Motivation and Motherhood: Past and Present Attributions in the Reconstruction of Illegitimacy

Abstract

‘Epidemics’ of teenage pregnancy and ‘amazing rises’ in illegitimacy are part of a recurrent moral panic about the social implications of sexual nonconformity. Simultaneously, major social surveys attempt to provide empirical assessments of actual sexual behaviour. There is often a yawning gulf between the images created by press and politicians and the experiences of their subjects. Similarly, in the 1850s when statistics first ruptured the cosy notion that rural Scotland was the home of all that was virtuous and that vice inhabited the cities, perplexed clerics and reformers set about creating convenient fictions to explain high levels of bastardy in farming districts. Their conclusions tell us far more about middle-class suppositions about sexual attitudes than they do about the motives of those that they purported to be investigating. Thus explanation of rural sexual behaviour needs to be sought in ways that reach beyond the ideology of social concern. This paper explores, first, the vocabularies of motive informing social investigation and, secondly, the local contexts in which women conceived, bore and reared their children, and the roles of poor relief, the churches, grandparents and fathers. Far from representing ‘an index of “disorganisation” in an urbanising epoch‘, unmarried motherhood appears to have been both a relevant and culturally sanctioned response to straitened circumstances (Goode, 1961). The discussion considers the pervasiveness of attempts to classify and contain illegitimacy within an underclass interpretation despite clear evidence to the contrary. Against such willing opacity, accessing the motives of the parents themselves remains a tantalizingly difficult exercise, especially when dealing with historical data beyond oral recall. The routes by which intentionality may be inferred are critically assessed.