Gordon Wood tells me, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (which is excellent, btw), that "in the last part of the eighteenth century, one-quarter to one-third of all brides in some areas of America (and England too) were pregnant before marriage."
How, pray tell, was this particularly juicy statistic determined? The information comes from an essay published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, so I assume it wasn't pulled out of thin air. I'm picturing a few haggard graduate students poring over the marriage and birth records of England and colonial America, endlessly counting the months between matrimony and arrival of progeny. Or endlessly imputing data into spreadsheets. I hope they were paid extremely well. I bet they weren't.
Fun fact, though, right? And I thought 6th graders were bad. But what do you think got those colonials preggers? Lack of birth control, raging horniness, or the revolutionary spirit? Gordon Wood thinks it's the revolutionary spirit, and I think he might be right. (Changing social mores, rebellion against paternal power, etc, etc...read the book.)
I still feel bad about the grad students, though. I wonder if they're all ABD.
3 comments:
Generally, demographic statistics from the eighteenth about anything more specific than the number of people alive or dead should be held suspect. Sometimes, they cull data from diaries and newspaper articles. That would be like counting the number of times, "Prudence's weddinge was a humble affaire though she was with childe at the time" appears in a journal salvaged from a New Haven attic. JSTOR the article and see how they got their numbers.
I enjoy how you use "JSTOR" as a verb.
So, I JSTORed the article. It looks like my grad student hypothesis was right. The appendix details the "vital record studies" of 19 towns in colonial America, including Boston. Vital records are marriages and baptisms, apparently.
"Prudence's weddinge was a humble affaire though she was with childe at the time"
LMAO
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