skip to primary navigation skip to content
 

 

Did anyone have sex before marriage in the past? « Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Did anyone have sex before marriage in the past?

Alice Reid, Eilidh Garrett, Hanna Jaadla

It is generally accepted that the context of marriage was seen as the proper place for childbearing in historic Britain, and levels of non-marital fertility, or ‘illegitimacy’, were relatively low. Depictions in literature suggest that unmarried mothers were predominantly servant girls ‘taken advantage of’ by their unscrupulous employers or, as was the case for the eponymous Tess of the D’Urbervilles, their sons. Even some historians espouse this view.

But was this really the case? And what do levels and patterns of unmarried motherhood tell us about sexual activity outside marriage? This blog describes what demography can tell us about who was having sex before marriage in the past, who ended up as unmarried mothers, and how these were likely viewed by society. 

Rembrandt van Rijn; A Young Man and a Girl playing Cards. The National Gallery, London.

Non-marital births across history 

2022 was the first year that more births in England and Wales took place outside marriage (or civil partnership) than within. This rise in non-marital childbearing has much to do with the relatively recent decrease in the relevance of marriage as an institution, and the widespread acceptability of diverse forms of family formation. Until the last few decades of the 20th century, fewer than 10 percent, and often fewer than five percent, of births took place outside marriage. Well over 90 percent of children were born within marriage.  

While some women bearing children outside marriage were widowed, and others bore several children without ever making it to the altar, most mothers of illegitimate children were as-yet-unmarried women who only had one child outside marriage. This means that it was mostly first births which were at risk of being illegitimate. When fertility was around five children per woman, and first births made up roughly a fifth of overall fertility, the proportion of first births which were illegitimate was much higher than the illegitimacy ratio (the percentage of births outside of marriage) suggests.  

The implication of this is that sexual intercourse before marriage was much more common than is often supposed. The ubiquity of sex before marriage is confirmed by trends in pre-marital conception which suggest that, before the mid-19th century, of all first births born within marriage, between 20 and 40 percent had been conceived before the wedding took place. Adding together first births born before a marriage and those conceived prior to, but born within a marriage, it is likely that in many periods in British history more than half of first-born children were conceived outside of wedlock.

It is also likely that there were other couples engaging in intercourse before marriage who had not fallen pregnant before the wedding: sex before marriage was probably the norm for all but the elite sectors of society.  

Marriage as a process, not an event 

Scholars at Campop, such as Richard Smith, argue that marriage should be seen as a process rather than an event, starting with courtship and a gradual increase in intimacy. Couples may have moved more quickly into a sexual relationship once a marriage had been agreed, with pregnancy further hurrying the engaged couple to the altar.  

Arthur Hughes, The Long Engagement (1859).

Illegitimacy also forms part of this process, as some promised or expected marriages did not actually come to fruition. In some instances, a woman would be ‘taken advantage of’ by a man – maybe of a different social class – who never intended to fulfil his promise to marry her, but evidence from testimonies and court cases suggests that in most cases a marriage had been very likely. Reasons that marriages failed to take place include one party taking a job elsewhere (common among construction workers, for instance) and other changes of circumstance; for example, Oliver Twist’s mother, Agnes Fleming, bore him out of wedlock because her fiancé, Edwin Leeford, died before they could marry. 

The view of illegitimacy as part of a more general process of family formation is supported by the finding that the age at which unmarried mothers gave birth was very similar to the age at which first births occurred within marriage. This led Campop’s Peter Laslett to develop the notion of a woman’s ‘procreative career’ which encompassed births before and after marriage. 

Although it was clearly deemed preferable for children to be born within marriage, the timing of marriages and births indicates that many pre-nuptially pregnant brides would have been visibly expecting at the time of their wedding, so there seems to have been little shame in pre-marital pregnancy. Certainly, at least in the pre-industrial period, the stigma of unmarried parenthood was not strong enough to prevent many unmarried mothers going on to get married – either to the fathers of their children or to other men. 

Long term trends and the courtship intensity hypothesis 

There were strong parallels between the trends in non-marital birth and pre-marital pregnancy, and these also moved in tandem with changes in age at marriage and fertility within marriage. For example, in England the late 17th century was a time of relatively high age at marriage, but had relatively low levels of pre-nuptial pregnancy, and fertility both in and outside marriage. In the early 19th century, women were marrying at relatively young ages, but were more likely to be pre-nuptially pregnant, and fertility of both sorts was relatively high 

A man wearing a ridiculously long wig pointing accusingly to a young pregnant woman, another man sits with his back to them. Wellcome Collection.

Demographers find these patterns surprising. This is because in an era before legal abortion, women who conceived before marriage could either marry (and have their pregnancy classed as pre-marital) or fail to marry and have a non-marital birth. Pre-marital conception and non-marital fertility might therefore be expected to have varied inversely with one another: when levels of one were high, levels of the other were low.

Similarly, as a child resulting from a pre-marital conception could have been born either in or out of marriage, non-marital fertility and marital fertility rates could be expected to vary inversely. And if unmarried couples in every time period started having intercourse at around the same age, we would expect higher levels of pre-marital conception to be associated with accelerated, and therefore lower age at, marriage, as was the pattern in 18th century France.

Rembrandt, A pregnant woman standing. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Peter Laslett offered the ‘courtship intensity hypothesis’ as an explanation. This is linked to the European Marriage Pattern and the responsiveness of marriage to the state of the economy. As explained in a previous blog, a buoyant economy enabled couples to marry at younger ages. Laslett argued that this increased possibility of marriage also encouraged couples to start courting earlier and, crucially, to court with more intensity; they felt confident to progress to sexual intercourse earlier, or to engage in it more frequently. The result was more pre-marital pregnancies and younger ages at marriage.

The percentage of promised marriages which failed to take place did not fall, however, so there were also more illegitimate births. 

Non-marital fertility since the 19th century 

The proportion of births outside marriage started to decline during the second half of the 19th century, and remained around four percent until the 1960s. The late 19th century was characterised by the emergence of Victorian prudery and social norms guiding relationships and marriage, and the spread of (upper) middle class values. It’s possible that these were associated with an increase in the stigma of having either a non-marital birth or a pre-nuptial pregnancy. Certainly, the share of pre-nuptially pregnant brides declined from close to 40 percent in the first half of the 19th century to less than 15 percent by the 1940s.  

Richard Redgrave, The Outcast (1851). The Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Up until the 1930s, marital fertility was also declining and age at marriage was increasing, meaning that more restraint was being shown in all forms of childbearing. The only exceptions to these trends were seen during the years covering World War I and II, which were characterised by sharp increases in illegitimacy 

In the 1960s, the later years of the Baby Boom saw the start of a remarkable change in the relationship between marital and non-marital childbearing: over the following 60 years, the share of births outside marriage increased continuously from six percent in 1961 to more than 50 percent in 2022. The Victorian stigma associated with birth outside marriage receded, although the majority of babies were still born to cohabiting couples, and eventually legal changes caught up with public opinion through measures such as parental responsibility for unmarried fathers (in 2003) and the recognition of civil partnerships and cohabitation as suitable contexts in which to bring up children. 

Geographical variation

Levels of non-marital childbearing were not always the same across England, Wales and Scotland; there were quite distinctive regional patterns, with some areas experiencing much higher levels of non-marital fertility than others. The north east and south west of Scotland, north west England, east Yorkshire, East Anglia, central Wales and the north Midlands all showed high levels of non-marital fertility in 1861. But these centuries-old regional patterns were disappearing: by 1901 the only well-defined hot spots of non-marital fertility remaining were in the NE and SW of Scotland.  

So far, we have discussed non-marital fertility ratios (the percentages of all births which are born outside marriage). These can be distorted by differences in the population at risk of having a birth outside marriage: for example, areas with many unmarried women could have relatively high proportions of births outside marriage, even though the risk of any individual unmarried woman having such a birth was low. A better measure of the risk to women is the non-marital fertility rate (less commonly presented, because the numbers of unmarried women in childbearing ages are less readily available), and this is what is shown in the maps above.  

This demonstrates that in London, where there was a high concentration of unmarried women working as servants, the non-marital fertility rates were in fact relatively low – except in areas with workhouses or institutions which catered specifically for unmarried women and their children. In general, therefore, servants were not at higher risk of having a birth outside marriage (although some servants may have returned home to their parents outside London if they fell pregnant).

József Borsos, “Seduction” (1851).

In fact, low illegitimacy ratios and rates were a long-standing feature of British towns and cities, despite the presence of large numbers of unmarried women, and this contrasted with urban areas on the European continent, which generally had much higher levels of illegitimacy than the countryside. 

These regional variations were partly to do with differences in local economies, opportunities for female employment, migration and its influence on family and the social oversight of young people, as well as cultural differences, particularly those relating to courtship. For example, although domestic servants in London, who were subject to a considerable amount of oversight from their employers, were not linked to a high risk of illegitimacy, the situation was very different for farm servants in Aberdeenshire, both in the degree of oversight and the number of children born out of wedlock. 

Why do we think that servants were particularly likely to become unmarried mothers, seduced by unscrupulous upperclass men? 

Some such liaisons clearly did take place and have been well documented. Indeed, cases where a woman pursued a man of higher status for child support are likely to be better documented than cases where both parents came from the labouring classes, as there would have been less point in pursuing a man who had no resources to spare. 

Service was the main employment opportunity for single women, and this means that unmarried mothers were probably more likely to be servants, even though domestic servants were, in fact, less likely than other women to become unmarried mothers. 

Why is it assumed that pre-marital sex was uniformly stigmatised in the past? 

The fact that many people still alive today remember, and perhaps suffered from, the stigmas of unmarried motherhood or pre-marital pregnancy, which were both still pervasive in the mid-20th century, and even later in some regions, may encourage a belief that such attitudes were also the norm further back in the past. 

Frederick Walker, “The Lost Path” (1862). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

How do we know? 

Percentages of births born outside of marriage are relatively easy to calculate. In both baptism registers (1550-1810) and civil registers (1845 to the present), the priest or registrar usually made a note if the parents of a child were not married. Alternatively, this can be inferred when only a mother’s name was given.  

For the parish register period, pre-nuptial pregnancies have been identified as those where a baptism took place within eight months of a marriage ceremony. As there was usually a gap between birth and baptism, some infants baptised nine, or even 10, months after a marriage may also have been pre-nuptially conceived. However, any infants conceived soon after marriage who were born pre-term might have been born less than nine months later. The 20th century figures for pre-nuptial pregnancies in the line graph above were derived from a survey for the Royal Commission on Population, and match well with results from other contemporary surveys of the UK.  

Further reading

Geographical patterns of non-marital fertility (illegitimacy) in 19th and early 20th century UK can be explored at www.PopulationsPast.org (click on the Fertility button, and then choose Illegitimacy ratio or Illegitimacy rate). 

  • Adair, R., Courtship, illegitimacy and marriage in early modern England. (Manchester University Press, 1996). 
  • Gillis, J. R., ‘Servants, Sexual Relations and the Risks of Illegitimacy in London, 1801–1900’, in J.L. Newton, M.P. Ryan and J.R. Walkowitz, Sex and Class in Women’s History: essays from Feminist Studies (Routledge, 2012), pp. 114–145. 
  • Laslett, P., ‘Introduction: comparing illegitimacy over time and between cultures’, in P. Laslett, K. Oosterveen and R. Smith (eds), Bastardy and its comparative history (Edward Arnold, 1980), pp. 1–65. 
  • Reay B., ‘Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century England: the social context of illegitimacy in rural Kent’, Rural History 1:2 (1990), 219–247.  
  • Smith, R.M., ‘Marriage processes in the English past: some continuities’, in L. Bonfield, R.M. Smith and K. Wrightson (eds.) The World We Have Gained (Oxford, 1986), pp. 43–99.
JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER
And get notified everytime we publish a new blog post.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Leave a Reply

« Home
  • Recent posts

  • Pages

  • Archive

  • Tags

  • age at childbirth agricultural revolution coal contraception death demographic transition demography doctors economic history energy English peasants Europe family history family size family tree famine fertility fossil fuels genealogies households illegitimacy industrial revolution marriage medieval migration mortality naming practices non-marital fertility north-south divide occupational structure occupations old age organic economy plague poor laws population size serfdom social history surnames towns and cities urbanisation women's employment women's history women's wages women's work