Unwed mothers, urban institutions and female agency in early modern Dutch, German and Italian towns

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship has exposed the complexity of the position of unwed mothers in early modern society. The traditional focus on their social marginalization is complemented by a growing awareness and scrutiny of their agency in navigating the various social, cultural, economic and political constraints. The various formal and informal institutions that were available to them played significant roles in shaping the extent to which these women were able to exercise control and make meaningful decisions. The aim of this contribution is to assess how different institutional arrangements affected women’s options in navigating unwed motherhood across seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cities in Holland, Germany and Italy. Based on an overview of existing literature, we compare the experiences of unwed mothers by focusing on their scope of action before criminal courts, in litigation for marriage or financial compensation, and in abandonment practices. Differences cannot be characterized solely by contrasting Catholic and Protestant regions, nor can a North-South divide capture all variations we found. Rather, we argue, the contours of urban unwed mothers’ agency were shaped by a combination of women’s socio-economic status, the problematization of illegitimacy in societies, the availability of institutional arrangements relating to criminal prosecution, civil litigation, and welfare provisions, and the particular entanglements of these institutions in a given society.