“Remedies” and Remedies

Young people sought to resolve the challenge of untimely pregnancies in various ways. Male and female partners were involved with efforts to terminate the pregnancies—in effect, to induce abortion. Women’s reproductive health was potentially endangered both by the morbity of pregnancies and childbirth in pre-modern societies and by the potential risk of the “remedies” associated with attempting to end a pregnancy. A host of clergy, legal specialists, and friends and neighbors sought to support young couples in other ways by mediating informal settlements with the goal of ensuring safe deliveries and the welfare of the babies. In all of these efforts, working communities saw out-of-wedlock pregnancy as an inevitable if hopefully occasional occurrence to be managed pragmatically to secure the futures of all involved.

Conclusion

Although the later decades of the eighteenth century and the decade of the Revolution are often associated with important changes in marriage and family as well as other issues, the persistence of key patterns in young couples’ relationships is also striking. Courtship, heartbreak, untimely pregnancy, and out-of-wedlock births remained common in working communities. Pragmatic as well as emotional concerns underpinned marriage choices just as they had in the Old Regime. Women remained more vulnerable due to legal, cultural, and economic patterns that were very slow to change. The particularities of the Old Regime configurations of intimacy in working communities were only gradually adjusted after 1800.

Foundlings and Makeshift Coffins

Young couples, singly or together, could also choose to give up their baby to the local foundling hospital (the Hôtel-Dieu), seek to terminate a late term pregnancy, engage in situational infanticide by not providing essential newborn care, or more actively induce the newborn’s death. Single parents could negotiate with the Hôtel-Dieu staff months ahead of the babies’ due dates to make arrangements. Social welfare officials supported young women and held young men and male employers responsible, much as courts and communities did. They sought to discipline only women who were regarded as promiscuous. Court records and surgeons’ reports demonstrate that many late term terminations or post-natal newborn deaths were met with communal silence. Official reports of the finding of dead newborn cadavers around the city highlight how communal complicity, whether tacit silence or active assistance, enabled young people to deal with untimely pregnancies in a host of ways.

Intimate Labor

The pragmatic local management of out-of-wedlock pregnancy also relied on the paid work of landladies, midwives, and wet-nurses who made the smooth and even respectable handing of single parenthood possible. Some landladies specialized in short-term rentals to young expectant mothers for whom they provided pre- and post-natal care and arranged midwives and wet-nurses. Young men who did not or could not marry could save their reputations by meeting their paternal responsibilities—renting such a room, being present at the baby’s baptism, and taking custody of the newborn in arrangements that closely replicated what a paternity suit award would usually involve. Midwives also served as medico-legal experts who were gatekeepers to paternity suits as they had to confirm the alleged pregnancy for the courts.

Holding Men Responsible

Pregnancy, an inevitable hazard of the multi-step process into marriage that included intercourse before the wedding, was an important point of negotiation and often contention between couples and with community members. Women’s fertility sparked a series of discussions about the timing of the next step, but family and community could channel young couples toward marriage if they perceived matrimony was desirable but becoming unlikely - or prevent it. Through all of these negotiations and across generations and communities as well as between intimate partners, roiling emotions were integral to the transition into marriage or the decisions not to marry. A wide variety of community members acted as safeguarders who sought to ensure progression toward marriage before and after the birth of babies. Young women could go to court to make paternity claims against the alleged fathers, and courts, like communities, consistently expected young men to take responsibility.

Introduction

The extraordinary stories of ordinary people’s intimate lives provide a window into critical issues in French history, European history, and gender history. To historicize what have been universal experiences like young couples’ relationships, untimely pregnancies, and the interest of communities, states, and religions in managing those issues, this chapter explores the particular ways they were dealt with in an Old Regime city, Lyon, that was enmeshed in national and global as well as local trends and where young women as well as men provided key labor in the city’s expansive textile production.

Sourcing Intimate Histories

The histories of intimate lives have proven very elusive, but a rich series of long misunderstood legal documents offers an informative window into the social world of young workers. Understanding the long, complex history of their misrepresentation uncovers a trove brimming with evidence. Young women’s paternity suits, usually mischaracterized as pregnancy declarations (déclarations de grossesse), provide a thick vein of evidence about all aspects of young couples’ intimacy. The testimonies of witnesses provide a granular texture about their experiences, and young women sometimes deposited as evidence other material that is almost never extant for working communities in the form of letters, love notes, and out-of-court settlements. They reveal the material culture of intimacy.

Peril Stories

As young couples began their relationships, their intimacy from the start was a community project in which they were allowed extensive room to explore, in emotional as well as physical terms, relationships with potential life partners as long as they observed the conventions by which working communities defined what was licit. Their intimacy could be expansive as long as they conducted it in public spaces. The commitment to marry was soon followed by intercourse as part of the many steps into marriage rather than a “wedding day.” The promises to marry were accompanied by a shift to intimacy in personalized, interior spaces where women often described men’s use of violence as intrinsic to their first experience of intercourse. Community safeguarders sought to manage the risk of youthful intimacy by marking the boundaries, but courtship, even as it offered the potential opportunity of marriage, remained a perilous time for young women.