The Way We Lived Then by Jean Robin

Author:Jean Robin [Robin, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781351788212
Google: zX-YDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-05-08T05:06:11+00:00

Chapter 9

‘Fallen Women’

However light-heartedly some young women may have embarked on sex before marriage, confident in the belief that their lover would marry them when a child was conceived, they were in reality taking a considerable risk in having intercourse before the wedding, at a time when abortion was illegal and infanticide a capital offence.1 An examination of all known first births recorded in the Colyton baptismal register from 1 April 1851 to 31 March 1881, whether to a married or to a single woman, reveals that in addition to the 114 premarital pregnancies and the 107 conceptions after marriage which have already been discussed, a further fifty-seven first children were born out of wedlock altogether, and were therefore illegitimate in the eyes of the law. Thus, while only 38 per cent of known first born children in Colyton over a thirty-year period were conceived after the marriage of their parents, as many as one out of every three women known to have engaged in premarital sex resulting in the birth of a child found themselves faced with the prospect of bringing up their offspring without the help of its father. Just as women in Colyton in the second half of the nineteenth century who engaged in intercourse before marriage were carrying on a long tradition, so their contemporaries who became single mothers did not differ markedly from their predecessors living in the parish in earlier times. Illegitimacy had been a fact of life for centuries not only in Colyton, but in other parts of the country as well.2

Births outside marriage on this scale raise many questions about the society of which the single mothers were part, ranging from the degree of support they received as one-parent families, to the possibility that some of them may have formed an underclass whose members behaved in a way fundamentally different from those who had simply fallen in with the generally tolerated practice of intercourse before marriage, only to be let down by the man concerned, or even to have lost him through death by accident or illness. A study of the life histories of the women involved may help to answer these and other questions, if only to a limited degree.

It has been possible to trace ninety unmarried mothers between 1851 and 1881 who may be considered to be Colytonians, either because they themselves, their parents or their late husbands were born in the parish, or because they grew up there.3 Nine of these women were widows at the time of the conception of their children, and the remainder were single women. They were to be found in all sections of society, except for the small upper-middle class, but daughters of labourers were by far the most likely to bear an illegitimate child, with more than half of all the single mothers coming from this, the poorest social group. It should be remembered, however, that illegitimacy was less likely to be recorded for those in the more prosperous classes, who would not

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