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.
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.
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The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure