The Limits of Love

If an emotional ethic like caritas was embodied, how did some come to engage in ‘deviant’ behaviours such as premarital sex and why did a society so enculturated in a Christian ethic come to have such a significant illegitimacy rate? This chapter uses a case study of servants and their sex lives to explore how people reconciled their ‘sinful’ behaviour with their commitment to caritas. It first looks at the ways in which individuals justified their romantic feelings that led to sex within the moral framework of the community, as well as those—especially men—who instead made a claim to human frailty as an excuse for misbehaviour. It then attends to how the community responded to such activities, particularly in making life uncomfortable and encouraging those who did not conform to move on. A final section looks at how sinners were restored to the community once they had reformed, especially attending to rituals of reconciliation and peace, including touch, kisses, and sharing food and drink.

Nonmarital Intimacies

Chapter Five surveys the varied intimate and nonmarital relationships formed between free and freed people. A comprehensive survey of more than two thousand baptism records demonstrates that Jamaica had the highest illegitimacy rate in the British Empire. One in four of the children baptized on the island was born out of wedlock. This chapter explores the confluence of factors that led to the development of a sexual culture in Jamaica that afforded unmarried women more autonomy in their intimate lives. In contrast with other colonies in British North America, Jamaica adopted a remarkably lenient approach toward female sexuality. Women also commanded more authority and wealth, largely owing to their participation in slavery. In the absence of social censure and legal repercussions, a large number of free couples established families outside of marriage. Doing so protected women’s material assets and legal autonomy, which would otherwise be comprised by coverture—a set of laws that ceded a wife’s property to her husband. Instead, colonists used baptism rather than marriage to recognize, legitimize, and even legalize intimate relationships with free and enslaved partners.

Trends In Illegitimacy: United States, 1940-1965, by Mrs. Alice J. Claque and Mrs. Stephanie J. Ventura. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office (PHS Publication Number 1000, Series 21, No. 15 of National Center for Health Statistics), 1968, 90 pp., $0.55 (Available through the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office. Washington, D.C. 20402)

This recent report from the National Center for Health Statistics describes trends and differentials in illegitimacy in the United States. These statistics are based on information required on birth certificates in 34 States and the District of Columbia, and deal principally with the illegitimacy rate, or number of births per 1,000 unmarried women 15-44 years of age. The illegitimacy rate increased from 7.1 in 1940 to 23.5 in 1965. The nonwhite rate declined from 12 times higher than the white rate in 1950 to slightly over 8 times as high in 1965.