Discourses versus life courses: servants' extramarital sexual activities in Flanders during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

This article combines qualitative and quantitative analysis to study the effect of rural-urban migration on the sexual behavior of servants in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Flanders. In the qualitative part, I compare various discourses on servants' extramarital behavior to sketch the ideological context which affected women's agency. Contemporaries were commonly convinced that urban servants more often became pregnant out-of-wedlock than other women, but disagreed on the causes for this: vulnerability or immorality. In the quantitative part, I use life course analysis to determine d... Mehr ...