This article examines the bastardy clauses of the New
Poor Law of 1834 which made illegitimate children the responsibility of
single mothers. These clauses reveal a fundamental shift in thinking
about poverty and welfare from paternalism to Liberalism. Supporters
of the clauses imagined both men and women as free agents economically
responsible for themselves. Moreover, it was a Liberal project--largely
influenced by Thomas Robert Malthus and disseminated by the 1834
poor law Report from His Majesty's Commissioners for Inquiring into
the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws and
such novelists as Harriet Martineau--asserting that poverty arose
from overpopulation and that women more so than men were responsible
for determining demographic growth. In the context of Liberal thought,
single mothers and their out-of-wedlock children represented the worst
violators of independence and individualism, and the centuries-old
welfare provisions offered them among the worst obstacles to a free
market. Radical critics perceived in the bastardy clauses a challenge
to traditional notions of protecting society's weak and of allowing
the working class the "right" to receive parish and charitable
aid. Furthermore, critics recognized that the sexual double standard
inherent in the new clauses revealed the ideology of Liberalism: the
Liberal system magnified rather than minimized the advantages enjoyed
by society's enfranchised and the disadvantages experienced by society's
weakest members.
This article uses previously untapped archival sources to revise the dominant, negative view of London's eighteenth-century maternity hospitals, by reconstructing daily life at the British Lying-in Hospital. Though the hospital in fact helped to support women's work as midwives, its institutional practices altered the experience of childbirth both negatively and positively, which inspired rumors, criticism, and inflammatory published attacks. The article illuminates how two unrecognized events in 1751—the hospital's first epidemiological crisis, and the arrival of a new man-midwife who used instruments—may have become intertwined in the public imagination and helped to shape the terrible reputation of lying-in hospitals, despite their overall positive eighteenth-century record.
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