Brooke L. Blower is Jon Westling Professor of History and chair of the history department at Boston University, where she studies modern American political culture, travel, and war in urban and transnational contexts. She is the author and editor of numerous award-winning books and articles, including Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars, which won the Gilbert Chinard Book Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the James Hanlan Best Book Prize from the New England Historical Association. Her most recent book, Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper, won the New Deal Book Award, received honorable mention for the Myrna Bernath Award, and was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize. Her research has been supported by an NEH Public Scholars Fellowship, an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, among several other grants. 

Faced with rising stigma and dwindling support in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Europe, unwed women who fell pregnant often ran away—to keep babies they could not at home, to give babies up anonymously, or to try to find someone to help them not have a baby at all. Because these runaways made use of preexisting migration routes, and because those were leading unprecedented millions to the United States, pregnant refugees from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Austro-Hungary, and the Russian Empire left significant traces in the US Immigration Service’s expanding bureaucracy. Historians who work on the policing of gender and sexuality at the US border note that single, pregnant arrivals were excludable. This paper offers the first systematic exploration of how this policy worked and what difference this traffic made, including how it reaffirmed the citizenship rights of babies born on US soil to mothers who did not have permanent, sanctioned residence in the United States.