Sex in an Old Regime City

Know about the book -

Sex in an Old Regime City is written by Julie Hardwick and published by . It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0190945214 (ISBN 10) and 9780190945213 (ISBN 13).

"Based on extensive archival research, the extraordinary stories of ordinary peoples' lives explore many facets of young people's intimacy from meeting to courtship and to the many occasions when untimely pregnancies necessitated a range of strategies that might include marriage but also efforts to induce abortions, arrangements for out of wedlock delivery and custody with the fathers or charging the babies to a foundling hospital or infanticide. Clergy, lawyers, social welfare officials, employers, midwives, wet-nurses, neighbors, family and friends supported young women and held young men responsible for the reproductive consequences of their sexual activity. These practices of intimacy reframe our understanding of multiple aspects of the Old Regime. Their experiences challenge the centrality of the disciplining of female sexuality as a critical early modern project of state formation and religious reformation, the history of a sexual double standard in local and long contexts, the history of marriage, and the role of law in politics writ large and small of communities and institutions. Their lives also reshape many more specific debates, for instance, about the history of emotions, infanticide, attitudes to illegitimacy, pre-modern workplaces, and the body. It reveals the ways in which for working communities local management of intimacy with a heavy emphasis on pastoral care and pragmatic acceptance of the inevitability of out of wedlock pregnancy were the norm"--