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 ...
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Dokumenttyp: | journalarticle |
Erscheinungsdatum: | 2016 |
Schlagwörter: | Languages and Literatures / extramarital fertility / domestic servants / life course analysis / narratives / Flanders |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Permalink: | https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27086228 |
Datenquelle: | BASE; Originalkatalog |
Powered By: | BASE |
Link(s) : | https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/4224740 |
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 differences in the behavioral patterns of servants and women who were never servants. Looking both at extramarital fertility and at marriage behavior, I argue that servants were slightly more risk-taking when entering into extramarital relationships. With this mixed-methods approach, this article avoids one-dimensional readings of the sources, and I challenge the dichotomous use of concepts that are too basic to comprehend the complexity of extramarital sexual behavior.