In this meticulously researched and sensitively written book, Samantha Williams casts new light on the experiences of unmarried mothers and their interactions with the poor law in London from the early eighteenth through to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Fusing quantitative and qualitative approaches, Williams pays as much attention to emotions as to economics, never losing sight of the human stories underpinning the statistics.
In an initial chapter setting this new work in the context of the existing literature, Williams explores the variety of explanations that have been offered by different historians for the rise in the illegitimacy ratio over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and examines the particular characteristics of illegitimacy in London. Unmarried parents, she notes, ‘were part of a highly mobile population’ (p. 16) in the metropolis, with a large number of women being employed in domestic service and ‘unlikely to be able to afford to marry until they had accrued savings’ (p. 25).
Moving from the social and economic landscape to individual experiences, Williams then seeks to uncover the emotions of unmarried mothers. In exploring the concept of ‘shame’ in chapter 2, she dryly notes that ‘this chapter could be a history of others telling unmarried parents that they should feel shame’ (p. 46). Even written documentation expressing feelings of shame cannot be taken as evidence that this was what unmarried mothers actually felt; rather, if support from institutions and organisations ‘required such an expression to be successful’ (p. 46), it may simply have been strategic.
Unmarried mothers’ experiences of courtship, conception, and childbirth were also very varied, as chapter 3 shows. The relationships involved spanned the full range, from loving and stable unions to rapes. Ascertaining behaviour is one thing, but exactly what was intended or expected is virtually impossible for the historian to determine. As Williams notes, ‘although many started having sex at betrothal, a significant, but ultimately uncalculatable [sic], number engaged in sexual activity with little thought of marriage’ (p. 83). She is, however, able to provide evidence rebutting the stereotypical image of the unmarried mother giving birth alone and unaided. While there are examples of women giving birth in the fields, the privy, or alone in their bedrooms, a significant finding is that ‘a domestic delivery, with birth attendants, was more usual for unmarried mothers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (p. 91).
Births in the workhouse were more common in the nineteenth century – although still constituting only a minority – and chapter 4 provides particularly rich new data on the way in which unmarried mothers made use of the workhouses in St Luke's Chelsea and St Martin in the Fields. Williams examines not just the proportion of unmarried mothers who were delivered in the workhouse, but their profile, the duration of their stay and the manner in which they left, contrasting this data with that for married mothers. This brings out the similarities and differences between the two groups. On the one hand, unmarried and married mothers tended to be of a similar age, which, as Williams notes, ‘suggests that they were engaged in similar courtship behaviour’ (p. 119). On the other, while a sizeable proportion of unmarried mothers entered the workhouse a week or less before they gave birth, others did so when they were six to eight months pregnant, and ‘very few left quickly following childbirth’ (p. 122). It was married mothers who were more likely to enter the workhouse only very shortly before birth and to leave again shortly afterwards. Married mothers, in other words, seem to have been going to the workhouse in the same way that women would go to hospital to give birth today. The different experience of their unmarried counterparts underlines the fact that they simply did not have the same support available to them. Few were actually living with the father of their child and many recent migrants to the capital would have had no family close by. As Williams notes, it is likely that ‘even before advanced pregnancy [unmarried women] could no longer cope outside, perhaps having left their places, run out of savings or wanting to hide pregnancies from parents, employers and friends’ (p. 126).
Even if unmarried mothers were generally not living with the fathers of their children, could they nonetheless call upon them for financial support? Williams explores the issue of maintenance in chapter 5, revealing the wide gap that existed between what the law could in theory require a father to pay and what those tasked with administering the system could in practice extract. The extent to which parishes were able to recoup the costs of illegitimate children from alleged fathers varied considerably by region and the proportion recovered was particularly low in London. In some cases fathers may simply have been reluctant; as Williams notes, ‘it was easy to disappear in a city as large as London’ (p. 175). Yet, as she emphasises, an ‘important factor affecting the ability of the parochial authorities to recover bastardy costs was the poverty of fathers’ (p. 173). The records for a number of London parishes ‘reveal the constant and long-term difficulty of recouping the money from men over many years’ (p. 193). It is a story only too familiar from more recent attempts to enforce the payment of child support. For unmarried mothers in the nineteenth century, as the New Poor Law changed the way in which affiliation orders were made, the consequence was still greater reliance on the workhouse.
At least by this time unmarried mothers were less likely to be subjected to other forms of punishment. Chapter 6 shows that the fall in prosecutions for fornication and bastardy offences had occurred much earlier in London than elsewhere and that the number of cases in which men and women were whipped, incarcerated, or required to do penance ‘remained low throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (p. 223). Williams's conclusion is nonetheless ‘cautiously pessimistic’ (p. 236), emphasising that unmarried mothers had limited choices and that they – and their children – ‘were the casualties of a metropolitan sexual culture and a frequently unsympathetic welfare system’ (p. 236).
