Pre-marital sex was not unusual in eighteenth-century England. Up to one third of women were pregnant when they got married, and by 1800 the illegitimacy ratio had reached 6.3 per cent of registered births, or 25 per cent of first births. Unmarried parenthood was, therefore, if not an everyday occurrence, at least a very real risk for a significant proportion of the population. However, most historical scholarship has studied unmarried parenthood through the lens of state and church records which were created for punishment and regulation, and which categorise it as deviant. The state regulated illegitimacy primarily through the poor law, and so many historians have followed these records to produce a picture in which unmarried parenthood was indelibly intertwined with poverty, and associated with destitution, shame, loss of control, and damage to social and financial credit for both mothers and fathers. I argue that these negative consequences were caused more by the wider context of poverty and the poor law, than by the cultural stigma surrounding illegitimacy. The relationships between couples, parents and children appear artificially antagonistic when mediated through the processes of the state, and these records also omit any middling or elite families who maintained children themselves. I argue that unmarried parenthood occurred across the socio-economic scale, and that poverty and the poor law heavily shaped experiences of unmarried parenthood. Comparing state-generated sources with those produced outside the punitive context, such as correspondence and diaries produced by middling and elite families, I argue, provides a much more complex view of shame, the balance of maternal and paternal authority, and the compatibility of unmarried parenthood with ideals of masculinity and femininity.
Dr Kate Gibson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester. Her first book, Illegitimacy, Family, and Stigma in England, 1660-1834 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) won the Women’s History Network Prize and was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize. She has held fellowships at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Huntington Library in California, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Manchester, and is a former editorial fellow for History Workshop. Her second, collaborative book, Faith in the Town: Lay Religion in Northern England, 1740-1830 is forthcoming with OUP, and she has published on the history of the family, illegitimacy, and marriage in The Historical Journal, Past and Present, Cultural and Social History and the Journal of Family History. Her current project is a history of fostering and adoption in eighteenth-century Britain.
All welcome- this seminar is free to attend, but advance registration is required.