Private Lives, Public Records: Illegitimacy and the Birth Certificate in Twentieth-Century Britain

Abstract

In the early decades of the twentieth century, as the British government expanded its social programs, and private charities and co-operative associations began to offer more benefits, birth certificates became essential to the bureaucratic process of establishing both age and identity. But every time a birth certificate was produced, it made the private circumstances of an individual's birth public knowledge. For those born out of wedlock, handing over these certificates was often stigmatizing at a time when illegitimacy remained for many a shameful family secret. When the government finally introduced an abbreviated birth certificate in 1947, which documented name, sex, and birth date without reference to parentage, they were responding to long-standing concerns both within and beyond the state bureaucracy about the tension inherent in keeping public records about people's private lives. The emergence of the short form birth certificate is thus part of a much larger human story that can help us to map significant shifts in the relationship between the individual citizen and the modern state in the information age.

Dishonoured: The Fate of Infants Born out of Wedlock

“…Civil registration of birth was introduced in England and Wales in 1836. Public records stigmatized those applying for school, insurance, or employment in an era when illegitimacy remained a shameful family secret [32]. The "New Poor Law" of 1834 and the "Bastardy Laws Amendment" of 1872 changed the rights of illegitimates and their mothers to paternal maintenance and parish relief [33].…”

Gender Transition: Is There a Right to Be Forgotten?

“…On the other hand, according to Durbach [ 26 ], the history of registers in the United Kingdom, for example, suggests that, although people’s documentation primarily addressed the needs of the state, this technique was also favourable to some social classes that participated in the process to the extent that their economic interests benefited. Interest in identification registration arose primarily to secure inheritance rights for wealthier social classes.…”

“…However, the registration of actual events, such as birth and marriage, was equally important for those who did not own property. In the UK, since the sixteenth century, people have understood that the registration of vital information could guarantee their property rights and their rights to state support in times of economic deprivation [ 26 ].…”

“…The United Kingdom discussed this idea on a similar issue in 1947. Attempts to allow birth certificate without the father’s name had limited success but were made as a public health measure and in light of the high mortality rates of out of wedlock children [ 26 ]. Recently, critiques of the gender binary view are gaining momentum as a growing number of countries—Belgium, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Malta, The Netherlands—now recognise nonbinary genders in official registries or use no gender markers at all in their official documentation [ 28 ].…”

Registering the Everyday: Documents, Bureaucracy, and the Socio-Legal

“…But there has been a consequential relationship between registration and the everyday since long before the pandemic. While the pandemic made this relationship visible to the public at large, for some groups, the capacity for registration to impact the everyday has long been an all too evident, seemingly inescapable aspect of their lives (see for discussion, Currah and Moore, 2009;Durbach, 2014;Spade, 2015). A range of scholarships from disciplines including Media Studies, Anthropology, and History have examined aspects of this relationship over previous decades (see for discussion, Vismann, 2008).…”