Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution, and Social Change in Modern Europe

Abstract

Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution, and Social Change in Modern Europe Sexuality in traditional society may be thought of as a great iceberg, frozen by the command of custom, by the need of the surrounding community for stability at the cost of individuality, and by the dismal grind of daily life. Its thawing in England and Western Europe occurred roughly between the middle of the eighteenth and the end of the nineteenth centuries, when a revolution in eroticism took place, specifically among the lower classes, in the direction of libertine sexual behavior. One by one, great chunks-such as premarital sexuality, extraand intra-marital sexual styles, and the realm of the choice of partners-began falling away from the mass and melting into the swift streams of modern sexuality. This article considers the crumbling of only a small chunk of the ice: premarital sexuality among young people, studied from the evidence of illegitimacy. However, in other realms of sexuality, a liberalization was simultaneously in progress. There is evidence that masturbation was increasing in those years. The first transvestite appears in Berlin police blotters in 1823. Prostitution in Paris tripled in the first half of the nineteenth century. And, between 1830 and I855, reported rapes in France and England climbed by over 50 per cent.' It is not the concern of this paper, however, to pin down qualitatively these other developments. This is a task reserved for future research based upon a