When did it become socially acceptable to have a baby without being married?

[Lambsandchicks]

1990s? Or before that? Any history/sociology experts around?

80’s

@tmainsqueeze In case you don't know, it is still advantageous if you have children with the same partner both in and out of wedlock, to re-register the first ones as otherwise it can cause oddities when you die with regard to inheritance. It might be something to look into.

@reesewithoutaspoon

I got married when my son was 6 weeks old and I got him re registered. I was also told this was for inheritance reasons as an illegitimate child wasn't automatically allowed to inherit. I think the law changed around just after that point

The law on inheritance changed, and aside from some aristocratic titles, DC inherit regardless of whether parents are married.

But no-one tidied up the law on registration of births, and you can still be fined (£2) if you do not re-register your DC after marrying the father.

I think attitudes changed enormously during the 1980s.

Eastenders was huge then, and Michelle keepining her baby as a teenage mother was a big storyline - something that both reflected and reinforced attitudes.

But women had always been single parents - there had been a lot of it around during the war, when the traditional method of dealing with it was to relabel yourself 'Mrs' and say that the father had been killed in action. Of course, for many people that was, sadly, literally true.

1970's?

I (unmarried) had my first child in 1980 and my second in 1983 and it wasn’t a big deal then.

I guess it depends also on your family really.

DH from a rural working class family has two cousins whose fathers were American soldiers during WW2. Both mothers went on to marry different people after the war. They were not the only young women in those circumstances by a long way. As DH says, everyone knew everyone's business back then.

MIL's grandmother had a whole second raft of children after her husband died in the 1900s- with a man who apparently lived in her shed - again rural working class.

On my side though (big Catholic family) a cousin got married in a hurry in the early 1990s, but another cousin had her first in the late 1990s and her and her partner possibly won't ever marry.
The main thing that happened between those dates were the matriarch died. Make of that what you will!

IMO the stigma had certainly largely disappeared by the 80s. A school friend ‘had’ to get married in the late 60s and I do remember it being something of an Awful Warning to the rest of us - to make damn sure the boyfriend wore a condom - properly! The pill was available but not nearly so easily, or without sniffy disapproving looks, as it was later.

A year or so earlier we’d had an ‘ask me anything’ biology lesson, questions were asked anonymously on a piece of paper.

Someone asked about contraception and the teacher’s reply was (word for word, I still remember) - ‘This is something no NICE girl needs to know about until she’s married!’
So that was still a very common attitude then.

It really depends on your upbringing - I'm in my 30s - well educated, very good career independent of my husband financially and would say within my immediate family it's still considered socially unacceptable - I personally would never have done it. And I'd be terribly disappointed in my children one day if they had children without being married

H was born in the first months of 1978. His parents had a shotgun wedding at the back end of 1977. Back then there was pretence that he was born very early, and the only official wedding photos are just of the happy couple, and strictly head and shoulders only.

I remember an ex work colleague who 'had to get married' this was 1980s. Her mother insisted she get married and insisted she had to have some colour on her dress as she absolutely could not wear pure white. They later divorced, he was violent and abusive. Her mother told her divorce was unacceptable but by this time my colleague was at the end of her tether.
Another work colleague had a sister who was really her neice again 1980s. Her sister's boyfriend had left her pregnant so her parents decided the best thing to do was to adopt the child and raise him/her as their own.
In the 1980s my auntie got divorced. Her auntie told her she had brought great shame upon our family as 'We do not get divorced in our family.'
I'm divorced myself around 2015, and had to listen to comments of 'When I married, I married for life,' at work. Ridiculous, but it did not bother me one bit.

DM had a shotgun wedding in the 1960s when she was pregnant with me but it didn't last. It was a very big deal for both sets of parents.

I was the only child with divorced parents when I was at school in the 1970s. It didn't make a difference to how I was treated but it was 'known'.

When I left university in the late 1980s lots of uni friends cohabited, but all were married before DC. It would not have been seen as acceptable in that social group. Ok for others, maybe, but not for us.

Even when I had my own DC in the late 1990s, everyone in my NCT and mum and baby groups were married.

Even later, all but one couple of our 'school gate' friends were married too. It was a bit of a surprise as they had been together since they were 18. They have since married too.

Wracking my brains I can't think of many families that we know whose parents are unmarried. Younger generations of my family, DS and DD's friends' parents.... all married before DC. Even work colleagues over the years. Plenty of divorces but all married at the time of birth.

I think it is only in my current workplace that there is a single mother in our team and I think one of the men in his late 20s has a baby with his partner. It hasn't ever been said.

My point I think, is that for people in their 20s now it really isn't an issue. Earlier than that, it might not have been rare, but it was likely still commented on behind backs.

Unmarried women keeping children not such an issue from the 80s not such a problem if financially stable. But a young girl from an estate? my brother was born in 1993. I can still remember on one visit to the hospital hearing a young girl screaming for her baby and being told to be quiet, shouldn’t be a tart and it’s going to family who could care for it. I stood in the corridor horror struck. The door was slammed in my face. I remember asking mum if she would do that to me and she insisted she wouldn’t after all my granddads sister was his niece. Plus I remember the tuts and stares when I took my brother out by myself - I was a teenager when he was born. To say it felt unpleasant would be an understatement.
I lived in a London borough.

You chose an apt username @twinsetandpearl

Nobody seemed that censorious in 1988 when I had my first daughter.

At some point the sensible respectable people would have stopped saying x, y or z ''had'' to get married and would have begun to think that marriage would be a disaster. At some point, a disastrous marriage became ''worse'' than having a baby with a man you weren't married to.

@twinsetandpearl

It really depends on your upbringing - I'm in my 30s - well educated, very good career independent of my husband financially and would say within my immediate family it's still considered socially unacceptable - I personally would never have done it. And I'd be terribly disappointed in my children one day if they had children without being married

To me and dh (well educated MC, both with very traditional sets of parents) the question of being married or not, would be much less important than being in a stable, long-term relationship, as a dd was when her first was born.

She and SiL did marry not long afterwards, but it honestly didn’t occur to us to turn a hair about the fact of her being an ‘unmarried’ mother.

We’d have felt very differently about an accidental pregnancy from a casual relationship. Not from any moral stance, but from a practical one - finances, etc., how was she going to manage.

Might add that I ‘lived in sin’ as they used to all it, for 2 years with dh before we married. This was in the early 70s and even my true-blue-Tory, super-traditional parents never tried to dissuade me. And this despite my mother having told me in my teens that if you slept with a boyfriend he’d never marry you, because men didn’t want ‘shop-soiled goods’.

Attitudes had changed enormously, even with such as my DPs, during the previous 10 years or so.,

@twinsetandpearl

It really depends on your upbringing - I'm in my 30s - well educated, very good career independent of my husband financially and would say within my immediate family it's still considered socially unacceptable - I personally would never have done it. And I'd be terribly disappointed in my children one day if they had children without being married

I agree. I had children without being married and I think I only really realised after I'd done it, nope, this isn't ''done'' in my circles, in our family circle. I'm literally the only cousin who has done it and one of the cousins has been very unpleasant to me. Iced me. Fawns over the other cousins though. Funnily enough she was most vociferous in her condemnation of the nuns and the catholic church and the state's blind eye to their cruelty to single mothers on facebook!. But if she'd been there at the time she would have made an excellent nun.

+It really depends on your upbringing - I'm in my 30s - well educated, very good career independent of my husband financially and would say within my immediate family it's still considered socially unacceptable -*

I had the same upbringing. I’m nearly 60. Nobody batted an eyelid.

I remember having my son in 93. No one really cared then, but if people did care, l quite enjoyed shocking them with my shameless hussy values.

In 1940 my grandmother had the first of 4 DC out of wedlock, with 3 different fathers. One of the children had deep olive-toned skin so when he was around 8 he was placed in an orphanage for a year because my DGM couldn’t cope with people’s attitudes towards his skin tone. My DM and her siblings used to visit him and then he eventually returned home. Needless to say he became massively emotionally damaged throughout his life by this.

Three out of the four DC had no father figure in their life until the third child turned 3, and then the father of the 4th child was in their lives for many years. Still didn’t get married.

The older three DC are very emotionally damaged people; I am NC with my DM but I wish I’d asked years ago what it was like growing up because I would think the reason the older three are how they are is because of their childhood experiences from society etc. My DGM had no family support either. My DM used to have very heated arguments with her siblings about their DM and I never used to take any notice, being a child, but my DM always used to defend her DM vehemently.

Although I don’t know all the history, I can’t help but feel that my DGM was grossly irresponsible and selfish to have 4 DC out of wedlock (in the 1940’s/50’s) and that two of these DC were to the same married man who had DC with his wife too (the latter being vile on both their parts). Society’s attitudes at the time would have been such that these 4 innocent DC would have not have had an easy ride in life while young.

When my (very victorian-style-parenting, adopted) dad found out I was having my first in 1994 he said "shame my first grandchild is going to be a bastard ". Nice man

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow 😂 love your attitude!
Really shocked by some of the stories on this thread. The levels of judgement are horrendous. I hope that has generally improved now.

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow

Sil had dn in 81. No one really cared then either

DM had DB in 81 and was asked if she was 'keeping him' when she went to register the birth

"Eastenders was huge then, and Michelle keepining her baby as a teenage mother was a big storyline - something that both reflected and reinforced attitudes."

That's an interesting example. At the same time, the grandmother disapproved just as much of her mother Pauline having a child at the grand old age of 40 as she did of Michelle being a single, schoolgirl mother.
Michelle's baby father was her friend's father and while it was a minor scandal when it came out in Eastenders, I think our attitudes to middle aged men having babies with teenagers are probably more disapproving now than they were in those days.

"MIL's grandmother had a whole second raft of children after her husband died in the 1900s- with a man who apparently lived in her shed grin- again rural working class."

These things have always happened, but that's not the same as it being socially acceptable. One of my female ancestors was her baby father's housekeeper rather than his wife. It was presumably known about locally, but never acknowledged and my great uncle left that branch off the family tree because he was still ashamed of it decades later. We only spoke openly about it when his generation had died.

The fact that so many posters are equating unmarried with single makes me think that people still have a problem with unmarried couples planning a baby.