A short — and completely unresearched — history of nonmarital childbearing

Last updated on: November 7, 2013 at 1:17 pm by Jane the Actuary

A short — and completely unresearched — history of nonmarital childbearing 2013-11-07T13:17:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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(Look, I wrote this up while proctoring an actuarial exam without internet access.)

We all know that having children outside of marriage is not new — what’s changed is, first, its prevalence, and, second, its acceptance.

We’re told that, when blacks were slaves, and children were raised communally by the grandmothers too old to work in the fields, and marriages weren’t legally recognized and could be split up by the slaveholder in any case, having children “out of wedlock” was quite normal and entirely accepted. Hence, high rates of nonmarital childbearing are another legacy of slavery.

Of course, there was a full century between the end of slavery and the Monihan (sp) Report, during which, until the 1920s, those former slaves generally lived as sharecroppers, and then, in waves of migration in the 1920s (or thereabouts, maybe the 1910s), responding to the pull of factories in the north, and in the 1960s, pushed out by the mechanization of cotton-growing, came to northern cities.

What was life like as a cotton farmer, and how did it make single-motherhood more, or less, difficult? I’m not sure. It was around 1890 or so when what’s his name declared, in a famous paper, that “the frontier was closed” — that is, that there was no means of moving ever-futher westward to settle new land, if you were a younger son and didn’t stand to inherit the farm from your father. In the sharecropping south, did sharecropping “rights” pass down through the family, or did black farmers move from one farm to the next in pursuit of better arrangements? Did a young man relatively easily find a white farmowner (are their farms still called “plantations” after the end of slavery? not sure.) from whom to share-crop some land, or was their always a constant lower-level migration into the cities? And, in this setting, were the children a farmer’s teenage girl bore just considered “another member of the household” and equally accepted by her future husband, if she married?

Anyway, a long time ago I read a book called “Wake Up Little Susie” about black and white nonmarital childbearing before Roe v. Wade. (I owned this book once, and there’s a certain chance it’s buried in the basement, rather than having been donated in one of my periodic purges; I’ll see if I can find it later.) For black families, this was just a part of life; for white girls, this required a trip to a maternity home, a quick signing of relinquishment papers, and a return back home as if she’d just been visiting an aunt out-of-town.

Of course, after Roe v. Wade, everything changed — or, maybe it’s more correct to say, after The Pill and the Sexual Revoluation and a whole constellation of events. That is, The Pill promised consequence-free sex, and the Sexual Revoluation which followed changed mores to say there’s nothing wrong with sex outside marriage, which meant that a baby is nothing to be ashamed of; getting pregnant becomes a matter of being unlucky, rather than being sinful. And the skyrocketing number of abortions wasn’t simply a matter of babies being aborted who, a decade prior, would have been delivered and surrendered for adoption or grown up in unhappy homes, but it meant that people felt even freer to engage in all the Free Love, knowing they abortion as a back-up. (Yes, I know that the birth rate dropped — but it dropped a decade prior to the legalization of abortion, in 1963; that’s the reason for the cut-off between the Baby Boom and the Baby Bust.)

* Look, I said this was unresearched — but it would be interesting to look at the way birth rates, abortion rates, and surveys on prevalence of sexual activity, in those first years abortion was legalized. And, yes, I know that abortion did exist before Roe v. Wade, with some states already having fairly liberal abortion laws, middle-class women able to find doctors who would certify that the abortion was “medically necessary,” and others finding a so-called “back-alley” abortion, but it was a completely different order of magnitude.

Anyway, I said before that once premarital sex is perfectly normal, then there’s no shame in getting pregnant, from a liberal point of view. And, with the advent of Roe v. Wade and the establishment of the Pro-Life movement, Christian conservatives find themselves in an awkward place, hesitant to shun a pregnant girl or unmarried woman because they don’t want to drive these girls/women to abortion. And the tendency moves to celebrating: “she chose life.”

Then, of course, in the seventies, we had the increase in divorce, and the fact that, in order to not create any impediments towards women divorcing their husbands (because, while men abandoning their families was nothing new, the idea that a woman could leave her husband and make something of herself, and be celebrated for it, was new), experts announced that divorce did children no harm because of their resiliance.

And if a chilid of divorced parents can do just fine, why not a child of two parents who never married at all?

Hollywood, of course, didn’t help, giving us such very prominent and visible examples of women having children without being married, or of marriages which don’t particularly last long anyway.

And among the current “Millenial” generation, both middle-class and poor, there’s a certain backlash: better never to marry than to have a bad marriage — but without the corresponding willingness to refrain from sex or at least be very, very determined to not get pregnant.

We’ve even got Experts telling us that, back a century or five ago, when people married young, it was reasonable to expect young people to refrain from sex until marriage, but now that it’s practically not possible to marry until one’s late twenties, what with education and career-building and all the general maturing that just doesn’t happen any sooner than that, there’s no way that young people can supress this basic drive, so the best you can hope for is to drill them in contraception and promote long-lasting methods.

And now we’ve got Gay Marriage — which is both cause and consequence of these trends. Young people have been conditioned to think of marriage as a union of two soulmates, and unrelated to childbearing except that, by coincidence, if you’ve found your soulmate in your late twenties, and are ready for children in your early thirties, marriage does come first. And if those soulmates happen to be of the same sex, it would be unfair to prevent them from marrying, right? — at the same time, same-sex marriage advocates, in order to gain support, have relentlessly hammered home the idea that “marriage is just about being united to the one you love.”

I’ve completely glossed over a further issue — the extent to which women can be financially better off being single, with government benefits, than married, and unqualified for them because the dad is considered to be capable of working, whether or not he is gainfully employed, looking for work, or just lazy. I really wouldn’t want to start discussing this withough looking at this history more in-depth.

Coming up next: my point — and I do have one. (But it’ll have to wait until later — lunch break is over.)

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