Black Teenage Mothers: Pregnancy and Child Rearing from Their Perspective. Constance Willard Williams. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1991. 208 pp. $24.95. This book describes the results of an ethnographic, interview study of 30 black teenage mothers in the Boston area. The author's primary goal was to understand the meaning of births to black adolescent mothers in the context of their cultural and personal circumstances. The book successfully makes two interrelated contributions to the literature: (a) it explores what teenage mothers themselves (and not others) think and feel about their experiences, and (b) it takes an adaptive perspective on adolescent pregnancy and childrearing that does not assume that such behavior represents maladaptive or acting-out behavior.
