I have been attempting a Google search to find out the average age of first-time mothers in the year 1500. I’m guessing it would tend to be younger in rural regions, but my search so far as turned up nothing but noise.
Surveys sound interesting, but there are also areas where people misreport, either because they think there’s a ‘right response’ or because they simply mistake their own views.
This is one of the skepticisms I had when we first learned about qualitative research in my nursing class. But I guess the point is less to be objective and more just to gather descriptive data. Later on you can choose your variables and find reliable ways to measure them, and your research becomes quantitative.
You can find some relevant data about pre-Industrial and Industrial England in chapter 12 of Clark’s Farewell to Alms. (Interestingly, age of marriage—which implies first pregnancy since illegitimacy was so rare—dropped around 2-3 years for women between the 1600s and 1800s.)
Same demographer friend (more accurately, ex-girlfriend who was studying social and economic history at the time) told me that illegitimacy varied a lot by region in the early modern period. If I recall correctly, there were Northern rural communities where the first child was typically born before marriage. Or maybe so soon after that the parents must have known the women would bear a child. This was because marriage was seen as marking when you set up house, rather than the start of sex, and because you wouldn’t fix a relationship until fertility/combatibility was clear. People may have become engaged and pledged to each other first, mind.
I have been attempting a Google search to find out the average age of first-time mothers in the year 1500. I’m guessing it would tend to be younger in rural regions, but my search so far as turned up nothing but noise.
This is one of the skepticisms I had when we first learned about qualitative research in my nursing class. But I guess the point is less to be objective and more just to gather descriptive data. Later on you can choose your variables and find reliable ways to measure them, and your research becomes quantitative.
You can find some relevant data about pre-Industrial and Industrial England in chapter 12 of Clark’s Farewell to Alms. (Interestingly, age of marriage—which implies first pregnancy since illegitimacy was so rare—dropped around 2-3 years for women between the 1600s and 1800s.)
Same demographer friend (more accurately, ex-girlfriend who was studying social and economic history at the time) told me that illegitimacy varied a lot by region in the early modern period. If I recall correctly, there were Northern rural communities where the first child was typically born before marriage. Or maybe so soon after that the parents must have known the women would bear a child. This was because marriage was seen as marking when you set up house, rather than the start of sex, and because you wouldn’t fix a relationship until fertility/combatibility was clear. People may have become engaged and pledged to each other first, mind.