Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789

Based on legal documents from Lyon, Julie Hardwick's book Sex in an Old Regime City challenges the conventional wisdom that young couples' relationships and women's efforts to control their reproductive health are based on a strong sexual double standard. She discovers a secret society of tactics used by young couples when they faced an unexpected pregnancy, such as attempting to terminate pregnancies, placing the newborn in local welfare institutions, or charging the infant to local welfare institutions. These support mechanisms made it possible for women to return to their jobs and typically marry later without incurring long-term expenses, ensuring that the women could resume their jobs and usually marry later without long-term costs.

\n Format: Hardback
\n Length: 288 pages
\n Publication date: 06 October 2020
\n Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
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Our perceptions of the long histories of young couples' relationships and women's efforts to manage their reproductive health are frequently underpinned by the notion of a pervasive sexual double standard. Julie Hardwick presents a significant reinterpretation of the history of young people's intimacy in her book Sex in an Old Regime City. Hardwick examines the relationships of young workers before marriage and after pregnancy, even if marriage did not follow, using legal records from the city of Lyon. She discovers that communities treated these occurrences without stigmatizing or moralizing. She uncovers a hidden world of strategies young couples enacted when they faced an untimely pregnancy. If they could not or would not marry, they sometimes tried to terminate pregnancies, to make the newborn go away by various measures, or to charge the infant to local welfare institutions. Far from being isolated, couples drew on the resources of local communities and networks. Clerics, midwives, wet nurses, landladies, lawyers, parents, and male partners in and outside the city offered pragmatic, sympathetic ways to help young, unmarried pregnant women deal with their situations and hold young men responsible for the reproductive consequences of their sexual activity. This was not merely emotional work; those involved were financially compensated. These support systems ensured that the women could resume their jobs and usually marry later, without long-term costs. By doing so, communities managed and minimized the disruptions and consequences, even in cases of abandonment and unprosecuted infanticide. This richly textured study re-thinks the ways in which fundamental issues of intimacy and gendered power were entwined with families, communities, and religious and secular institutions at all levels, from households.

\n Weight: 552g\n
Dimension: 166 x 244 x 29 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9780190945183\n \n