Fertility and Out-of-Wedlock Births
Did either of these two public policies, the regulation of child labor or the reform of the poor laws, have a discernable effect on British birth rates? The larger economic environment probably overshadowed both.
It seems unlikely that parish allowances were ever high enough or reliable enough to induce more births.31 In Ireland, a country that offered virtually no assistance to the poor, most families relied on an agricultural technology that allowed children to become productive at an early age. Fertility rates there far outstripped those in England in the early nineteenth century. Fear of the workhouse probably did more to discipline adult workers than to discourage births.Accountability for out-of-wedlock births also became more openly contested. In the early eighteenth century, single men were held accountable for the support of children born out of wedlock. In the second half of the century, non-marital fertility increased in most of Northwestern Europe along with declines in age at marriage. The likelihood of premarital sex probably changed less than its consequences. Paternal desertion became easier in a world where men could find jobs outside their community of birth.32 In France, before the revolution, an unmarried woman could sue the father of her child according to the doctrine of ‘‘creditur virgini” (literally, ‘‘give credence to the virgin”).
New legislation passed in 1793 guaranteed an illegitimate child full rights if recognized by its father, but forbade any investigation into paternity and stipulated that no married man could acknowledge an illegitimate child. Similarly, the Napoleonic code forbade investigation of fatherhood unless the mother in question had been abducted. This restriction, which remained in force until 1912, left unmarried mothers—and their children—in a vulnerable position.33 In the early nineteenth century, more than a third of all births in large cities such as Paris and Lyon took place outside of wedlock.
Every year thousands of infants were deposited into foundling hospitals.34A similar shift took place in England. Following the advice of Malthus, the authors of the Poor Law Report of 1834 (including Nassau Senior, Professor of Political Economy at Oxford) recommended elimination of legal responsibilities for fathers of bastard children. They quoted the observations of a vestry clerk in Cornwall to the effect that women were almost always responsible for seductions, often hoping to entrap the potential fathers.35 The report explained that, ‘‘the virtue of female chastity does not exist among the lower orders.”36 Such women had been known to seduce even the most respectable of men. A Mr. Simeon explained:
I rather believe we shall never be able to check the birth of bastard children by throwing the onus upon the man; and I feel strongly convinced, that until the law of this country is assimilated to the law of nature, and to the law of every other country, by throwing the onus more upon the females, the getting of bastard children will never be checked.37
The resulting legislation provoked such outrage that it was later revised to allow mothers to sue if they could meet stringent standards of proof.38
Reasoning about reproduction seldom took an explicit, calculating form. Still, the historical record shows that individuals responded to changes in the costs and benefits of family formation. Class interests were transparent. Factory owners had good reason to prefer the abolition of parish assistance to the regulation of child labor: the former policy would reduce their taxes, while the latter would decrease their profits. In the long run, regulation of child labor would benefit them as well, by improving the quality of the future labor force. Gender interests left a darker, more ambiguous mark. Men had a stake in future generations. But they could hedge their bets by avoiding responsibility for sexual mistakes. By and large, their calculations served them well.