Yes, They Did: Premarital Sex in (English) History
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If you go just by fiction and stereotypes, it’d be easy to think that nobody in the past could countenance having sex before marriage — that when it happened, it was hushed and secret, and that the possible consequences were so severe that women rarely risked them.
But this certainly wasn’t the case — far from it. There’s buckets of evidence of men and women frolicking without benefit of clergy, despite the wholesome and refined veneer many would like to put over history.
(This is a topic you can draw as far back in the past as you want to go, but I’m going to look at the Early Modern Period up to the twentieth century.)
The common theme that runs through this story is that it all comes down to social class. The chaste, virtuous ideal was relevant to the lives of unmarried women of higher social standing, and therefore most historical-fiction heroines. For one thing, their children would inherit or marry into money and property (see What’s in an Entail?), and their future husbands wanted to be sure that those children were theirs.
For another, it was generally supposed that women were innocent beings until their first sexual experience. After that point, their sexuality was let loose and required a man’s control to be kept in check. If an elite young woman was known to be sexually active, then she would be under suspicion for every moment that she wasn’t being watched by the public eye. Her reputation would be gone.
It is very easie for him which never experienced himself that vain Pleasure, or repenting Pleasure, chuse you whether I mean the accompanying of lewd Women, but such as are exercised and experimented in that kind of Drudgery; they I say, have a continual desire and Temptation is ready at hand: Therefore stake heed at the first, suffer not thy self to be led away into lustful Folly; for it is more easie for a young Man or Maid to forbear carnal Act than it is for a Widow …¹
In the late eighteenth century, people started to think that refined ladies were an exception to this rule. That women who were raised to be accomplished and leisured generally had too many finer feelings to become “degraded” in such a way. I could write a whole piece on this transition! And I will, but not right now.
Still, even after that, premarital chastity was very important for upper-class and upper-middle-class women.
But outside of this group, the picture was very different. Sex was actually a fairly common aspect of working-class and even middle-class courtship, once a couple was pretty well committed to each other — or once a woman thought a man was pretty well committed to her. It didn’t truly become shameful unless she was left with an illegitimate child.
At the end of the sixteenth century, a full quarter of the brides in certain rural English parishes went to the altar already pregnant. The percentage dipped during the Civil Wars and Interregnum (possibly because of issues with record-keeping rather than an actual change in practice), and came back up to about a fifth in the first decades of the eighteenth century, increasing to about forty percent by the end of it and into the nineteenth.²
And these are just the women whose premarital sex resulted in a pregnancy! More than that number were actually having it.
While some of this is probably just rooted in human nature, there’s another factor in play. In medieval Britain, marriage had been mostly about the couple consenting to be together rather than the ceremony. While the church and state would eventually try to enforce more formality, this tradition was remembered.
“Clandestine” marriages that played fast and loose with all requirements other than consent kept happening, and were only outlawed in England in 1754. (They could happen in Scotland until 1856, which is why eloping English couples often went to Gretna Green, just over the border.)
Rural areas also held onto courtship rituals that allowed unmarried couples to share a bed as long as they were fully dressed, or had a board placed between them — measures that were easy enough to get around, if you wanted.
Early in the nineteenth century, it was becoming less accepted for middle-class women to have sex during courtship as the culture of “refinement” spread downward. By the 1830s, middle-class premarital sex was much more cautious and infrequent, when it even happened. And by the end of the century, even upper-working-class women needed to avoid it to be respectable.
This is roughly the same timeline in which women’s ability to enjoy sex went from being commonly accepted to disbelieved.
Of course, not all sex was followed by a wedding. In some cases, that’s because the man died, or ran away, or just failed to come through. Young women who came to the cities alone ran into the latter two problems frequently. Without family members to push a suitor to the final step, they had very little power.
In others, there was never any agreement to get married. This was rarer, and mostly would have involved sex work or sexual assault. Historical sex work could be either done as a profession or on a casual basis, as needed between stints in domestic service or other jobs.
In these cases, a woman would have hoped strongly not to be pregnant, as society was not kind to unwed mothers. This was especially true if they were unsupported financially and required money from the parish to help take care of their children.
Among the urban poor, it was also common for men and women to have successive monogamous relationships without getting legally married. This meant that if a woman was abandoned, she could more easily start a new relationship — which she needed to do for financial support, especially if she had children — without worrying about being charged with bigamy.
Even if your heroine is well-off and would avoid premarital sex, this is important stuff to keep in mind. They’re living in a world where these things happen, and they would likely know about it.
For characters living in country society, it would be common knowledge. Many women they knew of would have had a child less than nine months after the wedding, and there would be local scandals about deserting suitors. And for characters who aren’t in the nobility or gentry, they might even participate in this kind of courtship, or have friends or siblings who do.
For stories set later in the nineteenth century, though, it would be much more taboo. Instead of being a dividing line between high society and everyone else, it would divide the immoral from everyone else. Couples who had premarital sex generally worked hard to hide it.
Some footnotes:
- The arraignment of lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women, by Joseph Swetnam (1615)
- Statistics drawn from P. E. H. Hair’s “Puritanism and Bridal Pregnancy: Some Doubts” in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (1977; vol. 7 no. 4) and Richard Adair’s Courtship, Illegitimacy, and Marriage in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, 1994).
And some other sources in general:
Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800–1975 (Oxford University Press, 1992)
R. B. Outhwaite, Clandestine Marriage in England, 1500–1850 (A&C Black, 1995)
Ben Wilson, The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain, 1789–1837 (Penguin, 2007)
Samantha Williams, Unmarried Motherhood in the Metropolis, 1700–1850: Pregnancy, the Poor Law and Provision (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
