On December 14, 1847, at the age of twenty-one, Anna Maria van den Bemden gave birth to her first child in Antwerp. On the birth record of her daughter, Maria Theresia, ‘onwettig’ was written, meaning illegitimate, the young mother being unmarried. However, the father of the child, Joannes Cormon, recognized the child at birth.¹ Later on, the couple had two more illegitimate children. In 1856, they married and thereby legitimized their children. As a married woman, Anna Maria gave birth to her fourth and last child.

In the nineteenth century, marriage was the only institution within which sexual intercourse was socially, legally, and religiously accepted. Moreover, marriage provided the only context within which legitimate offspring were born, that is, children who could inherit from their fathers. Therefore, ideally, family formation started with a marriage.² Still, there were quite a lot of women who gave birth to one or more children out of wedlock. In fact, throughout Europe their numbers were on the rise from the middle of the eighteenth century onward, peaking in the nineteenth century.³ By then, nearly everywhere, more than five percent of live births were illegitimate. In some countries the percentage even rose above ten.⁴ In fact, there were large national, regional, and local differences. In Belgium as a whole, illegitimacy rates were between 7 and 9 percent, increasing to 10 percent between 1875 and 1895. Mid-nineteenth-century illegitimacy rates in Brussels were between 30 and 35 percent.⁵ In the city of Antwerp, illegitimacy rates fluctuated between 13 and 16 percent in the period 1830-1860.⁶

The question is why so many women in the nineteenth and early twentieth century engaged in extramarital sex, as well as why their numbers were on the rise. By having sex out of wedlock these women risked not only the shame of unmarried motherhood, but potentially also harmed their chances of ever getting married. Why did they take this risk?

The aim of this article is to provide new insights into the lives of unwed mothers and women who had bridal pregnancies in the Antwerp district in the period 1820-1920. A central concept in this paper is ‘vulnerability.’ Vulnerability has been defined in many ways, often emphasizing individuals’ exposure to various types of risks, fragility, and lack of agency.⁷ Sociologist Misztal formulates an aggregative conception of vulnerability, integrating various definitions of vulnerability used in sociological research. As such, vulnerability ‘captures the ways in which an individual experiences different aspects of disadvantage connected with human dependence on another, the unpredictability and the irreversibility of action.’⁸ Many historians have used the concept of ‘vulnerability’ in their explanation for illegitimacy. The principal cause of vulnerability is poverty, but it is also intertwined with the lack of a social network and social exclusion.⁹ It is indeed striking that, in the nineteenth century, out-of-wedlock childbearing was predominantly a phenomenon of the lower social classes, and it has often been suggested that migrant women were especially liable, as they were likely to lack kin in their city of residence. Reto Schumacher et al. stressed that the association between vulnerability and illegitimacy should be thought of as an interaction. On the one hand, vulnerability can be considered as a major factor motivating women to engage in premarital sexual relationships; on the other hand, out-of-wedlock childbearing may have increased women’s economic insecurity, thereby engendering social stigma and vulnerability.¹⁰

The main question of this article is: did unmarried mothers and women with bridal pregnancies in the Antwerp district between 1821 and 1920 belong to a vulnerable group in society? To answer this question, four sub-questions were formulated: (1) what was the ‘profile’ of unwed mothers and mothers with bridal pregnancies, and did it differ from that of women who exclusively conceived within marriage? To answer this question we will compare (i) unmarried mothers, (ii) mothers with bridal pregnancies, and (iii) mothers who were married at the time of conception regarding their age at first birth, social status, birth place, place of residence, and migration background. Special attention is given to ‘migration background’ as migrants are often associated with (the rise in) illegitimacy in historical research. Therefore, the following sub-question is (2): were women with a migration background more prone to premarital and extramarital fertility? Next, we evaluate whether having illegitimate children led to increased vulnerability later in life by analyzing the marriage opportunities of women who gave birth to a child out of wedlock. The accompanying sub-question is (3): did an illegitimate child negatively influence the marriage opportunities of these women, thereby indicating sustained vulnerability as a result of unmarried motherhood? In this regard, marriage opportunities and the interval between birth and marriage are examined. The fourth sub-question focusses on ‘repeaters’ (4): what was the profile of women who gave birth to multiple illegitimate children, and are there indications that those women belonged to a bastardy-prone sub-society, as suggested by Peter Laslett?¹¹

Historians have explored various mechanisms that may have caused the rise in illegitimacy as well as social and regional variations in levels and trends of illegitimacy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Generally, illegitimacy rates were higher in cities than in the countryside, and extramarital fertility was found mainly among the working classes.¹² It is therefore not surprising that numerous historians have explained the rise of illegitimacy in the context of modernization (i.e., industrialization, urbanization, and increased mobility). Edward Shorter asserts that the rise of illegitimacy signified an early ‘sexual revolution’ among working-class women.¹³ According to Shorter, industrialization and the rise of wage labor had a liberating effect on laboring women. As a result of industrialization more women moved away from their families and rural communities to cities to earn individual wages. This (economic) independence was an incentive for women to break free from traditional norms concerning sexuality and social control, and resulted, in combination with increased mobility and the absence of birth control, in an increase of illegitimacy.¹⁴

Others associate the high levels of illegitimacy with heightened vulnerability due to spatial mobility, social disintegration, and economic insecurity in the context of industrialization and urbanization.¹⁵ Tilly et al., for example, criticized Shorter’s theory arguing that although the women did move to cities to work, they did so in order to contribute to the family income, not to seek independence. Moreover, they state that their earnings were too low to achieve economic independence.¹⁶ Low income and social isolation in the city made women vulnerable and compelled them to find a partner, hoping that marriage would provide financial security. As a result, many young working women engaged in premarital sex in anticipation of marriage, a courtship practice which had been common among rural women for centuries. However, due to economic instability, increased mobility, and anonymity in cities, men were more likely to break their marriage promise. Moreover, rural-to-urban migrant women could not count on their families to enforce marital promises, having left them behind in the countryside.¹⁷

In ‘Deconstructing illegitimacy’, Jan Kok states that regional variation in illegitimacy is often related to marriage obstacles and the relative acceptance of unmarried cohabitation. He argues that marriage-like relationships, such as cohabitation, could be an important reason for illegitimate births, especially in the case of ‘repeaters’. Given the fact that marriage had many (legal) advantages and that cohabitation was stigmatized and sometimes criminalized, Kok reasons that cohabitation was mostly the result of obstacles preventing couples from marrying.¹⁸ Together with Dalia Leinarte, Kok has pointed out that the costs of a wedding may have been prohibitive for poor people, resulting in cohabitation and illegitimacy. Moreover, economic necessity potentially motivated cohabitation in the first place.¹⁹ Furthermore, Kok and Leinarte mention legal obstacles inhibiting marriage such as laws against marriages of the poor and elaborate rules that prohibited marriages among kin.²⁰ Lastly, complex official procedures could hinder foreign migrants from marrying. The French Civil Code stipulated that several documents were needed, such as documents proving parents’ consent, before a marriage could take place. These requirements were often problematic for foreign migrants.²¹ Schumacher et al. have shown that the rise of illegitimacy in Geneva was partly the result of the difficulties immigrants faced in obtaining legal documents for marriage.²²

Although illegitimacy has been explained by some historians as a result of sexual intercourse in anticipation of a marriage that never happened or that met with obstacles, others have come up with different explanations. Nynke van den Boomen and Paul Puschmann found that a significant part of illegitimate births in nineteenth-century Nijmegen had been conceived during the annual fair, which led them to the assumption that these births resulted from occasional encounters in a setting with alcohol consumption and looser morals. Peter Laslett argues, by contrast, that a bastardy-prone sub-society accounted for the rise in illegitimacy. According to Laslett, unwed mothers often lived in the same neighborhood and were related to one another. Many of these mothers – ‘repeaters’, as he refers to them – had multiple illegitimate children. Within this subculture, alternative sexual behaviours such as prostitution and illegitimacy were exhibited, normalized, and passed on from generation to generation.²³ In general, historians debate whether the lower classes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries upheld different, looser sexual norms than the middle classes, or adopted and internalized the stricter and more ‘prudish’ sexual norms the middle classes aimed to spread. Various historians argue the former, although not entirely rejecting an increasing prudishness as a result of middle-class endeavors to spread their norms and values and impose them in others.²⁴ Antoon Vrints, for example, concludes on the basis of his research into (sexual) insults used among the working classes of Antwerp in the early twentieth century, that a large variety of sexual norms and values existed among the citizens of Antwerp and that the sexual norms of the working classes did not always correspond with those promoted by the middle classes.²⁵

Besides different sexual norms of the working classes, for the Belgian case scholars have found evidence in support of the vulnerability hypothesis, as well as results conflicting with the argument of social isolation put forward by Tilly et al. For example George Alter, who looked at nineteenth-century Verviers, also explains the rise of illegitimacy in a context of poor living and working conditions as well as migration among the working classes. Similar to Tilly et al., Alter states that the persistence of rural courtship practices among migrants played a role in the rise of illegitimacy.²⁶ In addition, Alter points at the ‘double standard’ among the Belgian working classes. A woman should not agree to sexual intimacy too early in the relationship, as this might raise questions about her chastity and therefore her suitability as a marriage partner. If she refused it for too long, though, her partner might lose his interest.²⁷ According to Alter, sexual intercourse in anticipation of marriage could result in illegitimacy in two ways. First, he points to economic insecurity: a man might have had insufficient economic means for marriage. Second, it is conceivable that a man did not have honest intentions and, through a lack of social control, could easily disappear. However, in contrast to Tilly et al., Alter argues that unmarried mothers were not socially isolated; he shows that most migrant women had moved to Verviers with their parents or siblings.²⁸ In line with Alter’s results, Jan Van Bavel, who investigated bridal pregnancies and illegitimacy in Leuven, showed that there, too, not all unmarried mothers were socially isolated, and that for women living with a parent the risk of illegitimate conceptions was actually higher.²⁹

Recently, evolutionary explanations have been added to the discussion. Katharina Pink et al. demonstrated for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Krummhörn, Germany, that women who had experienced the death of one or more of their siblings in early life (0-5 years) were at an increased risk of conceiving out of wedlock. While this tendency points also to vulnerability, they explain it from a biological perspective. Women who experience harsh life circumstances are more likely to pursue a speedy life history strategy: these women do not wait until they have formed a stable relationship, as early death might otherwise prevent them from reproducing. Such biological assertions show that there are multiple pathways through which vulnerability can lead to risky sexual behaviour and illegitimacy.³⁰

During the nineteenth century, the city of Antwerp transformed from a small regional textile center into one of the largest European seaports, with a large service sector, making it the fastest-growing city in Belgium.³¹ In 1846 it numbered just under 90,000 inhabitants, rising to more than 300,000 by 1910.³² Immigration, which soared from the late 1840s onwards, played an important role in this growth.³³ Most migrants in Antwerp came from its hinterlands, although considerable numbers came from abroad, especially from neighboring countries. The number of migrants from further away increased during the second half of the nineteenth century.³⁴ Antwerp as a port and service center attracted labor migrants.³⁵ Antwerp’s economy was dominated by port activities, offering job opportunities mainly to men. Thus, the city therefore attracted more male than female migrants, although the share of female migrants increased in the second half of the nineteenth century.³⁶ The influx of migrants and overall mobility were also stimulated by the rapid development of the railway system in Belgium and its neighboring countries.³⁷ Furthermore, rural push factors played a role. Rural livelihoods were threatened by increasing population pressure and declining rural employment opportunities, partly due to agricultural innovations.³⁸ Between 1750 and 1850 the rural population of Flanders almost doubled, resulting in decreasing average farm sizes.³⁹ Consequently the rural population had become increasingly reliant on the rural linen industry. However, as a result of the increasing mechanization of textile production and strong competition from England, especially the Flemish rural linen industry, which had employed around 300,000 people in 1840, had been virtually obliterated by 1850. The already dire situation was exacerbated by the rural crisis of the mid-1840s as a result of a series of harvest failures, which impacted not only Flanders but almost all of Europe.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, as various scholars have demonstrated, it was not necessarily those who suffered most from the economic changes and rural crisis who migrated. Instead, they argue that the dynamics of selectivity, traditions, and access to migration information and networks were seemingly more decisive in stimulating migration than structural socio-economic differences.⁴¹

Antwerp’s transition from a textile center to a port-city had negative consequences for the working classes. The transition resulted in lower real incomes, poorer living conditions, and economic insecurity.⁴² In 1850 approximately 40 percent of the Antwerp population lived in poverty.⁴³ Employment opportunities for the local population declined with the disappearance of textile industries. Newcomers took up employment in port-related sectors. The transition to a port economy was especially disastrous for women, who had previously often found employment in the textile industries. The share of women conducting paid work declined from 58.5 percent in 1796 to 41 percent in 1830. Moreover, more women were forced to work as waitresses, domestic servants, or prostitutes, due to declining employment opportunities for females.⁴⁴

This paper is based on data from the Antwerp COR*-database, a representative letter sample of the total population that lived in what is known today as the Antwerp district between 1846 and 1920. The area comprises of the city of Antwerp, its suburbs (13 municipalities), and 48 rural municipalities, allowing comparisons of different geographical settings (e.g., rural versus urban).⁴⁵ It contains longitudinal micro-level information on 33,583 individuals.⁴⁶ All persons in the database have a last name starting with the letters ‘Cor’ or a partner (or another householder) with such a last name. The letter combination ‘Cor’ was selected by the database makers because individuals with surnames that started with these letters were equally distributed over the total nineteenth-century Flemish population. Moreover, COR*-persons are representative of various socio-demographic characteristics of the Flemish population at the time. Last but not least, COR*-names also include a wide range of foreign immigrants. The database is based on data from population registers and vital registration records: birth, marriage, and death certificates (the latter sources, contrary to the population registers, go back to the early nineteenth century).⁴⁷

For this paper, data was used on mothers giving birth to their first child in the period 1821-1906. All women in the database were linked to their children in the database, which allowed ‘reconstructing’ the reproductive life course of these mothers. After deletion of cases with incomplete data on the target variables (civil status at birth, and, in the case of married women, a marriage date), this led to a dataset of 1,110 unique mothers. Next, a distinction was made between three types of mothers: (1) mothers who conceived exclusively within marriage, (2) mothers who experienced a bridal pregnancy, and (3) mothers who gave birth to at least one illegitimate child. To prevent a married woman who gave birth prematurely falling into the ‘bridal pregnancy’ category, a threshold of eight months after marriage was maintained. If the woman had given birth within these eight months after the wedding, she was labelled as a ‘mother with a bridal pregnancy’. Hence, to be able to determine whether a married mother belonged to the bridal pregnancy category the wedding date was needed. Mothers with exclusively legitimate children but without a marriage date or lacking birth dates of their children were excluded from the analysis. Also removed were women whose life course was incomplete due to left-censoring, as they had potentially borne children outside of the observation area and/or period, making it impossible to categorize them accurately.

The three groups of mothers were compared regarding their age at first birth, social status, birthplace, place of residence, and migration background. Accordingly, the following variables were selected: date of birth of the mother, occupation of the mother, HISCO code for occupation of the mother, dates and places of birth of the children, and whether the children were legitimate or illegitimate. Next, the following variables were constructed: the birth order of each child, the migration status of the mother (by comparing birthplace to residence), the HISCAM score for the occupation of the mother, the age of the mother at giving birth, the age of the mother at marriage, and the time interval in months between the birth of the first illegitimate child and the date of marriage of the mother. The age at first birth is calculated as the difference in years between the date of the first recorded birth of a woman in the database and the date of birth of the woman. The age at first marriage is calculated in the same way using the date of the first marriage recorded in the database.

The social status of the mothers is determined by recoding the occupations of the mothers (coded in HISCO) into HISCAM. HISCAM stands for ‘Historical CAMSIS’ and is based on HISCO. HISCAM is an occupational stratification scale from 1 to 100. High occupations, such as doctor, receive a high score; lower occupations, such as domestic servant, get a low score.⁴⁸ For this paper a special HISCAM scale for women was used, that is, HISCAM VERSION 1.3.1 (NOVEMBER 2013), U3: Female only, 1800-1938.⁴⁹ Since some women had only one registered and others multiple occupations, we decided to use the occupation with the lowest HISCAM score for all women, as vulnerability at some point in the life course is expected to have been a cause of extramarital fertility. Since vulnerability may have been temporary, average or highest HISCAM-scores were considered as less appropriate for this analysis than the lowest HISCAM scores, because by focusing on average or highest HISCAM-scores we are more likely to miss vulnerable periods in the life course of women. The women’s migration status was determined through a combination of her birth place and her residence at the birth of her first child (or the municipality of declaration of the first child). Three migration status categories were distinguished: (1) women who did not migrate, (2) women who migrated within the Belgian borders, and (3) foreign female migrants. Based on the same data, a distinction was also made by direction of migration (rural-rural, rural-urban, urban-rural, and urban-urban). In this regard, places that by the mid-nineteenth century consisted of at least 10,000 inhabitants were considered as urban, while places with fewer inhabitants were considered as rural.

Using basic descriptive analyses, the distribution of all three types of mothers is visualized over time. Next, the three types of mothers are compared regarding their age when giving birth for the first time, social status, birthplace and place of residence, and migration background. Finally, within the ‘out-of-wedlock’ category basic descriptive analyses are presented concerning ‘repeatership’ and marriage opportunities.

Graph 1 shows the distribution of (1) mothers who conceived exclusively within marriage, (2) mothers who experienced bridal pregnancies, and (3) mothers who gave birth out of wedlock, as well as its development over time between 1821 and 1906. Between 1821 and 1840, some 65 percent of all mothers conceived exclusively within marriage, around 22 percent experienced a bridal pregnancy, and slightly less than 14 percent gave birth to at least one illegitimate child. In the following decades, however, when Antwerp transformed from a regional textile center into a port city, the shares of bridal pregnancies and illegitimacy would rise and reach, respectively, 26 and 27 percent during the final two decades of the nineteenth century. By then, more than half of all mothers had conceived out of wedlock. Then, in the first years of the twentieth century, illegitimacy numbers declined again. The increase of illegitimacy and bridal pregnancy ratios in the nineteenth century and their decline at the beginning of the twentieth century correspond with the overall trend of illegitimacy and bridal pregnancies in Belgium.⁵⁰ Moreover, research has shown that the fall in illegitimate fertility was paralleled by a decline in marital fertility in Belgium as well as the rest of Europe, indicating that the decline of illegitimate fertility was part of the so-called demographic transition.⁵¹

Illegitimacy was generally frowned upon and may therefore have had negative consequences for both mother and child.⁷⁵ In order to evaluate whether illegitimacy indeed led to sustained vulnerability over the life course, we will evaluate the marriage prospects of women with an illegitimate child, as well as the interval between the first birth and the first marriage, as the latter can serve as a proxy of whether the marriage partner was the father of the child: the longer the interval, the more likely it is that the marriage partner was not the father.⁷⁶

According to Laslett, repeaters – women who give birth to more than one illegitimate child – are an indication for the presence of a bastardy-prone sub-society.⁸³ Out of all unmarried mothers, 14.4 percent had multiple illegitimate children. Graph 8 suggests that mothers with an international migration background were more likely to be repeaters. However, the number of mothers in this subcategory was small (N= 15). The difference in repeatership between natives and domestic migrants was negligible.

Laslett argues that repeaters were part of a marginal societal group that displayed alternative sexual behaviour.⁸⁴ It is debatable, however, whether repeaters indeed represented an intentional defiance of social norms. For example, Kok has argued for the province North Holland that repeaters did not form a sexual subculture, but were simply unable to meet social norms due to a weak position in the marriage market.⁸⁵

Others have pointed to the role of cohabitation. Sandra Bree for example found that a large share of the illegitimate births in nineteenth-century Paris can be attributed to cohabitation, or at least to unmarried couples.⁸⁶ Cohabitation was not uncommon among the urban working classes, due to financial and legal marriage obstacles. Certain groups, such as soldiers, were forbidden to marry. It is thus possible that mothers with multiple illegitimate children were not sexually deviant, but were in a stable long-term relationship. As demonstrated, international migrants were repeaters relatively often, perhaps because they often faced various difficulties when getting married, as with the application for and delivery of necessary legal documents.⁸⁷

Graph 9 shows that, remarkably, it were not the women with the lowest social status but those from the middle category who had an increased likelihood of giving birth to multiple illegitimate children. The results show no clear evidence of economic vulnerability as an explanation for having more than one illegitimate child. Therefore it is more plausible that for these women ‘repeatership’ was mainly the result of stable consensual relationships which, because of various obstacles, did not lead to marriage. This requires further investigation, however, which falls beyond the scope of this article. As we have seen in graph 6, women with an unknown occupation had little chance of marrying. Nevertheless, their likelihood of having a second illegitimate child was very low. This suggests that many women with an unknown occupation did not conceive within a stable relationship and also did not engage in a new relationship but remained alone, making them a particularly vulnerable group.

By studying the reproductive life courses of 1,110 mothers in the Antwerp district between 1821 and 1920 using data in the Antwerp COR*-database, we sought to unravel whether unmarried mothers and women with bridal pregnancies formed a vulnerable group in society. First, we compared the profiles of unmarried mothers, mothers who experienced bridal pregnancies, and mothers who were married at the time of conception. In their characteristics and behaviours, unmarried mothers seemingly deviated more from married mothers (and therefore the social norm) than from mothers with bridal pregnancies. Illegitimacy was primarily an urban phenomenon occurring mainly among lower social classes. Married mothers and their peers with bridal pregnancies showed many similarities. These similarities and the observed slightly younger age at marriage of women with bridal pregnancies suggest that premarital conception was predominantly the result of stable relationships and sex in anticipation of a marriage, and that the pregnancy only motivated marrying earlier.

Numerous historians have highlighted sexual activity in anticipation of a marriage that never happened as an important cause of increasing illegitimacy.⁸⁸ The results presented here demonstrate, however, that unmarried mothers were on average considerably younger than their married peers at first birth, making this explanation unlikely in this context. The results rather suggest that the rise of illegitimacy in the Antwerp district was mainly due to (economic) vulnerability and the related weak bargaining position during courtship. It is no coincidence that the rise of illegitimacy coincided with Antwerp’s transition from a regional textile center to a port city and the proletarianization of its hinterland. This economic transition caused lower incomes, increased economic instability and fewer job opportunities for women. Our findings therefore align with the conclusions of historians who emphasize the role of economic insecurity, anonymity and mobility in the cities.⁸⁹ Low wages and poverty might indeed, as argued by Tilly et al., have motivated women to find a partner earlier, which also explains the strikingly young age of unmarried women at the birth of their child.⁹⁰

Migrants have frequently been associated with (the rise in) illegitimacy, mainly due to their alleged social isolation. We investigated whether women with a migration background were indeed more prone to premarital and extramarital fertility. Our results showed that international migrant women indeed had a higher share of illegitimate births. However, the share of illegitimate children of domestic migrants was even lower than that of native Antwerp women. This makes it plausible that domestic female migrants maintained a social network and in most cases were less vulnerable than native women. The category of rural-to-urban migrants may have been an exception to this, as these women had a relatively high share of illegitimate children. It may be, as argued by Tilly et al., that rural-to-urban migrants continued their rural courtship practices in the city.⁹¹

As underlined by Schumacher et al., vulnerability might not only be a cause but also a consequence of out-of-wedlock fertility.⁹² However, our analysis of the marriage opportunities of mothers with an illegitimate child suggests, in contrast to what is often argued by historians, that the disastrous effects of giving birth out of wedlock for the women’s subsequent life course should not be exaggerated, at least not regarding marriage opportunities. An exception were the international migrant women who often remained unmarried and often gave birth to multiple illegitimate children. For this specific group of women illegitimacy might have been part of a negative vicious cycle. An alternative explanation, however, is that these women were in stable consensual relationships but simply lacked the means or documents to marry, which, as other historians have argued, was not unusual for foreign migrants.⁹³ An especially insightful result is that unmarried mothers from higher social classes had lower chances of securing a marriage partner later in life than women from lower classes. Illegitimate fertility was likely considered less acceptable among higher social classes, resulting in a more negative impact on their marriage opportunities and life chances. This indicates that vulnerability is not only the result of poverty but is also determined by dependency on others. Stricter sexual norms in certain circles of society made women from those social classes more susceptible to rejection by their surroundings when failing to adhere to those norms.

Lastly, we examined the ‘profile’ of women who gave birth to multiple illegitimate children to see if there are indications that those women belonged to a bastardy-prone sub-society. Overall, the results suggest that ‘repeatership’ was the result of stable consensual relationships and cohabitation that did not lead to marriage due to a variety of obstacles. All things considered, there are no indications that illegitimacy in the Antwerp district marked an early sexual revolution among working-class women, as argued by Shorter, or that the rise in illegitimacy in the district can be ascribed to the presence of a bastardy-prone sub-society, as argued by Laslett.

All in all, this paper has found evidence in support of the vulnerability hypothesis for the Antwerp district as put forward by a variety of scholars and has provided valuable insights into the consequences of illegitimate fertility for women’s marriage opportunities. The rise in illegitimacy in the Antwerp district seems to have resulted from a group of vulnerable women in society that was growing as a consequence of economic transformations.

This research was only a first step in unravelling the causes and consequences of illegitimacy in the nineteenth-century Antwerp district. The logical next step is to turn to multivariate analysis, although this would require an expansion of the database. Furthermore, it would be interesting to investigate who unmarried women lived and migrated with – before their extramarital pregnancy – to test the social isolation hypothesis and explore the role of cohabitation. It is useful, for example, to distinguish between women with illegitimate children that were recognized and those whose children were not, as recognition can serve as an indicator of the birth being the result of a stable relationship and perhaps even cohabitation. Furthermore, it is important to look at other life course transitions, apart from marriage, of women and their offspring, such as social mobility and mortality, to get a more complete picture of the long-term consequences of out-of-wedlock fertility. Finally, it would be interesting to explore the socio-economic and demographic background of the male counterparts: the men these women married eventually, the men who legitimized the child, or the men the women were living with.

Sophie Vries (1998) completed the Research Master’s program of Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies at Radboud University. Sophie’s research interests lie in the fields of historical demography and family history and, more specifically, in partner selection and family formation. Recently, she did an internship at the Centre for Demographic Studies of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

E-mail: Sophie.Vries@ru.nl

Paul Puschmann (1984) is an assistant professor of Economic, Social and Demographic History at Radboud University. He is especially interested in long-term trends in partner choice, marriage, and fertility, as well as in migration and social inclusion. Paul is the scientific coordinator for HiDo, the international scientific network of historical demography (funded by the Research Foundation Flanders); the research program director for the network ‘Life-Courses, Family, and Labour’ of the N.W. Posthumus Institute; and the co-editor-in-chief of Historical Life Course Studies.

E-mail: Paul.Puschmann@ru.nl65