Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Illegitimacy: Sex & Secrecy in the 18th Century

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Why were children punished for illegitimacy in the 18th century? And what does the word even mean?The truth is quite shocking, and probably still affects a lot of the people you know today.Joining Kate today is Kate Gibson, historian and author of Illegitimacy, Family, and Stigma in England, 1660-1834, to explore the ways that female sexuality played a part in the stigma of illegitimacy, and how attitudes evolved, from the Victorians up until the modern day.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXTYou can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I'm so glad that we get to do this again. I do enjoy our time together. But before we can enjoy any more of our time together, I have to tell you that this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things

and an adulty way covering a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. And if you can't take all of those boxes, just f*** off now, quite frankly. We don't need you around here, jeopardising everyone else's enjoyment and just frankly letting the side down. So this is your chance to just go.

You have been warned. You have been fair dues, warned the rest of you, which I hope is still quite a lot of you. I hope I haven't scared everyone away. But let's get on with the show. Here's a fun fact for you, betwixters. The legal definition of illegitimacy, which meant that if you were born out of wedlock,

you would have no legal rights to, say, property on your father's side, was only eradicated in 19. I mean, that's not really a fun fact. That's more of a shit fact, but it's a fact nonetheless. 1987! This speaks hugely to how stigmatized illegitimacy has been. I mean, just look at the name of it, for God's sake, illegitimate. You are deemed not legitimate by the state. You are not a legitimate person. Fuck off. And if you consider that 51% of babies born in 2021 were born to unmarried mothers, you could probably say that illicitly legitimacy has now become the norm. But that has certainly not always been the case. I mean,

if it was affecting people's lives in 1986, then just how was it affecting people as far back as the 18th century? Well, I think that we better go and have a look. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness had nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister.

If you were born in the long 18th century, as we historians like to call it, to a mother who wasn't married, then baby, you were in for one hell of a ride. Yep, it was a century of great social change, but there was a huge stigma around illegitimacy, with it being strongly linked to sin. How did the law put this prejudice into effect? What impacted the class you were born into have upon you if you were illegitimate? And what effect did it have on the mother's lives, who were often left, well, almost always left, to struggle in these situations? Joining me today is Kate Gibson, historian and author of Illigitimacy, Family and Stigma in England 1660 to 1834.

Birth certificates and hereditary titles at the ready. Let's do this. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheet. it's only Kate Gibson. How are you doing? Hi, I'm very well. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to have you here because you, well, you can tell me what your specialism is, but we are here to talk about your book, Ill legitimacy, Family and Stigma in England, 1660 to 1834. That is very niche, Kate. So what? And I love a niche historian. So what was it that made you, want to write this book, brought you to this research, the study of illegitimacy? So as a sort of baby historian when I was doing my master's, I was going to the archives in

the Sumberland Archive in the North East. And, you know, sometimes a historian, you just spend some time in the archive and you see if something strikes you, if you're kind of thinking of what else should I write about. And I came across this letter from a lad whose father was a gentleman. He had a landed estate, but he was illegitimate. His parents hadn't been married. And he was writing to his uncle and he joined the army and he was saying, I feel like I have been held back and I feel like people care that I am illegitimate. And his uncle had said something like, and paraphrase, it has been the lot of many a good man to be the child of parents who weren't married. Like, it's terrible, yes, but you can go with it. And I suddenly thought, oh, well, this seems to really matter to this guy.

but I've not read anything in my studies so far that suggests to me that I hadn't read any books about it. I didn't know anything about it. And so as quite often happens with historians, you're like, okay, well, there isn't a book. I'll write that book. Because if I'm wondering, other people are wondering as well. So it's all that one letter. I couldn't find the answer. So I decided to look myself.

I love a historian's origin story. I suppose we should start, like really, really, really basic page one question. What is illegitimacy? how do you define it? So, idiosimacy, bluntly, is just the quality of being born to parents who aren't married to each other. They could be married to someone else. It could be adultery.

It could be they just never got married. It could be from like a more casual relationship. It could be an exploitative relationship, prostitution. All kinds of, you know, human experience is infinite, right? So all kinds of relationships could end up in a child. And throughout human history until very, very recently, and through most, you know, most cultures in the world, illegitimate children are stigmatised in some way. There's some kind of punishment attached to it, whether that's loss of status.

So in Britain, for example, for a lot of history, you were excluded from certain legal rights. Wow. Yeah. Access to the welfare state, the kind of beginnings of the welfare state, illegitimate children had limited rights. When was that? So that's from like the beginning of the welfare state. So from the Elizabethan period on all words. What is it? Wow.

And it only changed, this old blow mind, it only changed in 1987. Oh! Yeah. 1987? Yeah. So there's 45-year-olds wandering around now who, when they were born, if their parents went married, they would have had certain legal disadvantages just attached to them being born. What were those disadvantages?

So if we're talking about the 20th century, single mothers and their children under Thatcher would be way down the council housing list. And that was the same in the 18th century as well. You wouldn't have the same rights to state support. You couldn't inherit anything from your parents until the middle of the 20th century. They reformed it a bit in the 1920s, but you couldn't inherit anything. That's wild. And so, for example, if your father was French, you couldn't get French citizenship.

You'd have no right through your father because the whole premise of being illegitimate is that they don't know who your father is. That's the whole basis of it. It's all about this worry about paternity. And so until we live in a world where you can prove paternity, so like DNA testing, there's still this massive question mark. You don't know who your father is. And so many legal rights for the whole of history pass through the father.

So if you have no father, you have no access to those legal rights. So that's the whole premise. It's all about uncertain paternity. Do you think that possibly, because mercifully now, we don't have that stigma. I mean, perhaps we're doing some places around the world and it's still kind of bubbling away somewhere. But really, nobody, at least in my experience, gives much of a shit about it. But do you think that maybe that coincided with the rise of DNA paternity tests? Yeah, so then this uncertain, this unknowable thing becomes knowable.

And at the root, it's all down to this worry about dangerous female sexuality and uncontrollable female sexuality. and the fact that a woman could almost trap a man into having a baby. Because we do that. And that the man would have no. Yeah. That's the like big patriarchal fear, though, for like thousands of years that women have sexual power. And that power kind of has to be controlled within marriage, right? So if you don't have marriage, it's uncontrollable.

And that kind of fear attaches to the child. So it's all at the root. It's all about this anxiety about fatherhood and women's sexuality. It must be. you've got to be right on that because I've often wondered, I'm very pleased that single parents aren't stigmatized in the same way that they were anymore, and it's pretty numb. But I have often wondered what it was that shifted,

that did away with thousands of years of stigma so quickly. Because as you've already pointed out, there are still people walking around who were affected by these laws. It's within living memory that it would be terribly shameful to have an illegitimate child, to the point where people were forced to give up babies and horrible, really dreadful things happened. And then it just very, very quickly in the space of like 40 years, we're now going, oh well, and it's because of paternity test. Paternity tests and also just wider understanding about women's rights. As the place of women in

society gets better, there's less fear about women being deceptive and having this dangerous sexuality. Attitudes towards premarital sex got a bit better, things like the pill. You know, so it gets more permissive anyway, sexual culture. but there's also this handy DNA testing where you can suddenly prove. And we're still dealing with the ramifications. I mean, it is by no means, of course, confined to Ireland, but the Irish mother and baby home scandal, you know, where women were forced into having their babies adopted.

Forced adoptions happened in Britain as well. And a lot of that was to do with the stigma of illegitimacy and the shame, but also this idea that an illegitimate child will not have a very good life. and a lot of women were told, give your baby up to a married couple who will look after it and it'll have a better life than it could have had with you

and that was the rationale that they used to persuade women, unmarried women to give up their babies. And that's in the 60s, in the 70s, very recent. So let's take it back far into history. Is there ever been a point when illegitimacy wasn't an issue? Or have there been kind of fluctuations in it

of points in history where it seems to have been a really big deal and then other times like now where we're kind of like, no, we're not that fussed about it. Yeah, it does fluctuate. I mean, so it's always a category. Illegimate children are always different to legitimate children. But the amount of difference in the amount of punishment varies quite a lot.

In the medieval period, they were kind of like tacitly tolerated. And it was reasonable that a nobleman would make his illegitimate child into a bishop or something as like a way of providing for them. But they still wouldn't have the same right. as the church becomes more and more Protestant, they get much more hardline. This is definitely what marriage is. There's a lot less flexibility about how you define marriage. And so the boundary between an illegitimate and illegitimate child becomes much more defined

and therefore the punishment becomes harder. The 18th century, which is what I specialize in, I personally think is a sort of slight high point of tolerance in the overall scheme because in the 18th century you get culturally this movement where there's this belief in human potential and you know philosophers like Rousseau and Locke are all like oh humans are blank slates and there's full of potential it could be whatever they want to be and um this kind of optimism that came out of the enlightenment about humans and and this idea that we should all be charitable to wields each other And so there were a lot of charities set on the 18th century to help illegitimate children,

to reduce them from being in poverty, to train them and give them an education and all that kind of stuff. And there were debates about whether the laws were too cruel. And then in the Victorian period, you get this moral panic about female sexuality again, and it becomes much more. Sounds like them. Yeah, classic Victorian. And right up through to kind of the 1960s, it's really a culture of secrecy and shame. and you hide the illegitimity at all costs.

Whereas in the 18th century, people weren't, like, jazzed about it, but they got on with it. If you had an illegitimate child in your family, you're like, okay, well, this isn't ideal, but we can work around it. And I have lots of examples of illegitimate children growing up into loving families who tried to mitigate some of the disadvantages in any way that they could.

So I do think there's this, sometimes with the history of sexuality, you have to think about it in terms of, of like a very outwardly punitive state and church teaching, but that's mitigated by ordinary people muddling through, trying to work it out between them. So quite often what happens at local level is not as bad as what the kind of official guidance is, if you see what I mean. I always think of that as like when I'm trying to explain to people and students,

like just because the church and the government and the big wigs are saying something does not mean that it translates. I always liken it to the NHS's recommendation that you have five pieces of fruit and veg per day and yet I had a cream egg for my breakfast. It's kind of like, like, it's there, but it doesn't mean that people are doing it. But I'm curious as to what would be the experience of an illegitimate...

Because you've got two things going on here. You've got the shame that's attached to the mother, presumably, and some shame to the father as well, if he's a scallywag and he's run off. But the shame that's lumped on the child themselves, who even if you buy into this idea that women shouldn't be doing this, the child has done nothing. They're just sort of wandering around. But what would be their experience? I'm really glad to hear that you say in the 18th century they might have kind of got through it. But would that have been across the board or is the certain classes that maybe it would have been harder for them? Yeah. I mean, so the rationale that about punishing the child is one as a deterrent. So that other parents will see that poor. child and they won't do it to their own children. Well, that's the rationale. It's the bonkers rationale. It's terrible. Yeah. And also that there's like a religious teaching. The Bible does

say that it calls it the stain is like attached to the bloodline of an illegitimate child so that you are affected. You're literally affected by the way you were conceived. And so that's why this sin attaches to the child, right? So that's the rationale. It wasn't as bad as that in practice, but that is the rationale. It varies massively according to your class. So if you were fairly wealthy and your father admitted paternity, I've got examples where their parents

were basically living together monogamously for long loving relationships, had multiple children, you know, to all intents purposes of marriage, it's just not legal. And those children were given a lot of support. So say, you know, you're an Obleman and your house is like entailed on your eldest legitimate child,

you would maybe save up a bit of cash to give to your illegitimate child because they can't inherit anything, but you're kind of putting something by that you can give them as a gift, right? So there are lots of ways where they try and sort of muddle something through or you try and find them a good job because you job somewhere. In the middle classes, it's a bit harder because everybody's resources are a bit squeezed, so there's not enough money to go around, Erasmus Darwin, who's like Charles Darwin's great grandfather, I want to say.

He had two illegitimate daughters before he got married. Everybody has them. They're everywhere. And he basically bought them a school. He trained them up to be school teachers because he knew he couldn't provide for them and they wouldn't be able to marry as well as his other children, his legitimate children. Okay. So he trained them to be school teachers, gave them an education, then he buys them a school.

And then he basically solicits all his patients to send them. their kids there to try and get a good job. Yeah. So he's trying to work within the restrictions to try and set them up in a good situation. And then if you were poor, so the state did help you. The state would try and get money back from your father, like child support essentially. That did vary quite a lot. Some fathers could run off and they couldn't find them. But the state wouldn't let you starve. but you might find it very hardgoing if you lived in a small community, if everybody knew what had happened, if there was judgment attached to your mother.

So, for example, you know, whether it was correct or not, some women were branded as prostitutes or, you know, this presumption that they're having loads of casual sex, that would be quite looked down on by the local community. So as a child, you might suffer shame from that. Very variable. A lot of it depends on whether your father admits paternity. is helpful to you or not.

What about for the mega rich? Because I'm aware that royalty of had mistresses left right and centre and they certainly left a collection, a squad of illegitimate children. Yeah, so one of my favourite case studies just because they left loads and loads of, their paper trails, massive, loads of letters.

So William IV, who was the one before Queen Victoria, he had 10 illegitimate children and no legitimate children. So Queen Victoria is his niece. So him and his brothers left no legitimate air apart from her. That's how come we had Queen Victoria. Wow. But she's got 10 healthy cousins who are all older than her.

Five of them are boys, big strapping lads, who all go into the Navy and the army and everything. And just by an accident that their parents weren't married, we ended up with a Queen Victoria and not a King George, who was the oldest of William Ford's children. And they were called the Fitz Clarences. So Fix is like a thing that they attach to royal children, which just means son of in Latin.

And William was the Duke of Clarence, so they are the Fits Clarences. And their mum was a renowned actress called Dorothy Georgian. She's great. She trod the boards. She was very famous. I'll be back with Kate after the short break. Like, because I know that there's stigma around this,

but it could almost be aspirational if you were the illegitimate son of the king. All right, you're illegitimate. But, you know, it's royalty. to hear. Yeah, and it's interesting because they're like celebrities. So their mother was famous. She, yeah, yeah. And it helped so they were beautiful children apparently. So they were very good looking. This is like the 17, 80, 1790s. So when they're in their 20s, then the polioidant wars are happening and all the boys are going off to fight. So they become heroes and their return or the fortunes of their ships is reported in the newspapers. So they distinguish

themselves in National Service, right? And their father supports them. He buys them various titles so the eldest boy becomes the Earl of Munster. The girls all marry into the aristocracy. So they become duchesses and countesses. And so there's this sense that they have royal blood and they're beautiful and accomplished. And so why wouldn't you want to marry one of them? but when you read their letters that they write themselves as adults, they're very sad and they're very poignant. And George, the eldest one, feels very frustrated that he isn't able to fulfill his potential. And he isn't occupying what he sees as his rightful place as the son of the king.

And he's not allowed any political influence. He's not, he's basically given an elder and then just kind of pushed off because they know he'll never become. king. He could never become king. And so he and his brothers write about how they're not given the respect they think they deserve and they feel like they would be really good at it, but they're not allowed to be it. And it, yeah, it's very sad. And he marries the illegitimate daughter of another Earl. He felt very frustrated about what had happened to him and he actually ended up killing himself. Yeah, it's very sad. I mean, it must have messed people up. I mean, even if, as you said, you're in the 18th century where people are making real efforts to go, hang on, maybe we don't

have to be complete jerks about this, but it's still to grow up and know that you've got that label, literally the label on your birth certificate, that must have been very, very difficult to deal with. And to know, I mean, in some cases you would grow up in the same house as your half-sibling who is legitimate and who's maybe younger than you and is going to inherit, it's going to be a duke, is going to inherit the whole, the whole shaband. It's a bit of tidy violins and these are still quite. privileged people. You know, they have wealthy fathers who are supporting them. But there's this

sense with this kind of elite masculinity where it's all about how much land you have and how much power and influence you have that you are not allowed to fulfil that potential. And so it kind of clashes with what you think your identity should be. And so there's a lot of letters where they complain about it and they ask for maybe could we reform some of the laws and no, it never gets anywhere. So what's going on in the 18th century then? Because there was a sort of a softening of attitude. I'm thinking of something like the Foundling Hospital,

which maybe you could tell us about and what that was. But there does seem to be a shift in attitudes around illegitimacy at this time. Yeah. So the Foundling Hospital was founded in the 1730s, and it was out of a worry that there were a lot of abandoned children on the streets of London. We don't have much corroborating evidence for that,

It's just what people were saying at the time. And this need for the state to do something, that this is a waste of humanity and this protection that England was a religious, virtuous country, and this is a terrible thing to happen. These initiatives to supposedly help illegitimate children, they're very patronising. And they're kind of like, oh, yes, you need charity, but we won't actually reform any of the laws that are putting you in this position.

We'll just help you a little bit. But it basically allowed women to give up their children to the institution. No questions asked really. And the idea was that if a woman could give up her child, they would both be better off. The child would be removed from the supposedly slightly dangerous influence of their mother who had done wrong by getting pregnant in first place. And that that woman would then be freed from the economic problem of having a child that she'd have to support. And she could then go on and get a job and get married and have a family, a legitimate, correct family of her own. So yes, in the 18th,

you have this kind of wave of philanthropy that is kind of more tolerant towards illegitimate children and seeing them as like an object of charity that a virtuous person would of course treat well because they're virtuous. But at the same time, you're also getting a slightly more permissive sexual culture is this idea that it's aspirational and good to want sexual satisfaction in marriage

or outside of marriage and that pursuing relationships like that is actually a human right. then you should be happy. So you get more people living outside of marriage for that reason. And the other big thing that happens is in the 17th century, you have these church courts that run by the Ankin Church that re-policed what people were doing. So you could be hauled in front of the church courts for fornication

and they would punish you by making you do penance in church or fining you or publicly shaming you in some way, right? And after the civil war, the church courts don't really come back in the same way, they stop during the Civil War and they don't really recover. And so the chances in the 18th century you actually being prosecuted for fornication goes right down. So there's less jeopardy involved in doing it. And as a culture, people, you know, historians have said, well, that means that the culture generally becomes more permissive because there's not this big threat of the shame and the sin hanging over you. I think one of the saddest things I've ever seen, well, it's not the saddest thing,

but it always stays with me, is in the founding hospital, they've still got all. all the tokens that were left behind. And tell me about that. You tell me about them. So there was this idea that mothers would be able to reclaim their children in the future. If they got a job and they married and they had a stable home, they could come and reclaim the child. Because there's no such thing as adoption.

You can't relinquish your parental rights. So that mother is still that child's mother legally. So the hospital can't keep them apart. But the hospital, in order to facilitate this separation and rehabilitation, as they saw it of the parent and the child, they anonymised the children. So when you left your child there, it would be given a number, its name would be changed. Their child would never find out its original name or the name of its mother. So in order to facilitate this miraculous reconciliation later, mothers would leave tokens with their children. and some of them are just, you know, scraps of cloth where they've obviously cut off a bit of their petticoat to leave it there because the nurse has said, do you want to leave a token with your child? And the mother has said, oh, I don't know what I have. So she's just cut off a bit of the bottom of her petticoat. Or pennies with holes drilled through them. Or padlocks, they're really sweet. Padlocks with initials on them. Obviously, like courtship tokens between lovers and the relationship's gone wrong or the partners died or something's happened. And they've given that

token in with the child. And they were kept in a file and the idea is that the child could request the token and that the mother could be like, well, that's the token I left with my child, therefore you must be my child. And it's heartbreaking really because we know that the number who actually reclaim their children is so low. I mean, really, really small numbers for whatever, for many reasons. But yeah, it's very, it's very sad. Was there a difference in the experience between being an illegitimate boy and being an illegitimate girl? Was it just kind of a bit crappy all round or did one fare better than the other? So it depends on your social class. Of course. So I would say, yeah, I mean, I would say among the very poor, it doesn't really matter

because the kind of penalties of being illegitimate of poverty of having a single parent household, single earner, that kind of affects you either way. Among the middle classes, I would say it was better to be a boy because you could go out and earn a living like anyone else and you wouldn't inherit your fortune anyway, so fine. Whereas girls, there might be some, like with the Darwin's, there might be some squeamishness about marrying for a girl and therefore a girl would probably have to earn her own living. So whereas your half-sister might get married

because she's got a dowry that she's inherited, you would have to go out and earn a living. So that's more of a difference. Among elites, I would say it's much worse to be a boy. because you can't inherit anything. With land and inheritance comes other signals of power, so you could be an MP and have influence that way, or you could be a landowner that has X number of acres,

employs X number of people, and you have influence that way. Whereas girls can marry, and as long as they've got a bit of cash, which their father might have given them, there's no reason why they can't marry just as well. And there doesn't seem to be any concern about, like, an inherited, promiscuity from the mother. That comes out in the 19th century. Victorians love that.

And I think it's a bit, you know, you get the rise of eugenics in the 19th century. I think it's to do with that. This idea that your blood could somehow be tainted in some way. So there's this perception that when you marry as a woman, you take on your husband's status. So it's almost if you make a good marriage, it kind of wipes the slate clean a little bit. Whereas if you're a boy, a woman marrying you, she would then share in your illegitimate status. So there's a bit more jeopardy, yeah, involved with marriage. I'll be back with Kate after this short break. So what did the Victorians do then? How did they kind of, I mean, it sounds like we're in the 18th century and it is patronising this kind of like, oh, we'll look after you. Don't worry,

it's okay, but they didn't really change much. But it sounds like there's a reasonable understanding around illegitimacy, and then the Victorians come in and start doing Victorian stuff all over the place. So what did they do to change the experience of an illegitimate person? So the really big change comes in your entitlement to welfare and financial support. So before 1834, an illegitimate child was entitled to state support and the state would try and find the father and make them pay child support. And there was this kind of assumption that having an illegitimate child was just a mistake or just something unfortunate that happened to you wasn't necessarily deliberate. There was lots of understanding that lots of things might have happened.

You know, you might have intended to get married, but then one of you lost your job. Or you might have intended to get married and then your fiancée's a soldierly dies and you're pregnant and left. And there was lots of premarital sex. It's not unusual to have sex before marriage. So there was this understanding there's lots of conditions that could result in an an individual child. Whereas after 1834, there's this big.

law change because the population's increasing, the cost of welfare is increasing, there's a bit of moral panic about, oh, it's all costing too much and we need to restrict entitlement to it. And they start, MPs start to say, well, we're spending too much money on these children. Their mothers have are feckless and have just decided to have all these children without getting married. How irresponsible. There's a lot more blame attached to the mother. they start to say one of the phrases that always I remember from the parliamentary papers

is one MP says that these children are a source of profit to these mothers. Oh, that sounds familiar. That sounds horrible. So Moveringly Thatcher uses very similar language, yeah. And this kind of benefit scrounging kind of rhetoric comes out. And so in 1834 they decide to completely remove the entitlement to support. Artholes. Yes.

So like a deterrent. Yeah, so they're basically, we won't pay for your fecklessness, is basically what they start to say. So there are still charities. There are still people that support unmarried mothers. The whole atmosphere becomes a lot more punitive and this idea that it's the woman's fault and that she has, you know, this, from Victorian fiction, you know, this idea of the fallen woman, you know, that becomes the dominant culture of it in the 19th century, which was not there in the 18th century. So what they did in 1834 is they basically, they removed the state helping at all. And did they remove the right to get the father to help?

Yeah. So this state won't pursue the father for you anymore. But you could kind of sue them privately. So like if you had been promised marriage and the man had reneged on the promise and you were pregnant, you could sue them. And in that case, the courts were supportive. They often did rule in favour of the mother. Or, for example, bigamy cases or cases where the woman thought she was married or had been promised things. The state would side with the mother. But that's a very kind of specific model of womanhood that you have to present to the court. You know, that you're an innocent woman that's being wronged who was promised something by a terrible man. and therefore the court have to protect you.

Whereas it's very hard to argue that if you are a woman, you know, making your own living, maybe with one or two children, especially if they were by different fathers. I mean, how you could prove that you were virtuous, but, you know, unfortunate, I don't know in that regard. So like, you'd have to fit a very narrow definition of a good woman in order to get state help. Whereas in the 18th century is like a blanket entitlement. So what's going to happen to you then? If you are a woman and you found yourself, oh, fuck, there's a baby on the way, dear, and there's no support. Like, what would a woman do in this situation?

Yeah, so a lot did have family help. Families didn't kick out everybody. You know, a lot of families did help you, especially sisters. You say you might go and live with your sister and she might help you raise your child with her children. or grandparents are really helpful. So you get these multi-generational households where a grandparent will take in the grandchild and then the mother can then go off and work

and she'll send money back. And you get all these amazing census records where there's a grandparent and a child and the census enumerates has been like, whose child is that? And the grandparents is like, that's mine. And it's not. It's an illegitimate grandchild.

Yeah. So that was an option. I mean, basically you have to try and work in some way and that is either leaving your child with family or childcare. So there were people who would take in lots of children and you'd pay them. And sometimes that care was great. There's a kind of archetypal image of the, they call them baby farmers, the Victorian baby farmer who's dosing all these children with laudanum and, you know,

to keep the quiet, you know. And so undoubtedly some childcare was very poor standard, but some was good. You just have fewer choices and it would be very hard. for a woman, a working class woman, to combine childcare and paid work. Most of the time she's going into domestic service. So that's a live-in job. She can't take a child with her. Or say she's working in a factory or a mill. Those are very long hours. And until the child is, say, seven or eight, they're not helpful economically. So you need to find someone to look after them. And what happened if you would, you know, go full Dickensian and you'd go off to the workhouse?

babies would be kept with their mothers until they were seven and then they would be separated. If you were an able-bodied woman, you wouldn't be allowed to stay in the workhouse. You'd be put to work. Whereas there is a sort of quite robust, you know, a child is a reasonable object of pity who obviously can't help themselves. And so they would still be admitted to the workhouse. But workhouses carry their own stigma throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. They're not pleasant places to be. You could be separated from your siblings, any other family that you had.

And most people try and stay out of the workhouse as much as possible. Or they go in and out of it. So, for example, I've got cases where a woman is obviously using the workhouse as childcare because she's got no other choice. And so she'll put a child in for a couple of months, take them out again, put them back in for a couple of months, take them out again. Because she's obviously desperately trying to keep them together. Yeah.

But sometimes she'll run out of money or sometimes she'll be sick. or something will happen. So, yeah, workhouses are very variable. It's absolutely awful. I mean, it seems like it was something that, although there was a huge amount of stigma attached to it, it's very punitive, that it was spoken about quite widely.

I mean, I'm just thinking out, it crops up in a few Jane Austen novels. There's a few characters that are, quote, unquote, natural, the natural daughter of such and such. And just the fact that Jane Austen is speaking about it in polite society, even though it's kind of like with a, oh, my goodness. But it seems like it was quite an open conversation. Yeah.

And also this is a society, remember, where people are introduced to you by, oh, they're such and such as child. Oh, that's true. They are introduced as this is a natural child. Yeah. Yeah. So family rate, but even if you were legitimate, you'd be like, oh, this is so and so. Their father is the bicker or their father is this. And so if you don't have anything to say, that's almost more suspicious.

So you're still, your family background's really important. But Jane Auster's a great example. You know, so like in Emma, Harriet Smith, I mean, her surname, it's a made-up surname. Her name's not Runey Smith. It's just tucked out in. I mean, I have one child whose name, he's enrolled in Westminster School as John Smith, son of John Smith. There is no John Smith. Oh, wow.

I know whose father is, it's not John Smith. You know, and so there's this kind of like veil of secrecy, but it's a see-through veil, you know. It's very obvious. But, you know, in Emma, Emma makes up this. romantic story about oh harriet smith is the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman and oh it's so romantic and her father will one day ride over and and say oh actually you know you're my child and then it turns out that her father is a shopkeeper you know and it's so boring and prosaic and so i'm is a bit disappointed but she's still friends with harriet because harriet is beautiful and lovely but it's a bit of a

condescending friendship you know patronising she tries to mould harriet and shape harriet and she doesn't view Harriet with shame, but Harriet's still not equal to her. Yes. So there's this kind of tacit. I mean, tolerance is not equal, right? Tolerance is begrudging. Yeah. So there's tolerance, but it's not anybody's first choice.

Do you think we were worse in the Victorian period or going into the 20th century? Because the stories that I hear living people around me, anecdotal, vicious stuff. Like you're talking about the mother and the baby homes. I mean, that is straight out of a Victorian situation. Thatcher, blaming it all on single mothers that they're just having these babies that and get free council houses. That's 19th century rhetoric as well.

Do you think, thankfully, things have improved now, but I'm just wondering, how long did this Victorian attitude last? And is it still around today? It's hard to say what's worth 19th or the early 20th century because I think it's just different, but it is using the same rhetoric and the same rationale. I think it's almost in the 20th century and things with forced adoptions,

it's almost dressed up as what's better for the child. It's almost dressed up as like a humanitarian thing and that you will have your child adopted because it's best for it to not know about where it came from. I think the secrecy is much, much worse in the 20th century. And secrecy is very damaging. You know, if you grow up, we know from sociology studies that if you grow up not understanding where you came from,

it's very damaging. and the campaigns currently character screens people campaigning for their own records because they have a right to know where they came from and they have a right to know what was hidden from them. That's not in the 18th century. There's not as much secrecy, really. And so I think that's a kind of extra layer of damage that care experience people are living with that has been inflicted on them by the state.

It's only really very, very recently that we have come to an understanding that is wrong to punish people for things that their parents did. a final question then, and this might be a bit of a tricky one, but do you think the stigma around illegitimacy is still with us? Like, it's been removed from law, it's not on birth certificates anymore. We're not forcing people to go for adoption. We don't have mother and baby homes that we force illegitimate children into. However, that doesn't mean that centuries of this stuff has just vanished overnight. So do you think that it's still with us? And what does that look like today? I mean, I'm an optimist. I really hope it's not really still with us. I think it's slowly fading,

because like you say, it was in living memory, so it's a slow process. But I think there's a lot more understanding now of different family types and that children can be loved in any type of family and it doesn't have to be this heterosexual nuclear two-parent, two point four children, ideal. And I think that's really helpful and that's helpful for everybody you know same-sex couples single-parent families we all benefit from from that i do think there is still some stigma especially in political rhetoric about fatherless children and this idea that fatherless children are more likely to be involved in crime or they're more likely to be supposedly bad citizens and i do think that is still there aren't sort of bubbling under the surface. I mean, a lot of the disadvantage with being illegitimate in

the past was just the disadvantage that came along with living in a single parent household, usually the mother, and that the economy wasn't set up for a woman to be able to earn enough money on her own. So the disadvantage is not necessarily being illegitimate. It's the poverty surrounding that. And I still think that that's a major structural problem with the economy where a single parent of either gender will find it very hard. to make ends meet, to pay childcare, to have a job with the right flexible hours and all this kind of stuff. And so I do think that that remains a problem and that if we're serious about, you know, tackling inequality, that really has to be fixed. Okay. You've been wonderful to talk to

about such a tricky subject as well. You've been fabulous. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? So they can Google me. Give her a Google. Yeah. And, So my book is out. You can buy it from all good bookshops. And your university library will also have it if you happen to be a member of that. And I write a lot for, because my current project is the history of fostering and adoption. So I write a lot of online. Care Experienced History Month is every April and I write a lot for that. So you'll be able to find my research online somewhere. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me today. You've been wonderful. Thank you for having it. It's a very fun discussion. Thanks for listening and thank you so much to Kate for joining me and if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like with you and follow along

wherever you get your podcasts. Even if you're illegitimate, we still want you. And if you want us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from the medieval nun who wrote about orgasming to a limited series called Inside the Witch Trials All Coming Your Way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagi and produced. by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This

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