Illegitimacy Rates Research Articles

‘He came to her bed pretending courtship’: sex, courtship and the making of marriage in Ulster, 1750–1844

AbstractThe history of sex and sexuality is underdeveloped in Irish historical studies, particularly for the period before the late-nineteenth century. While much has been written on rates of illegitimacy in Ireland, and its regional diversity, little research has been conducted on how ordinary women and men viewed sex and sexuality. Moreover, we still know little about the roles that sex played in the rituals of courtship and marriage. Drawing on a sample of Presbyterian church records, this article offers some new insights into these areas. It argues that sexual intercourse and other forms of sexual activity formed part of the normal courtship rituals for many young Presbyterian couples in Ulster. Courting couples participated in non-penetrative sexual practices, such as petting, groping and bundling. Furthermore, while sexual intercourse did not have a place in the formal route to marriage, many couples engaged in it regardless.

First a job, and then a family? Impacts of disabilities on young people's life courses in a nineteenth-century Swedish region

This study considers the life courses of young men and women with and without disabilities in the Sundsvall region of Sweden during the nineteenth century. It aims to ascertain how disability and gender shaped their involvement in work and their experience of family in order to assess the extent of their social inclusion. Through the use of Swedish parish registers digitized by the Demographic Data Base, Umeå University, we examine 8,874 individuals observed from 15 to 33 years of age to investigate whether obtaining a job, getting married and having children were less frequent events for people with disabilities. Our results reveal that this was the case and particularly for those with mental disabilities, even if having an impairment did not wholly prevent people from finding a job. However, their work did not represent the key to family formation and for the women it implied a higher rate of illegitimacy. We argue that the lower level of inclusion in work and family was not solely the outcome of the impairment itself, but differed in relation to the particular attitudes towards men and women with disabilities within the labour market and society more generally in this particular context.

Nacimientos fuera del matrimonio en la historia de Chile: Algunos hechos estilizados

espanolEste trabajo identifica y examina una serie de hechos estilizados en la evolucion historica de la tasa de ilegitimidad en Chile, considerando datos agregados desde 1848 hasta el presente, asi como datos a nivel departamental para el periodo 1862-1948. Los resultados mas sustantivos apuntan a que las tasas de ilegitimidad y de matrimonios son fenomenos que cambian frente a transformaciones en la estructura economica y social existente y a los incentivos que ello genera en el comportamiento de los agentes. En particular, los resultados sugieren que el fuerte aumento de la tasa de ilegitimidad entre 1880 y 1920 probablemente va asociado a un intenso proceso de urbanizacion y de movimientos desde el campo (y de la agricultura) a la ciudad. Este gran aumento en la tasa de ilegitimidad del periodo mencionado no se compensa con los efectos de ingreso hasta la decada de 1920. La contracara de este fenomeno es la tasa de matrimonios por poblacion, en la que encontramos que existe una correlacion robusta con la razon de hombres a mujeres y con medidas de desarrollo economico, en que a mas desarrollo hay mas posibilidades de formalizar la relacion de pareja en un matrimonio EnglishThis paper presents a series of stylized facts about the historical evolution of the rate of illegitimacy in Chile, looking both at aggregate data from 1848 to the present and at department-level data for the 1862-1948 period. The main results suggest that the rate of illegitimacy and marriage are phenomena that change depending on the economic and social structure and the incentives present in different periods rather than being predetermined structural and historical situations. In particular, our results suggest that the sharp increase in the rate of illegitimacy in the period between 1880 and 1920 probably is correlated with urbanization and migration to cities (and agriculture from other sectors). This is not compensated by significant income effects until the early 1920s. In parallel, the ratio of marriages to the total population is also strongly correlated with the sex-ratio and with proxies of economic activity

Ilegitimidad, matrimonio y mercados de trabajo femeninos en la Galicia interior, 1570-1899

La Galicia interior es una región que aproximadamente supone un 20% del territorio de la Galicia actual. Hasta finales del Antiguo Régimen se caracterizó por estar escasamente urbanizada, poco poblada, por tener una agricultura de año y vez basada en el cultivo del centeno, el predominio de un modelo matrimonial y la familia compleja, y la existencia de un sistema hereditario no igualitario. En este contexto, los tradicionales niveles de ilegitimidad, situados en torno a un 5-6% del total de bautizados, experimentaron un franco y neto despegue a partir de 1770-1780. Determinar los factores que explican ese crecimiento ininterrumpido del fenómeno durante casi un siglo, nos ha llevado a estudiar los cambios que registró la estructura interna de la sexualidad ilegítima, las transformaciones operadas en los mercados matrimoniales locales y la crisis que conocieron los tradicionales mercados de trabajo femeninos, ejemplificada en este caso a través de lo ocurrido al servicio doméstico de la zona.http://dx.doi.org/10.15304/ohm.24.2827

Ritual and Conflict: The Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England, by Adrian Wilson

Adrian Wilson provides a comprehensive and critical historiographical survey of gender in early modern England. He seeks to resituate childbirth within the broader social and cultural milieu of life at this time. Principally, he challenges historians’ notions of gender relations and problematises the idea of patriarchy. He poses questions about our understanding of illegitimate births, marriage and male ‘superiority’ in the early modern period—suggesting possible avenues of research—and highlights the amount of investigation still required of scholars in this field. In order to reassess the place of childbirth in English society, Wilson tackles a series of different issues and topics. He begins with the argument that ‘bastard bearing’ was a hazard common to all early modern women. It was not, as has sometimes been suggested, the result of a deviant bastard-prone subculture. Rather, rates of illegitimacy reveal tensions and dislocations in the processes of courtship and marriage, and tensions between popular tolerance of bastard-bearing and the views of authorities who sought to surround the practice with ideas of shame. Although this chapter is largely based upon secondary material, Wilson’s argument is persuasive.

Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century Wales

Census returns and the Reports of the Commission of Enquiry into the State of Education in Wales (1847) reveal that in comparison with England certain parts of Wales experienced a significantly higher level of illegitimacy in the nineteenth century. This article seeks to demonstrate that increased illegitimacy existed in some parts of Wales at least a century and a half prior to the 'Blue Books' and that this was the result of courtship customs and marital traditions that were unique to Wales. Evidence of paternity in parish baptism registers allows for a distinction to be made between illegitimacy that resulted from permissible sexual relationships and illicit sexual encounters. Behaviour leading to illegitimacy can be categorized into four different types of sexual behaviour, of varying degrees of acceptability and stigmatization, based on the ways in which fathers are listed. When this typology is applied to the baptism registers of the parishes of St Peter's in Carmarthenshire and Hawarden in Flintshire it becomes clear that higher rates of illegitimacy in Wales were probably the result of socially acceptable relationships that may not have been condoned by ecclesiastical authorities, rather than illicit sexuality that was not generally condoned by communities or the authorities.

Convict Bastards, Common-Law Unions, and Shotgun Weddings

This article uses reconstituted family data from birth, death, and marriage registers to measure ex-nuptial fertility and premarital pregnancies in nineteenth-century Tasmania. It also examines the extent to which convict origins of European society on the island caused a departure from English norms of family formation behavior, during a period when men greatly outnumbered women. Illegitimacy was high during the convict period. From the mid-1850s, after the convict system collapsed, levels of ex-nupital births were relatively constant until the end of the century, as indicated both by the illegitimacy rate and by the proportion of marriages associated with prenuptial births. By the end of the nineteenth-century, rates of illegitimacy and prenuptial conceptions in Tasmania were well within the range of those of contemporary English-speaking populations.

The deviance of women: a critique and an enquiry

The deviance of women: a critique and an enquiry

Women in the Khrushchev Era by M. Ilic , S. E. Reid , L. Attwood (review)

reviews 741 education in the country at large (for instance in provincial universities), a much under-researched issue, given how much attention these academic controversies have received from historians over the years. Pollock's study is an extremely valuable contribution to the debate on the nature of Soviet science, but it also deserves a wider readership amongst all those interested in the influence that Marxist-Leninist ideology had over both the Soviet state and Josef Stalin personally. HistoryDepartment Michael Froggatt Universityof Durham Ilic,M., Reid, S. E. and Attwood, L. (eds).Women in the Khrushchev Era. Studies inRussian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2004. xiv + 254 pp. Glossary. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?50.00. As Melanie Ilic points out in the introduction, this is a neglected area despite the revival of thewomen question in theKhrushchev period and the avail ability of a wealth of resources. In the firstchapter, Ilic provides a useful overview of the period, pointing out how key policies (forexample, on hous ing, health, consumption) affectedwomen's lives.The revival of thewomen's department, abolished by Stalin in 1929, throughWomen's Councils repre sented the New Soviet Woman as a housewife-mother-activist. On the one hand, thismeant that the regime took the problems women faced in combin ing these roles with full-time employment seriously; on the other, the failure to address the gendered division of labour ensured that Soviet women contin ued to shoulder the double burden. There was at least more open discussion of reasons for marital discord, but there was also concern that sexual equality was undermining men and de-feminizing women. The advice literature on housekeeping which now appeared was firmly directed at a female readership. These points are developed in the two chapters on working women. Deploying usually overlooked data on female employment, Donald Filtzer reveals how women were marginalized inheavy industry,pushed out of skilled and better-paid positions which theyhad been doing since the 1940s, confined tomostly un-mechanized work. The double burden as well as the bias in favour of male labour prevented them from improving their skills, so that any woman who wanted to increase her earnings took on dangerous jobs. Female dominated sectors were regarded as less skilled and commanded lower pay than male-dominated sectors. Michaela Pohl's case study of female emigrants to theVirgin Lands reinforces these points, showing women being confined to less satisfying work. She also shows how Slavic women were expected to 'civilize' the area of settlement (northern Kazakhstan) through marriage, motherhood and social activism. At the same time, such women, especially from Moscow, were seen by the indigenous people as too assertive, immoral and even out of control. 742 seer, 86, 4, October 2008 Kristin Roth-Ey takes up this image of 'loose girls', examining themoral panic around the 1957Youth Festival which drew thousands of foreigners to Moscow. She argues that the conflicts over adolescent female sexuality and femininitypervaded representations of the festival, both in official discourse and in rumour. The former, however, did not directly address issues such as rising rates of illegitimacy, abortion and sexually transmitted diseases. Instead, concern was expressed about the threat to Soviet morality from disaffected teenagers' vulnerability to foreign, especiallyWestern, influences.The related theme of Communist Party attempts to regulate private life through advice literature on parenting and how itreinforced the traditional gendered division of roles between mothers (caring) and fathers (controlling) is pursued by Deborah Field. The aim was toproduce children who would put the collective first.Field shows how parents followed advice theyagreed with while ignoring the rest, refusing to relinquish private aspirations for their children. Another means of influencing gender roles was the cinema. John Haynes examines two key films,The Cranes areFlying (1957) and Ballad ofa Soldier (1959), focusing on the reconstruction of motherhood which, though remaining essentialist, was also a positive evaluation of women's experience. Lynne Attwood and Susan Reid redirect this focus to the domestic space. Reid returns to the theme of resistance toParty effortsto shape family life,this time through the aesthetics of the home. Attwood's examination ofKhrushchev's housing and domestic goods programmes shows both how they fell...

The Role of Mother and Baby Homes in the Adoption of Children Born Outside Marriage in Twentieth-Century England and Wales

This article looks at the role of mother and baby homes in the twentieth century in providing unmarried pregnant girls with accommodation and support while making decisions about their future, one option being to have their children adopted. It examines staffing and conditions, funding and management and the need that kept homes in existence until about 1970. It proposes that the unforgiving attitude of families and rejection of the girls by the community, a reverse of their usual supporting roles, influenced decisions to place children for adoption. Within the homes, the beliefs and ethics of the organisers and the freedom of matrons to make third party arrangements were important. External factors were high illegitimacy rates during two wars, pregnant war workers and service personnel wanting to make a new start during the second war, the pull of childless parents and, finally, the social climate of the 1960s.

Innocence and experience: sexuality among young people in modern France, c. 1750-1950

Prying into the sex lives of young people in the past has always proved a challenging exercise. Historians have often ended up relying on the testimony from adult observers or on the quantitative evidence provided by illegitimacy rates. This article adopts a more direct route by drawing on first-hand accounts of early sexual experiences written by French people in diaries, childhood reminiscences and autobiographies. As a preliminary, it analyses the way various authorities depicted young people as sexual (or non-sexual) beings, and the state of sex education in France before the mid-twentieth century. It then considers the way people depicted their first stirrings of sexuality during childhood and adolescence. Finally, it examines evidence from the "ego documents" on sexual relations in the run-up to marriage.

How Saucy did it Make the Poor? The Straw Plait and Hat Trades, Illegitimate Fertility and the Family in Nineteenth-Century Hertfordshire

Although the straw plait and hat industry provided considerable employment for women and children in south and west Hertfordshire in the nineteenth century, it was absent in much of the north and east of the county. Many contemporaries felt the industry had a deleterious effect upon morality and the stability of the family, and its regional specificity within Hertfordshire allows these propositions to be tested through a comparative analysis of illegitimacy and examination of the family circumstances of young straw workers. What is discovered is that illegitimacy ratios often give a misleading impression and fail to take into account the size of the population ‘at risk’, while illegitimacy rates suggest only minor differences between straw and non-straw areas, a more noticeable feature of the data being the generally higher illegitimacy rates found in Hertfordshire's small towns. Nor does the evidence suggest that the industry led to early break-up of families. The rise and decline of illegitimacy in England between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries presents a continuing conundrum, and while the growth and decay of the straw industry offers little explanatory value for this, this article suggests that the changing conditions in the agricultural labour market may have more relevance to counties such as Hertfordshire.

Rescuing Children and Policing Families: Adoption Policy in Weimar and Nazi Germany

When the First World War ended, Germany experienced an unprecedented period of political revolution, economic turmoil, and social upheaval. Among the myriad problems facing the nation was one concern that cut across party lines and prompted attention at both the national and local levels. Lawmakers, doctors, clergy, and ordinary Germans across the political spectrum agreed that the breakdown of the family had weakened the nation, contributed to military defeat, worsened economic misery, and exacerbated societal conflict. High divorce and illegitimacy rates together with an alarmingly low birth rate created a picture of families in crisis. The belief was widespread that only by creating policies that strengthened families would Germany stand a chance of regaining its historical strength. Because both Weimar and National Socialist policymakers saw the family as essential to rejuvenating the battered nation, the interwar era witnessed a wide variety of family-directed policies. Social welfare, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and maternity benefits were just the beginning of a series of programs designed to strengthen Germany and support families. While state programs targeted many different groups within society, children stood out as especially worthy recipients. Policymakers in both the Weimar and National Socialist eras recognized that children, the most vulnerable members of society and the nation's future, required special attention.

Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic by Julie Kipp (review)

MLR, 100.4, 2005 1097 major Scottish poets of the earlier twentieth century, Sydney Goodsir Smith's 1952 collection Robert Fergusson 1750-1774: Essays by Various Hands (London: Nelson) remains indispensable. However, since 'Heaven-Taught Fergusson' is the only booksized essay collection since then, it is a valuable attempt to reintroduce Fergusson to our contemporaries. General assessments of eighteenth-century literature need to include him more centrally. Moreover, the book is worth having just for the informa? tion Janet Sorenson provides about the word 'wow' (p. 117). University of Glasgow Alan Riach Romanticism, Maternity, and theBody Politic. By Julie Kipp. (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism) Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2003. xiii + 237pp. ?40; $60. ISBN 0-521-81455-3. This study explores a range of representations of maternity in the Romantic period, representations linked by their engagement with a paradox which, according to Kipp, lies at the heart ofRomantic-era motherhood, whereby mothers were encouraged both to follow their affectionate 'natures' and to subordinate their affections to the best interests of the child and the state. Thus, she suggests, maternity was structured as an almost untenable subject-position: mothers were 'dangerously good' ifthey loved their children indiscriminately yet 'naturally bad' if they did not love them enough. The boundaries between 'good' and 'bad' motherhood threatened to dissolve under the pressure of a doubly contradictory construction of motherhood: not only must the ideal mother identify closely with her child and also promote his or her develop? ment as an autonomous subject; she must negotiate too her own confinement to the domestic sphere and a compromised civic identity No wonder that mothers might become too closely involved with their children to act objectively and that maternal love might become 'a savage impulse'. As Kipp demonstrates, many post-Enlightenment literarytexts invoke the motherchild bond, earlier utilized by Kant, Rousseau, and Hume as a figure forwider social relations, as a means of naturalizing or critiquing other forms of social interaction. The figureof the Irish wet-nurse in Maria Edgeworth's Ennui is a telling example. As Kipp demonstrates, Ellinor's divided position as both natural and foster mother en? ables Edgeworth to explore the conflicted subjectivity of the Irish people, dependent politically and economically on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy (of which Edgeworth was herself a part). Moreover, Ellinor's indiscriminate feeding of her natural and foster child, and her success in substituting one for the other, suggest the fragilityand permeability of the boundaries between the Irish and Anglo-Irish peoples. Similarly, in The Heart of Midlothian the representation of distracted or infanticidal mothers allows Scott to explore the dangerous nature of passionate local (Scottish) attachments , which threatened the stability of what was, in his view, the progressive and enlightened Act of Union. This suggestive study also explores images of motherhood in the novels of Matthew Lewis and Mary Wollstonecraft and in the poetry of Charlotte Smith and Percy Shelley. Yet the question which it does not quite ask or answer is why maternity was figured in such strikingly ambivalent terms in the literature of the period. In this re? spect Kipp's study might have benefited from closer attention to the socio-economic and medical contexts of motherhood in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. This was a period of significant change in class structure and in patterns of inheritance. A powerful middle class favoured more equitable systems of inheri? tance than the landed gentry,but was equally anxious to make absolute distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate children. In recognizing only church marriages, 1098 Reviews Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753 not only firmed up the concept of legi? timacy but tied it more closely to the middle classes. Informal betrothal customs lost much of their coercive power, illegitimacy rates rose among the poor, and con? cerns about infanticide and abortion led to the criminalizing of abortion in 1803. Reproduction, like production, was thus increasingly regulated by the nation state, with sanctions against 'improper' motherhood increasing the risks of maternity. The rise of obstetric medicine created additional pressures. In order to account for the physiological changes which took place in pregnancy, influential accoucheurs such as Thomas Denman developed existing...

Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada's Second World War (review)

Reviewed by: Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada's Second World War Michael D. Stevenson Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada's Second World War. Jeffrey A. Keshen. Vancouver: UBC Press2004. Pp. x, 389, illus. $45.00 In Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers, Jeff Keshen provides a groundbreaking examination of the impact of the Second World War on Canadian society by challenging the prevailing popular conception that the events of 1939-1945 constituted Canada's "good war." While Keshen carefully documents Canada's remarkable economic and military contributions to the Allied cause, he convincingly demonstrates that the traditional picture of the Canadian war effort has been 'sanitized and simplified" to largely ignore the war's serious negative social ramifications. Keshen divides his book into two parts. In the first, he emphasizes Canada's "patriotic" response to the war, a response that justifiably forms the basis of the "good war" viewpoint. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of men and women who volunteered for active military duty, the grassroots response of Canadians to the war was impressive. Spurred by government propaganda campaigns, Canadians donated $90 million to the Red Cross, purchased $12.5 billion worth of Victory Bonds, and salvaged more than 350,000 tons of recyclable materials. Canadian workers also participated fully in the burgeoning wartime economy largely supervised by federal agencies such as the Department of Munitions and Supply. Although this unprecedented economic growth exacerbated existing rural-urban and inter-provincial disparities, Keshen demonstrates that the Canadian government nonetheless presided over an administrative apparatus that regimented the activities of Canadian workers, controlled prices and wages, and laid the foundation of the postwar welfare state. [End Page 365] Keshen then devotes the majority of his text to the "problematic" aspects of the war effort by examining the negative impact of the war on many sectors of the Canadian population. In the economic field, Keshen focuses on the urban housing crisis and the thriving black market to demonstrate the financial hardships the war spawned. Government attempts to build an adequate supply of dwellings through Wartime Housing Incorporated proved to be woefully inadequate, and unscrupulous landlords took full advantage of the excess demand for lodging by gouging tenants, despite the imposition of rent controls. Stringent restrictions on the production of non-essential goods and the rationing of civilian supplies also created a thriving black market in gasoline, clothing, and food, despite the efforts of the Wartime Prices and Trade Board to prevent profiteering. Keshen also documents the negative impact of the war on Canadian morals. Wartime privations encouraged the use of alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs, and Canada's social fabric was stretched further by a significant increase in rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and venereal disease. Public concerns about the moral impact of the war manifested themselves in increased - and often unjustified - attention being paid to the activities of Canada's youth. Keshen provides a comprehensive overview of the resettling of thousands of British children in Canada, the rise in juvenile delinquency rates, and the implementation of progressive initiatives such as organized recreational facilities and reforms to the juvenile justice system. On no segment of society did the war have as great an impact as it did on Canada's women. Keshen devotes much attention to the "chaotic and at times contradictory" results of the full-fledged participation of Canadian women in the civilian and military arenas. Between 1939 and 1944, the number of working women increased by more than 50 per cent, with the number of women employed in the non-textile manufacturing sector alone increasing from 6,000 to more than 261,000. This influx of women into the labour market, however, upset many traditionalists who sought to maintain women within their traditional domestic confines. Many working women also struggled to obtain adequate child care and resisted government and business initiatives to undercut their new-found economic freedom by forcing them to relinquish their jobs to returning male veterans. The influx of nearly 45,000 women into the three military service branches posed an even greater challenge to the traditional, gendered order of Canadian society. Servicewomen were indeed subjected to more stringent moral constraints than their male counterparts and many active duty...

Community and Discipline in Ulster Presbyterianism,c.1770–1840

Ulster Presbyterians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries formally dealt out retribution, repentance and reconciliation through church discipline administered by Kirk sessions and presbyteries. These institutional structures had given Presbyterians an organizational framework that enhanced their geographical concentration in the north-east of Ireland. Hitherto, historians of Presbyterianism in Ireland have taken the view, often based on evidence from the period before 1740, that discipline was effective, broad in its coverage, and hard yet fair in its judgements, claims made all the more remarkable as the north-east had the highest illegitimacy rates in Ireland during the period under consideration. It has been argued that though the system largely survived the eighteenth century, it collapsed at the turn of the nineteenth because of a loss of morale among Presbyterians after the failure of the 1798 rebellion in which many thousands of them had taken part.

Suicide in the Ukraine.

The suicide rates of the 24 provinces (oblasts) of the Ukraine were found to be strongly associated with indices of social disintegration (such as divorce and illegitimacy rates), with the Western provinces incorporated in the USSR later than other Ukrainian territories having lower suicide rates and lower levels of social disintegration.

Hijos sanos y legítimos: sobre matrimonio y asistencia social en Argentina (1935-1948)

Este artículo analiza las formas que asumió la ayuda social en el período 1935-48, considerando especialmente los aspectos diferenciales de la mortalidad infantil y los índices de natalidad en las áreas urbanizadas del litoral argentino. Diferentes instituciones sanitarias estatales, como institutos de pediatría y maternidades, llevaron a cabo una tarea asistencial entre madres solteras en la cual tenía un papel importante la enseñanza moral, con insistencia en el papel regulador del matrimonio - incluso religioso - para evitar las altas tasas de ilegitimidad de los hijos. En esta tarea, médicos, visitadoras y asistentes sociales de instituciones estatales coincidían con la jerarquía eclesiástica y con intelectuales católicos, ya que ambos sectores consideraban esencial la legitimidad matrimonial para limitar el descenso demográfico nacional.

Family: a Christian social perspective

An authentic vision for today's Thoughtful and informative, Cahill's work brings fresh historical, theological, and ethical thought to the explosive area of family-deeply contested territory in today's cultural and religious skirmishes. As one group of social theorists and cultural critics points to rising divorce and illegitimacy rates as symptoms of unfettered individualism and moral laxity, another side notes that the traditional, nuclear is actually a product of the industrial age, with its strict gender roles, public-private split, and exclusion of an underclass. In the religious arena, evangelical- conservative vs. mainline-feminist lines echo these battles, contesting the authentic meaning of within a Christian framework. Though has been dissected in the academic and cultural wars, Cahill asserts that the usual religious agenda of restoring the traditional nuclear is actually misinformed and misguided. It actually bolsters oppressive social, economic, and racial mechanisms that are destroying families at the bottom, middle, and even top of the ladder. Is there an authentically Christian notion of family? Cahill's contribution shows in a striking way how very different we are counter-cultural New Testament and early- notions of from our ideas of family values; how, throughout history, other fruitful Christian examples have emerged in the work of John Chrysostom, Martin Luther, and the Puritans; how, despite distortion by gender and class divisions, there develops a Christian vision of the altruistic family, animated by Christian discipleship to stand for compassion, generosity, and justice; how pertinent this vision of the domestic church is to public debate and public policy.

Guardians of Virtue: The Social Reformers and the “Girl Problem,” 1890‐1920

Responding to escalating rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and prostitution, the Progressive Era ushered in a wave of cultural anxiety concerning sexual morality. Progressive reformers implemented a variety of state interventions to monitor and correct sexual “misconduct” among working‐class and immigrant young women. This article focuses on the leading social reformers from Chicago's Hull House Settlement and investigates their paradoxical thinking concerning the “girl problem.” Primary source analysis reveals that the social reformers' stance as “guardians of virtue” for working‐class young women's sexuality was integrally tied to larger concerns about human welfare and progress in twentieth‐century industrial America.