ruined forever!

[marycatelli]

Read a story set in an alternate Regency, lately.

During which the story of a young woman led astray by a cad.  He's still acceptable in Society, of course, but she was cast out by her family onto the streets.

Which had me eying it.  Sir Thomas Bertram's very severe stand on his daughter who eloped with another man after her marriage was that he would never take her back into the family home.  And that was justified by his having inviting Fanny's sister Sally to live there, a young and impressionable girl.  And Colonel Brandon provided for the illegitimate daughter of his childhood sweetheart, even after her seduction and having a child.  Didn't let her meet anyone in society.  But out on the street in the best Victorian melodrama tradition was not in the cards.

Dumas described such women -- because of a scandal and the absence of a husband, banished from society or le monde, but not having recourse to even being a courtesan -- as the demimonde.  The term got quickly turned to mean kept women, but he meant the women who didn't opt for that after the scandal.  Apparently there were enough to coin a term.

Even in the Victorian era, even in classes lower than that, a lot of them were generally packed off to distant relatives -- or packed themselves off -- and passed themselves off as widows.  Jokes might be made out being widowed in the grass, but the number of widows floating about seems demographically implausible without such a contrivance.

Of course, young women might be told she was cast into the streets, to dissuade them.  hmmm. . . .

Comments

[redxcrosse.livejournal.com]

True Fact: in the late 1800s, a Czech woman got pregnant out of wedlock and was packed off to the New World. Her daughter (whom for some reason the family insisted on calling her sister) is my great grandmother.

[marycatelli]

That was another tactic: pass off the baby as her mother's. When the average woman had ten children, one every other year, it was perfectly normal for a woman to be pregnant when marrying off the older ones, so the timing wasn't implausible.

[alivion.livejournal.com]

My family makeup is somewhat old-fashioned. I'm the oldest of six, and my youngest sibling is fifteen years younger than me. I remember one time when the youngest was a toddler, our family went to a new church and we had some doing to convince people that the youngest was one of the siblings and not a representative of a third generation (there's a 13 year age difference between the "baby" and the oldest sister commonly taken to be her mother, but with one looking old for her age and the other looking young, I can see where the confusion comes from).

[marycatelli]

Huh. How much of an age gap was there between the baby and the next oldest child?

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

In my own adolescence, I knew of one teenage girl who was told to leave home when she got pregnant--she stayed with our neighbors. It may be that people in the recent past (I was a teenager some thirty years ago now...) were more harsh because of the perception of there being a social safety net. Maybe people were less likely to turn someone out when you thought it really was likely to result in their demise (all just musing and speculation...)

[marycatelli]

Well, to argue the other side, they were also more likely to turn someone out when you thought it really was likely to result in your demise if you didn't. One baby you could perhaps feed -- unless there was a famine -- but it would not stop at one if it carried no penalty.