THE UNWED MOTHER
Women who gave birth out of wedlock occupied an uneasy position in most communities. In nineteenth-century religious, moral and legal discourse, the single mother was represented as deviant, irresponsible and dangerous.
Envisaged as either a fallen woman or a prostitute, the unmarried mother was held up as the archetype of the sexual woman; a woman who was not subject to a man within marriage.74 And yet in popular portrayals and in material reality the single mother was not always so reviled. Rather, she was the object of sympathy and in some parts of Europe her existence (and that of her child) was accepted by a community which understood her plight even if it did not accept her morals. Attempts to marginalise and punish single mothers continued and even intensified in the nineteenth century, but the beginning of state provision for single mothers and their children is also in evidence. By the end of our period the impulse to castigate and punish had been leavened by some sympathy and the recognition of the possibility of redemption.The vast majority of single women who became pregnant had not indulged in ‘promiscuous' behaviour. In many parts of Europe, premarital sex was accepted as part of the courtship process prior to an agreed marriage if the woman conceived. In parts of France and Germany up to one-quarter of women were pregnant when they married. Illegitimacy rates appear extraordinarily high but the numbers conceal a reality of responsible and highly regulated sexual behaviour. In Bavaria, where the rate climbed to 25 per cent in some parishes in the middle of the century, children born to farm maids were easily incorporated into foster homes or cared for by grandparents.75 In Protestant Aberdeenshire in Scotland, where the church commonly treated ‘fornicators' in a punitive fashion by subjecting them to public condemnation, single mothers and their children were not only tolerated but actively incorporated into the community, with the children being brought up by grandparents whilst the mothers returned to service.76 And in Iceland it has been argued that high illegitimacy rates were due to a liberal attitude towards premarital sex; children born out of wedlock were tolerated in this society which traditionally accorded women a high status.77
Premarital fertility testing was widespread in rural Europe, but it has been argued that this practice broke down as the looser community ties in towns allowed men to escape their responsibilities, leaving women to bear the consequences alone.
In Glasgow it was noted that fathers simply assumed a new identity and disappeared into the streets, lanes and lodging houses where they could not be traced by the mothers of their illegitimate children or the parish upon which such women were forced to turn for financial support.78 Certainly, contemporary observers believed that urbanisation was to blame for apparently rising illegitimacy rates. Big cities, according to the German feminist Marianne Weber (1870—1950) in 1907, brought about the ‘disruption of traditional social communities’ and the destabilisation of marriage and morals.79 The fact that the majority of mothers were in their early twenties (similar to the average age of marriage) when they became pregnant suggests that these women had engaged in what they believed to be serious relationships.80 These were not women of ‘easy virtue’; the majority were employed in the typical occupations of working-class women — domestic service, garment work, seamstress — and had been expecting to marry their lovers. Indeed, there appears to be no real shift in attitudes towards sexuality associated with industrialisation. Illegitimacy rates were no higher in urban areas. Farm and factory workers alike engaged in premarital intercourse, but condemnation of the morals of the urban proletariat by critics fearful of the consequences of economic change was vociferous. What had changed, though, was the plight of the unmarried mother.The single mother’s most pressing problem was likely to be the practical and financial difficulties of looking after a child alone, rather than the implications of shame and lost virtue. The options facing the poor single mother were unenviable ones. The most extreme solution — and the rarest — was infanticide, usually by suffocation or exposure to the elements. The action of the infanticidal women must be seen in the context of mounting censure of extramarital sex, rural poverty and the relatively common occurrence of infant death from natural causes, although the fact that so few mothers took this drastic step should guard us against sweeping analyses.
Infanticide in the early modern period is often interpreted as the unmarried mother’s desperate measure to escape community reproach at a time when honour was integral to a woman’s economic survival. By the nineteenth century though, it has been suggested that economic forces drove some to commit child murder. An unmarried woman presented a threat to the fragile stability of rural communities at times of economic hardship. Such women tended either to migrate to towns and give birth there or — and this was only a tiny minority of cases — they maintained a semblance of normality, denying or concealing their pregnancy until they gave birth and killed the child in secrecy.81 The case of Mary Dempster is typical. Mary was employed as a servant in a hotel in Lerwick, Shetland, but she was not a native of the town. In 1895 Mary gave birth in her room having admitted to no one that she was pregnant, and the body of her child was discovered hidden in a hole in the water closet. She was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment but the prosecutor demonstrated some sympathy for the girl:She was a young woman 25 years of age. She had neither father nor mother, nor a home. She was a domestic servant dependent on her own exertions for a livelihood. She came here a few months ago as a servant in the Royal Hotel here. She was a stranger among strangers and in all probability had she disclosed her condition she would have been turned off, so where was she to go? She had no home, she would have been out of a situation, and the distress of mind she must have passed through during this time, and all the circumstances... almost relieved her of moral responsibility for the crime.82
The sympathy shown to Mary Dempster is in marked contrast to attitudes earlier in the century. Across Europe, infanticidal women had been punished extremely harshly since the sixteenth century — the death penalty was widely applied and in Scotland hanging was the penalty until 1809.
By 1900, though, the waning of strict church discipline and, perhaps more significant, the breakdown of kinship ties as a consequence of industrialisation and female labour mobility, resulted in greater understanding of the plight of these women. Even in Russia where harsh punishment had been the norm, infanti- cidal women were treated with a degree of understanding so that by the second half of the century psychologists were helping to acquit women on the grounds of psychological disturbance and diminished responsibility.83Infanticide was extremely rare. Child abandonment, on the other hand, became a common, even popular, option in some countries, for single mothers unable to bring up a child alone. It has been estimated that as late as the 1850s as many as 100,000 babies were abandoned every year in Europe.84 The majority of babies abandoned in foundling homes were illegitimate. In Paris, illegitimate infants accounted for never fewer than 85 per cent of foundlings throughout the nineteenth century. During the first three decades, around half of all illegitimate babies born in Paris and the department of the Seine were abandoned, although the increase in aid to unmarried mothers towards the end of the century and the phasing out of the turning cradle or tour which facilitated anonymous abandonment, resulted in a small abatement in these figures.85 Elsewhere though, abandonment reached epidemic proportions. In Milan, for instance, some 50,000 babies were abandoned between 1860 and 1869, and in Russia and the Habsburg Empire, state-sponsored foundling homes were larger than any of those found in Catholic Europe. Protestant Europe, notably Britain, Scandinavia and much of Germany, was less hospitable in this respect, preferring to encourage an ethos of individual responsibility rather than collective provision.
A mother's decision to deposit her infant in a foundling home was influenced by a variety of factors including shame, financial restraints and the availability of an anonymous system whereby no one could trace the parent.
In Brittany, for example, although illegitimacy rates were low, almost all illegitimate infants were abandoned on account of the strict moral climate. By contrast, in Russia it appears that the stigma of illegitimacy was less pronounced. According to one observer in Vologda province at the end of the nineteenth century, there were ‘women and girls with families of illegitimate children who live on what is given in the name of “Christ.” The people do not persecute them or chase out these women, but laugh at them and say: “Let them live as they wish”.'86 Here, economic problems were possibly the deciding factor in a mother's decision to abandon her child, as the majority were peasant women from the countryside surrounding Moscow and St Petersburg. However, the act of abandonment does not necessarily imply indifference to the child and its future. Mothers frequently gave their babies identity tags or left them with trinkets suggesting either that they hoped to reclaim the child at a later date or that they wished to register their attachment to the infant. Few mothers would have been aware of the horrendous mortality rates in the foundling homes. In Moscow up to 90 per cent of babies abandoned to the foundling hospital there perished.The position of the single mother in nineteenth century Europe was ambiguous. She was caught at the interstices of moral discourse and material reality, but ironically it was her religious detractors who provided a means of salvation through the provision of foundling homes or the local community which found ways of incorporating the child and its mother into economic life. However, the changes in attitudes towards motherhood and especially the creation of the ‘responsible mother' had an impact upon unmarried mothers too. When the state began to attach value to motherhood (as a service to the state) and to children (as future citizens), unwed mothers became the objects of greater sympathy and understanding and, as a result, limited state aid.
In France, aid to unmarried mothers was introduced in 1837 and increased after the 1860s in order to help the women keeptheir children. In Scotland, one local poor law officer remarked in 1873 that if such women were not granted some financial aid, ‘the mothers would be compelled probably to leave their service to keep their children, depending on daily and precarious employment, a position of much greater peril than that which they now occupy.'87 Survival as a single mother was difficult and the limited welfare payments may have made the difference between keeping a child and surrendering it to a charity. However, financial support did not come without strings attached. The incorporation of unmarried mothers into the agenda of respectability and responsibility was tinged with a punitive streak, especially in northern Europe. In the Magdalene homes of Scotland and Ireland, the refuge provided to unmarried mothers was complemented by training in domestic and nurturing skills in order that the ‘fallen woman' might be rehabilitated and go on to assume a respectable lifestyle.88 Unmarried mothers in Britain, Germany and Sweden received welfare at the cost of losing their children. In Germany, under the so-called Leipzig system, illegitimate children were farmed out to foster parents who were thought to provide a better upbringing than the ‘depraved' mothers. Elsewhere, sympathy for the unmarried mother and her child was founded upon notions of maternal duty and service. Women were no longer persuaded to abandon their infants to the care of others; rather they were encouraged to take responsibility and thereby redeem themselves through work and selfsacrifice for the sake of their children. The single mother still had to be taught how to act responsibly.
By the 1890s the single mother attracted support amongst feminist activists who argued that the value being ascribed to married mothers should apply to single women too. The French feminist Louise Koppe founded the first maternity home in Paris for the children who otherwise would have been abandoned in 1891.89 In Germany, Adele Schreiber, a member of the radical Bund fur Mutterschutz (League for the Protection of Mothers), campaigned for homes for single mothers and argued in 1904 that unmarried mothers should no longer be marginalised: ‘It is a disgrace to our culture that women are forced to conceal the maternity of which they should be proud', she wrote. ‘No woman can “fall from virtue” through motherhood.'90 The League's forthright views on illegitimacy and sexual morality — which included demanding equality of status for legitimate and illegitimate children and state support for motherhood — were not matched in other European states. The rehabilitation of the single mother still had some way to go.