Sturtevant applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, It's All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy, and reported the following:
Page 99 of It’s All in the Delivery explains how the decline of the Motion Picture Production Code and social changes of the 1960’s brought teen pregnancy and non-marital pregnancy to film screens for the first time, generally framing the issue as a moral problem to be solved. Film comedies, finally free to play with the visual joke of a baby bump on an unmarried woman, played it pretty safe through the first decade. They usually integrated the naughty premise of non-marital pregnancy into stories that ended with a nice respectable wedding, for example Lover Come Back (1961), Irma la Douce (1963), and the provocatively titled Doctor, You’ve Got to be Kidding! (1967) all end with last-minute marriage vows as the woman is in labor. Page 99 captures half of the book’s overall argument, because it places pregnancy stories in popular media alongside a larger set of social changes around reproduction. I argue that twentieth century moral panics over non-marital and teen pregnancy were misguided from their earliest days. The increased visibility of unmarried pregnancy in the 1960’s didn’t just reflect the ongoing sexual revolution; it also reflected a healthy decline in forced or coerced marriage for pregnant girls and women. This decline should be celebrated, a fact obscured by the social problem framing that—even to this day—treats non-marital pregnancy as a problem to be solved only by marriage, rather than by economic, social, or educational support for unpartnered parents (or indeed by contraception and abortion, subjects of other chapters). The half of my book’s argument that page 99 doesn’t capture is that—unlike these early examples—popular comedy often leads the way in puncturing conservative pieties like the idea that single pregnancy must be “solved” by a hasty marriage in the first place. Readers who continue for a few more pages will encounter examples like Funny Girl (1968), which uses the suggestion of unwed pregnancy as a defiant joke, and Stand Up and Be Counted (1971), which frames unpartnered pregnancy as a form of feminist self-creation. Later pages and chapters build on these examples to chronicle a rich history of media that use the toolbox of comedy to push back against widespread pregnancy myths, stigmas, and taboos.Learn more about It's All in the Delivery at the University of Texas Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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