The unwed mother was always viewed as immoral and unacceptable in the 20th century, but a weird thing was that the Nazis encouraged some racially pure women to conceive babies without marriage. Regarding unwed mothers, Jill Stephenson (1975) gave some information about them and showcases compulsion as an important characteristic in policies and the intra-party debate about unwed mothers’ status, focusing on moral issues. Her work also raises many scholars’ interest in unwed mothers. Lisa Pine (1999) shows the official attitudes toward issues about single mothers and some details about the Lebensborn. A more comprehensive work is a whole chapter written by Michelle Mouton (2007), which overall presents how the government tried to change these women’s social status and how German society felt about them. Subsequently, Vanada Joshi (2011) paid attention to unwed mothers who have sex with foreign prisoners and discussed the relationship between such sexuality and single women’s civil identity.
During Nazi Germany, both Nazis’ efforts and the war increased the possibility of women becoming unwed mothers. Nevertheless, in most research, they were objects affected by contraception, birth control and family crisis, instead of subjects in these experiences, and these women were still less noticed as a subject.
This study consists of three main parts and these sections are scheduled in chronological order of single women coming to be unwed mothers. The first sector is about their sexuality, and related policies would be examined to demonstrate the methods Nazis conducted to regulate their sexual partners and behaviours. Secondly, policies regarding birth control would be argued to showcase Nazis’ supervision as well as influence on wombs and pregnant periods. In the third portion, policies about guardianship would be interpreted, exhibiting the Nazi’s dominant status in deciding guardianship, and the nation’s irruption as well as interference in these mothers’ daily life.