In discussing marriage, premarital sex and children conceived outside of marriage in Hallowell during the time of Martha Ballard, Ulrich makes deductions from the insight into the community given in the diary. For instance, analysis revealed that the girls from Martha’s household, regardless of age or company, could be courted by suitors when alone. Hence, Ulrich gathered that there was no taboo against young ladies participating in mixed gatherings when accompanied or alone 145. However, social norms were still to be observed by everyone. The taverns, a site of political meetings, celebrations, courts and dance signals that the courtship patterns and customs wove into the larger community, reinforcing gender roles, celebrating group identity and maintaining the boundaries within which sexuality might be expressed 147. …show more content…
Furthermore, the attitude of the community to the crime of premarital sex was acceptance. Both fathers and mothers were held responsible for the child 158. Moreover, the process of dealing with such situations and the resulting child had become systematic. The women could confess the identity of the father and the father would be sued for the maintain ace of the child 151. Usually, as was in the case of Johnathan Ballard, marriage followed the birth of a child 155. But, marriage was not forced on the woman. Single mothers typically remained in their families of origin and married later157. Hence, Ulrich derived the conclusion that since children were free to choose their spouses with minimal parental intervention and explore their options that primatial sex and children conceived out of marriages were
Drawn from her surviving love letters and court records, The Burgermeister's Daughter is an engaging examination of the politics of sexuality, gender and family in the 16th century, and a supreme testament to the grit and perseverance of a woman who challenged the inequalities of this distant age. The story, in Steven Ozment's meticulous and experienced hands, goes well beyond the litigious Anna to encompass much else about the 16th century, including the nature of sexual morality, the social individuality of men and women, the jockeying for power between the upwardly striving bourgeoisie and the downward sliding nobility, and the aftereffect of the reformation on private life. Steven Ozment's understanding of the Medieval German society and its effects on its citizens is amazing. Steven Ozment brings a medieval drama to life in this extensively researched and absorbing account of the 30-year lawsuit between Anna Buschler and her family. Anna's father was the Burgermeister (mayor) of the German town of Schwabisch Hall. He banished his daughter from the family home in 1525 after he read letters that proved her sexual connection with two men. Anna responded by suing her father. Anna Buschler looked predestined to a comfortable and serene life, not one of constant personal and legal conflict. Born into an eminent and respectable family, self-confident and high-spirited in her youth, and a woman of acknowledged beauty, she had a standing as the beauty of her hometown, and as something of a free soul. In an era when women were presumed to be disciplined and loyal, Anna proved to be neither. Defying 16th-century social mores, she was the constant subject of defamation because of her indecent dress and flirtatious behavior. When her we...
In Wade F. Horn’s article “Promoting Marriage as a Means of Promoting Fatherhood,” Horn discusses how having a child and being married is better for children because the father is more involved in the child’s life. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’s “Unmarried with Children,” on the other hand, takes the reader through Jen’s story about getting pregnant at a young age and deciding not to marry the father of her son. While both sources make appeals to emotion, reason, and character, Edin and Kefalas’s article makes more successful appeals and thus is the stronger argument.
mates are chosen automatically by the society, and they have to apply for a child
In “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” Jacquelyn Hall explains that future generations would need to grapple with the expenses of commercialization and to expound a dream that grasped financial equity and group unanimity and also women’s freedom. I determined the reasons for ladies ' insubordination neither reclassified sexual orientation parts nor overcame financial reliance. I recollected why their craving for the trappings of advancement could obscure into a self-constraining consumerism. I estimated how a belief system of sentiment could end in sexual peril or a wedded lady 's troublesome twofold day. None of that, in any case, should cloud a generation’s legacy. I understand requirements for a standard of female open work, another style of sexual expressiveness, the section of ladies into open space and political battles beforehand cornered by men all these pushed against conventional limitations even as they made new susceptibilities.
Not only was having children out of wedlock a reason adoption was forced. If any child was abandoned, neglected or abuse, adoption was there for them to get them a better home. There was also private or attorney adoptions and public or private adoption agencies.
In the Puritan New England town of Salem, Massachusetts, a gathering of young ladies goes moving in the timberland with a dark slave named Tituba. While dancing, they are gotten by the nearby clergyman, Reverend Parris. One of the young ladies, Parris' little girl Betty, falls into a trance like state like state. A jam accumulates in the Paris home while gossipy tidbits about witchcraft fill the town. Having sent for Reverend Hale, a specialist on witchcraft, Parris questions Abigail Williams, the young ladies' instigator, about the occasions that occurred in the backwoods. Abigail, who is Parris' niece and ward, confesses to doing nothing past "dancing." While Parris tries to quiet the jam that has accumulated in his home, Abigail converses with a portion of alternate young ladies, letting them know not to confess to anything. John Proctor, a neighborhood agriculturist, at
Catharine Sedgwick’s novel, A New-England Tale, tells the story of an orphan, Jane Elton, who “fights to preserve her honesty and her dignity in a household where religion is much talked about but little practiced” (Back Cover). The story take place in the 1820s, a time when many children were suffering in silence due to the fact that there was really no way to get people to understand exactly how bad things were for them. The only way anyone could ever really get a true understanding of the lives of the children in these households would be by knowing what took place in their homes. Outside of the home these women seemed perfectly normal and there was not reason to suspect any crookedness. The author herself was raised by a woman of Calvinist religion and realized how unjust things were for her and how her upbringing had ultimately play at role on her outcome. Sedgwick uses her novel, A New-England Tale to express to her readers how dreadful life was being raised by women of Calvinist religion and it’s affect by depicting their customary domestic life. She takes her readers on an in deep journey through what a typical household in the 1820s would be like providing them with vivid descriptions and reenactments of the domestic life during this period.
She tells the girl to “walk like a lady” (320), “hem a dress when you see the hem coming down”, and “behave in front of boys you don’t know very well” (321), so as not to “become the slut you are so bent on becoming” (320). The repetition of the word “slut” and the multitude of rules that must be obeyed so as not to be perceived as such, indicates that the suppression of sexual desire is a particularly important aspect of being a proper woman in a patriarchal society. The young girl in this poem must deny her sexual desires, a quality intrinsic to human nature, or she will be reprimanded for being a loose woman. These restrictions do not allow her to experience the freedom that her male counterparts
Women and Abortion, Prospects of Criminal Charges Monograph, American Center for Bioethics, 422 C St., NE, Washington, DC 20002, Spring 1983
Throughout time sex has been used for the human species to reproduce. When birth control was invented, sex was no longer just for reproduction. Children, especially before birth control was invented, were often times the result of sexual relations. If children were born to parents who were not married, they were considered illegitimate and legitimate to parents who were married. Society has changed how it views sex in regards to who should have sex with whom and for what purpose.
Little views the intimacy of gestation as the most important factor to be considered when examining the issues of a woman’s right to determine a pregnancy. There are no other instances where the state mandates the existence of an intimate relationship agains the will of one of the participants and pregnancy should be no different.
...e open to all women at any point of pregnancy, and that the woman reserves the right as a fully conscious member of the moral community to choose to carry the child or not. She argues that fetuses are not persons or members of the moral community because they don’t fulfill the five qualities of personhood she has fashioned. Warren’s arguments are valid, mostly sound, and cover just about all aspects of the overall topic. However much she was inconsistent on the topic of infanticide, her overall writing was well done and consistent. Warren rejects emotional appeal in a very Vulcan like manner; devout to reason and logic and in doing so has created a well-written paper based solely on this rational mindset.
Thomson recognizes that this thought experiment has a very limited application – specifically to those instances where a pregnancy is the result of coercion or violence. In the sec...
Teenage pregnancy has always been present in society. There is research stating that about half the women, born between 1900- 1910, who were interviewed were non-virginal at marriage (17 Ravoira). This contradicts some thoughts that premarital sexual behavior is something new. There was another study done in 1953, it found that one fifth of all first births to women were conceived before marriage (17 Ravoira). Even before our modern openness in discussing sexual behavior and acceptance that it does occur, it was quite routine. In earlier society, the incidence of teenage pregnancy was a moral problem. This was because people looked at the child as filius nullius (nobody's child), or illegitimate and the mother as bad, immoral, over- sexed, etc. (18 Ravoira). The child was being blamed for mearly being born, this is unfair to the child who had no fault in the matter (18 Ravoira). The real problem that was seen was the fact that the children were born out-of-wedlock. People seemed to have real difficulty accepting that the baby is still a baby no matter what conditions it was born under.
Through this comparing and contrasting, E.E. Cummings is able to show the superficial and fabricated world that the Cambridge ladies have created. Although these women claim to be strict Protestants, their unsympathetic behavior proves to be less than holy. The Cambridge ladies are not able to fully understand the harsh reality of a world that lies beyond their trifle lives. Because they have already been given everything they need in life without working for it, the women are content with their set ways and have “comfortable minds” ([the Cambridge] ln. 2). These women have never known anything other than luxury and happiness. Thus, the ladies have no reason to challenge their church’s or society’s customs....