For the African-American community the image of the teenage mother is especially troublesome. The author's interviews with the women themselves, and their mothers and grandmothers, provide a picture of their lives caught in the intersection of race, class and gender.

Teenage motherhood is a worrisome problem in America today, and the welfare system tends to spotlight the black teenage mom. Based on her own experience as an African-American teenage mother, sociologist Elaine Bell Kaplan dispels common perceptions of these young women by reassessing the class, gender, and racial factors that influence black teenagers to become mothers.