Discourses versus Life Courses

Servants’ Extramarital Sexual Activities in Flanders during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11109241
AutoresChrista Matthys (Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium, autor de correspondencia)
Año2016
Volumen42
Número1
Páginas81-100
Fecha de publicación2016-01-01
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Urban History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0096-1442 • E-ISSN: 1552-6771
EditorialSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0096144215611096
OpenAlexW967615063
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas14

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

Agency (philosophy · Civil servants · Context (archaeology · Human sexuality · Ideology · Immorality · Morality · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Vulnerability (computing · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology