To think that historical norms for men to marry (as opposed to simply financially support) women they impregnated weren't necessarily always positive?

[Carla786]

I've seen several comments here over the past year implying times were better for women when men would be pressured to marry a woman they got pregnant, that this was better than today when men can run with less repercussions, ignore CMS etc

Now I DO definitely agree that pressure to support financially was better in the past & the CMS is pathetically weak now.

But was the pressure to marry (which of course went hand in hand with shaming of single mothers) necessarily better?

In some cases it may have shamed men into shaping up into good fathers and partners. This is a good kind of pressure, obviously.

But otoh this pressure to marry also meant some women probably felt pressured to marry men who they didn't love and didn't want to marry, after an impulsive mistake. Especially in cases where the partners were young - are the first people someone dates necessarily the best choices to marry always? And of course divorce was much more taboo if a marriage did go wrong.

So I agree it had obvious pros but I think these kinds of posts overlook the cons.

Go on then…. Post one example where you have supposedly read this

It would have been good if my dad married my mum. At least I would known who he is.

Did women have say in this impregnation they didnt have to sleep with them

In the time you describe (most of recorded human history), premarital sex was not the norm for most people - the price of illegitimacy was too high for women, so most of them refused to do it. Whether that was a good thing or not... well, I'm sure you'll have your own opinion.

I should have thought there was a fair bit of premarital sex amongst the less respectable classes.
Having spent a fair bit of time on Ancestry and the likes, I should say that I've seen quite a lot of illegitimate births recorded in parish records, when people will tell you that clergy refused to baptise illegitimate babies.
I'm not sure it was always a matter of shaming the unmarried mother, rather that the parish had to pay for the upkeep of a 'bastard' if a father could not be found. The child had to be kept directly by the neighbours' contributions. I think it was more about that in reality.

It’s never been uncommon. Also, the level of stigma associated with premarital sex was not constant.

The ubiquity of sex before marriage is confirmed by trends in pre-marital conception which suggest that, before the mid-19th century, of all first births born within marriage, between 20 and 40 percent had been conceived before the wedding took place. Adding together first births born before a marriage and those conceived prior to, but born within a marriage, it is likely that in many periods in British history more than half of first-born children were conceived outside of wedlock.

It is also likely that there were other couples engaging in intercourse before marriage who had not fallen pregnant before the wedding: sex before marriage was probably the norm for all but the elite sectors of society.

www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/2024/10/03/sex-before-marriage/#:~:text=The%20ubiquity%20of%20sex%20before,a%20process%2C%20not%20an%20event

The Bible! repeatedly! It always made me very uncomfortable as a child hearing this as a “good example” in our Bible study 😳 terrible idea

In the Well-beloved, Thomas Hardy wrote about trial marriages on Portland. While islanders might be a bit different sometimes, I don't think it was a unique concept. There was lots of sex before marriage, especially in lower classes where they would have been less supervised, and no property to risk. There would also have been a lot of rape.

Yes, it would have sometimes ended in disastrous marriages, but so do some relationships where the couple start out madly in love.

Hang on, what were trial marriages? You mean couples living together and having sex as a try-out?

Exactly, Shakespeare's wife was pregnant before the marriage,,famously, and she's hardly the only one throughout history.

Plus remember a lot of illegitimate births were concealed by forced adoptions or by the woman's parents raising the child as their own.

Basically, yes.

One of the reasons that marriage gained legal status was to take the financial burden off local communities and make men take financial responsibility for the children they procreated.

It gets confusing when you overlay morality, religion, respectability, and then throw in romance and true love. At a basic level, the problem is, and always was, about men fucking around and fucking off without consequences.

Currently we’re living through a cultural revolution, dismantling the social constructions of marriage. We haven’t yet addressed the core issue properly because it suits too many agendas to blame women for men’s shortcomings - whether that’s loose immoral women, or the social scourge that we’re supposed to believe single mothers to be.

I don’t think it was better when raped women were forced to live with their attacker, when a teenage indiscretion could bring such shame on your family that the only options were disowning or forcing a marriage. I don’t think it was better when women were blocked from earning their own living to force their dependence on their husbands or when men legally owned their wives and children.

We could easily enforce paternal responsibilities if there was political will - we have unprecedented resources to do so.