Bastardy in South Germany: A Comment

Abstract

wages, which made it easier for people to support children born out of wedlock.' I am certainly sympathetic to his wage arguments, and to much of the logic of the article. But no at all? Not even a touch of saucy rebelliousness, an angryyoung-person-against-the-Hojbauerntum syndrome? His argument partly depends, of course, on what we mean by a sexual If we insist on a dramatic breakaway from previous styles, on homosexuality, oral intercourse, and the bondage-and-domination scene, then d'accord: no sexual revolution in early nineteenth-century Bavaria. But if we take mildly sensationalist notion of a revolution-which I myself am partly responsible for foisting upon the trade-to mean the sudden rejection by a whole generation of young people of their parents' values towards premarital intercourse, I think that such a did occur in Bavaria, and all over Europe, between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries. Here Lee and I differ. He argues that this illegitimacy did not imply a dramatic change in behavioral norms.... It did not conflict, in the opinion of the peasantry, either in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, with traditional moral norms (416). This, I think, is simply wrong. The mainstay of Lee's case is that the Bavarian peasantry had always accepted illegitimate children as more or less full-fledged family members, and that at the village level no one became very upset about out-of-wedlock conceptions. Illegitimate and legitimate children would inherit alike, work side by side, and enjoy roughly equal moral status in the local community. Because, according to Lee, continued to be true in I850 as well as in 1750, the great upsurge in bastardy had in no way conflicted with accepted local mores. Hence, no revolution.