictions, I compare the institution of migration to (post)modern culture and note that both contribute to social diversity and structural differentiation which lead to value inconsistencies.