Recently I have been flicking through old newspapers online (1860s-1870s), and came across a headline "Singular Affiliation Case at Pembroke Dock", so intrigued I read the article and ascertained that an Affiliation Order was a maintenance order awarded to the mother of an illegitimate child against the father. The going rate appears to have been 2s.6d. per week.
As this was not a term that I had come across before I thought that I would share this with others, who also might not be aware.
The National Archives includes them under the term "bastardy" and says "A bastardy or affiliation order could be made by a Quarter Sessions or Petty Sessions court, requiring the father to pay for the child's upkeep - failure to pay could result in a prison sentence."
Reading some of these old articles I am amazed at the double standards that seem to have been in play at the time. In the first article I read the woman had been drugged insensible by her sweetheart, and then in the weeks afterwards the man had frequent intercourse with her despite her always objecting. The court and spectators were very much on her side, despite his attempts to blacken her name and cheered when he was found to be the father and ordered to pay. In another case an employer drugged a 14 year old servant with chloroform before "having his way". In that case the baby died, and an affiliation order was granted for the time the child was alive, and the costs of the funeral. Separately her father was suing the employer for seduction. In both cases, to today's eyes, they don't seem like seduction but rape. Rape was a criminal offence at that time, but I wonder whether the economic practicalities came before criminal justice, because in these cases the courts were extremely well disposed to the girls.
There were also cases of classic Victorian moral outrage. Under the heading "Colliery Immorality" there was the briefest of mentions that there was an affiliation order case before the court, ("the details of which are totally unfit for publication and which disclose an amount of indecency and immorality incredible to everyone but those who were present"), the article's author launched an vitriolic attack on the practise of women being employed in collieries on the basis that it "completely unsexes the females so employed ..... when their work is over they adopt the habits and amusements of the other sex." And perhaps worst of all they "become totally unfitted for domestic life, and when they get married they make miserable wives and worse mothers".
Heavan only knows what level of apoplexy the journalist would have been driven to if he were to travel through time and visit any modern day town centre on a Saturday night!
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Thread: Affiliation Orders
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14-07-2012, 10:05 AM #1
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Affiliation Orders
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14-07-2012, 12:45 PM #2
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Anyone with an interest in this subject needs to get the book "My Ancestor was a Bastard" by Ruth Paley
Helping you trace your British Family History & British Genealogy.
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