Quote:
Originally Posted by 4691mls
I agree. While browsing library listings I've seen descriptions of Regency romances with plots like "Lady Mary is bored with her life and has decided she wants one night of passion, and she knows just the man for it". This just doesn't make sense in a time where premarital sex and unwed pregnancy were (as you said) a disaster for the woman. Sure, people are human and undoubtedly some of them got carried away and things went farther than they intended, but for a woman to intentionally set out to have premarital sex with no expectation of marriage just isn't realistic for the time period.
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There has never been a time in human history when sex outside of wedlock wasn't common. Prior to the Victorian era, 40% of first pregnancies were outside of marriage; even at the height of Victorian prudery, that number was still over 20%.
By the Regency era there were many options for attempting to avoid pregnancy, from contraceptive sponges and condoms to zinc and alum syringe baths (douches) to help avoid pregnancy. They weren't all effective by modern standards, but the plethora of attempts certainly indicates that the demand was there.
Moral Physiology was published in 1831 and
Fruits of Philosophy was in 1832, and they were hardly the first manuals of birth control around.
And there were doctors like
Madame Restell all over the civilized world; there's a reason that the
Malicious Shooting and Stabbing Act of 1803 had to deal explicitly with abortion as a topic.
The
Mosher study conducted during the American Civil War era is illustrative; it indicated that about 2/3 of women surveyed during the Victorian era had used some sort of birth control, effective or not.