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The vulnerability of non-marital births « 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

The vulnerability of non-marital births

Alice Reid

A previous blog charted trends in non-marital conceptions and births in England from 1550 to the present. It argued that although many couples engaged in sexual intercourse before marriage, in most cases when a woman fell pregnant she and her partner married swiftly, so that the majority of extra-marital conceptions were born within marriage. Not all pregnant women were able to marry however, giving rise to extra-marital births, or ‘illegitimate’ children.

Literature depicts unmarried mothers (e.g. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles) and their children (e.g. Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist) as supremely disadvantaged: cast out from society, malnourished, excluded from work, forced into the awful clutches of the workhouse and doomed to early deaths. The children of unmarried mothers Hetty (in George Eliot’s Adam Bede), Fanny (in Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd), and Tess (in Hardy’s eponymous novel) all died within days of their birth.  

Walter Langley, Day Dreams. Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.

Demographic evidence shows that children born out of wedlock and their mothers did have notably worse life outcomes, but the routes to this disadvantage are less clear: was it due to the stigma attached to being an illegitimate child or an unmarried mother, or the result of the material disadvantages which came with such status? This blog outlines the changing mortality penalty for children with an unmarried mother, and describes how this can be investigated using historical demographic sources. 

The changing mortality penalty 

The graph below charts the mortality penalty of being the child of an unmarried mother. The red line shows the ratio of non-marital to marital infant mortality. In 1906, the children of unmarried mothers were twice as likely to die before the end of the first year of life as the children of married mothers. From 1917 the penalty started to decline, reaching a low point of 1.18 in 1960 (when the children of unmarried mothers were only 18 percent more likely to die than the children of married mothers). This rose slightly to around 1.5 in the 1980s and then fell again.  

A previous blog pointed out that the proportion of children born outside marriage has massively increased over the last few decades, and this means that children born outside marriage in recent years are unlikely to face the same levels of disadvantage (of various sorts) that they did in the past. 

Since 1993, the Office for National Statistics has published data on births and infant deaths for unmarried mothers according to whether a father is mentioned on the birth certificate and whether he resided at the same address as the mother. It turns out that the risk of infant mortality for unmarried couples who lived at the same address when the child was born (i.e. they were cohabiting) was almost identical to that for married couples, while the risk for unmarried couples living at different addresses (i.e. not-cohabiting) was similar, although a little lower, to that where a father was not mentioned at all (also treated here as not-cohabiting). The blue line shows that there is a persistent disadvantage attached to non-cohabitation, which shows no sign of declining. 

It should be remembered that this changing disadvantage is set against a massive drop in the risks of infant mortality for the children of both married and unmarried mothers. In 1901-10, 125 children out of every 1,000 (or one in eight) children born alive in England and Wales died before their first birthday. By 1960 this had dropped to 24 per 1,000 (one in 42 children), and was 3.9 per 1,000 in 2022 (one in 256 children). The absolute difference between the mortality of the children of cohabiting and those of non-cohabiting parents is now therefore very small, even compared to the 1930s when the ratio between the two measures was the same as today 

What are the possible reasons for this disadvantage? 

First births are more risky 

One element of this mortality penalty has nothing to do with marital status or cohabitation. It is that the vast majority of births outside marriage in the past (and also the majority of births to non-cohabiting parents today) are first births. For physiological reasons, first births are riskier – since the early 20th century, first-born infants have been about 20 percent more likely to die in infancy than second or third births. The fact that in the late 1950s mortality for the infants of unmarried mothers was only 18 percent more than for married (that is, similar to the risk associated with all first births) suggests that at that point in time there was little additional disadvantage for such children at least in terms of mortality. 

Compound disadvantages for unmarried mothers  

It’s likely that unmarried mothers had less money and poorer housing than married couples. Many such women will have been forced to go to work, and this probably led to early weaning and the dangers of artificial feeding. Some unmarried mothers were able to extract financial support from the father of their child, but would have lacked the day-today moral and physical support provided by a partner 

Wilhelm Alexander Meyerheim, Mother and baby in an interior (1882).

Those whose families provided practical and emotional support are likely to have suffered less than those without family or whose families were unsympathetic or unable to help. The stigma surrounding illegitimacy and the disapproval directed towards unmarried mothers may have compounded these disadvantages, making it difficult for such women to find appropriate work, lodgings, childcare, or emotional support.  

Campop researchers have used two rare sets of records to gain insight into the risk factors associated with unmarried motherhood. The first of these consists of records created by health visitors in Derbyshire in the early 20th century from their visits to infants over the course of the first few years of life. Health visitors recorded whether the mother worked during pregnancy, father’s occupation, how the infant was fed at each visit, and the cause of any infant death.  

The second source of data is derived from linking births, marriages, and deaths to census records for a select number of Scottish communities in the second half of the 19th century. This allows us to see who unmarried mothers and their children were living with. 

Unmarried mothers were often forced to give up breastfeeding 

In the UK today there are appropriate breast milk substitutes and universal access to clean water and sterilization facilities. Even in the early 20th century, however, this was not the case. The risk of milk contamination was considerable, and bottle-fed infants were at high risk of contracting a diarrhoeal disease. The Derbyshire data reveal that 16 percent of infants with unmarried mothers were already entirely bottle-fed by one month of age, and 37 percent by six months. While this may not seem high by today’s levels, the figures for the infants with married mothers in the dataset are only five percent at one month and 18 percent by six months.  

A mother breastfeeding her child in a cottage while her dog sits at her feet. Etching by C. Lewis after E. H. Landseer. Wellcome Collection.

Infants who were already bottle-fed at one month were 60 percent more likely to die between one month and one year old than those not bottle-fed. Although the dataset does not routinely record whether women returned to work after the birth of an infant, the mothers of 15 illegitimate children were given subsidised powdered milk within a few days of the birth of their child because they were returning to work. Only a few years earlier, in correspondence with the Women’s Cooperative Guild, one mother detailed some of the difficulties of combining work and breastfeeding: ‘Before three weeks I had to go out working, washing and cleaning, and so lost my milk and began with the bottle.  

Disentangling material circumstances and stigma 

Many unmarried mothers were the sole wage earner in their household, and therefore had to return to work shortly after the birth of their child. Female wage rates tended to be lower than male, even for similar jobs, and unmarried mothers probably had less choice of jobs available to them. Even those in work are likely to have suffered from poverty, and one of the perennial questions regarding the mortality risks for the children of unmarried mothers in the past is the extent to which these can be explained just by such poverty, or whether stigma and lack of social support also played a role 

The Derbyshire dataset offers a way to look at this by comparing survival among four groups of children during the First World War: those whose mother was unmarried and whose father was known to be a soldier; those whose mother was unmarried and whose father was not known to be a soldier; those whose mother was married to a soldier; and those whose mother was married to a non-soldier. Comparison between these groups allows the impact of both paternal absence on a day-to-day basis and poverty to be assessed.  

Soldiers were more likely to have been absent than fathers in other occupations, but as the married wives of soldiers were entitled to separation allowance, they were no worse off financially than other married women. The infant mortality of these two groups was very similar, suggesting that a father’s physical absence did not disadvantage legitimate infants, and the same is probably true of illegitimate infants.  

George Smith, The Soldier’s Wife. Torre Abbey Historic House and Gardens.

Unmarried women who had fallen pregnant to a soldier, however, were not only ineligible for separation allowance, but soldiers (unlike other unmarried fathers) could not be legally forced to provide for their child. Poverty was therefore probably highest amongst this group, and intermediate for other unmarried mothers who might have been able to extract some provision from the father. The risks of infant death mirror these patterns, with mortality rates for illegitimate children of soldiers twice as high as other illegitimate children, and legitimate children (whether or not the child of a soldier) having the lowest risks.  

Poverty was therefore an important driver of the poorer survival prospects of the children of unmarried mothers, but a statistical analysis indicates that it cannot explain all that disadvantage. This same pattern of an additional disadvantage on top of the effects of poverty was also found by Alysa Levene when she compared the survival of the infants of the married and unmarried poor in London workhouses and the London Foundling Hospital in the 18th century.  

The importance of familial support 

It’s particularly difficult to find out about social support for unmarried mothers, but linking births to census data enables us to identify those receiving support through living with family members. During normal times on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, the children of unmarried mothers suffered no mortality disadvantage. This may be because the majority of unmarried mothers (and their children) lived with their own parents for at least a year after the birth of the child. After this period of heightened vulnerability for children, many mothers would leave in search of work elsewhere, leaving the children with their grandparents 

Pierre Bonnard, Grandmother and Child. Leeds Museums and Galleries.

In years of economic hardship, illegitimate children did have higher risks of death. This may be connected to the fact that more mothers were forced to leave, and those without living parents were forced to leave children with more distant relatives. Although such relatives might have taken as good care of their young wards as grandparents did, there is evidence that this was not always the case, as illustrated by the example of Bennie MacDonald, who was living with her grandparents in the 1881 census. Both her grandparents had died before the 1891 census, and although Bennie was still living with her aunt, she was described not as a niece but as a servant – a telling indictment of how she was viewed by the household 

Familial support, particularly from grandparents, seems to have provided an important buffer to protect the children of unmarried mothers, but broad economic downturns were quicker to force such families into severe hardship.  

Long term trends

Most of the research on the mortality penalty of children of unmarried mothers at Campop has focused on the period up to the mid-1920s, and we can only offer tentative suggestions for why the penalty declined over the early 20th century. However, as mentioned earlier, this was a period of massive decline in infant mortality, particularly due to declines in infectious diseases, diarrhoea, and respiratory diseases. Improvements in housing and the extension of running water and sanitation to even the poorest households will have made bottle-feeding safer and reduced the likelihood of other infectious diseases, and this may have been particularly beneficial for the children of unmarried mothers.  

It is also interesting to consider the reasons for the continued mortality penalty for the children of non-cohabiting couples. Again, we can only speculate about this: in part it can be accounted for by the fact that the majority will have been first births which are more risky. In an era when it is common for households to have two sources of income, the remaining disadvantage could still be attributed to higher levels of poverty and a lack of material resources in some one-parent households 

Further reading

  • Levene, A. ‘The mortality penalty of illegitimate children: foundlings and poor children in eighteenth-century England’, in Alysa Levene, Thomas Nutt and Samantha Williams (eds.), Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700-1920 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 
  • Llewelyn Davies, M., Maternity. Letters from of Working-Class Women (London: Virago, 1978. First published 1915). 
  • Reid, A., ‘The influences on the health and mortality of illegitimate children in Derbyshire, 1917-1922′, in Alysa Levene, Thomas Nutt and Samantha Williams (eds.), Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700-1920 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 
  • Reid, A., Davies, R., Garrett, E., and Blaikie, A., ‘Vulnerability among illegitimate children in nineteenth century Scotland’, Annales de Démographie Historique 111:1 (2006), 89–114.  
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