The stigma for women in past years
The Courier and our friends at West Lothian Local History Library have teamed up to help readers take a trip down memory lane.
We will be featuring regular photos and details from West Lothian’s past in the paper and on our website. This week: The Scandal of Illegitimacy. When researching your family history, there is nothing more frustrating than discovering that‘illegitimate’comment written on your ancestor’s birth certificate.
That knowledge that there is a large piece of your family history that you might never uncover.
But behind the word‘illegitimate’, is the long lasting consequences and stigma.
If an unmarried woman became pregnant, she alone was to blame. The mother would be responsible for reporting the birth and the father’s name could not be recorded unless he accompanied her to the registrar’s office and declared himself willing to have his name on the register, or if a court had already decided that he was the father.
The word‘illegitimate’was firmly recorded against these entries in the register and on birth certificates until 1919.
By that time, public opinion had turned against stigmatizing people born out of wedlock, though the registrars still kept a record of illegitimate births.
People born before 1919 could now ask for a new copy of their birth certificate, in which the word‘illegitimate’would not appear.
In some occasions, the illegitimate stigma was too much to bear and would result in some mothers resorting to desperate measures.
In 1690, The Concealment of Pregnancy Act was passed which stated;‘should a woman hide her pregnancy and not seek assistance in the birth and should that child be found dead or missing then the woman shall be deemed the murderer of her own child’.
Many unmarried women concealed their illegitimate pregnancies. In more extreme cases, mothers were even tempted to kill their new-born child, hoping to avoid punishment and humiliation.
In the Courier, we have discovered two completely different examples of how local women dealt with their illegitimate pregnancies.
In 1919, the Courier reported on the story of a woman from Ecclesmachen, who sued a man for an alleged‘breach of promise and seduction’.
The woman gave birth to a daughter in 1918 and she claimed in front of a full Court of Session, that both she and the man had been ‘acquainted since childhood’.
They attended the same church. For a long time the man paid her marked attention, professed love for her and courted her with a view to marriage.
She frequently walked out with him, and regarded herself as engaged to be married.
The man denied to the court that he was in breach of any promise to marry her, or that he seduced her and denied that he courted her.
The woman won her court case, with the jury taking only 25 minutes to award her £750 from the man.
However, the possible reasons behind this brave and extreme case became apparent, when we discovered that only six months after the outcome of this court case, the woman died of cancer.
Maybe she knew she was dying and was trying to help financially with her daughter’s future, we will never know.
The second, and most truly horrific story we discovered in the Courier, involved a 24-year-old West Calder school-mistress Elizabeth Mary Burns.
On the March 28, 1893, Elizabeth gave birth to an illegitimate son in her house in Glebe Cottage, West Calder. Her room-mate ran to fetch the local doctor and on their return, she refused to say anything, denying that she had given birth.
A police officer was sent for and he discovered the dead body of a full-term male child hidden in a box.
During the baby boy’s post mortem Doctors Young and Williamson found that the boy had been born alive and that his cause of death was suffocation.
Elizabeth was charged with child murder and went on trial at the High Court on the June 12, 1893, she pleaded guilty.
She only received 12 months in prison for her shocking crime.
It was stated in court, that Elizabeth came from a highly respectable family in the parish of Traquair, Peebleshire. Her father was the local blacksmith. She was described as an‘exemplary, industrious and well conducted girl’and her state of mind at the time of her son’s death was described as having‘reached a state of frenzy in which she was unable to recognise the gravity of her act, and the consequences which were to follow.
The act was committed without premeditation, and her punishment in the disgrace and remorse she felt was great.’
Elizabeth Mary Burns, moved back to Traquair after she was released from prison. She never married, or taught again. She died in Traquair in 1948, aged 78 years. If you would like to find out more about these stories, or read these West Lothian Courier articles in full, contact the West Lothian Local History Library on 01506 282491 or email localhistory@westlothian.gov.uk.