Mainly reading and watching period fiction, court opinions from around 1900 and earlier, and hearing about what life was like from my grandfather (who wasn’t alive prior to 1920 but told me stories from his youth and from his dad). I definitely could be totally wrong and it was rare for a community to punish a deadbeat for leading a girl on and abandoning her or that the typical punishment is very different from my understanding.
Data of course shows that pre-marital sex was both much less common and reported much less prior to 1920.[1] This however doesn’t necessarily mean there was community policing/shaming of the sort that I describe. Only that there were some prevention/punishment mechanisms in place that have eroded.
What kind of sources do you have for the norms that existed 100 years ago that drive your predictions of how people were driven out of town back then?
Mainly reading and watching period fiction, court opinions from around 1900 and earlier, and hearing about what life was like from my grandfather (who wasn’t alive prior to 1920 but told me stories from his youth and from his dad). I definitely could be totally wrong and it was rare for a community to punish a deadbeat for leading a girl on and abandoning her or that the typical punishment is very different from my understanding.
Data of course shows that pre-marital sex was both much less common and reported much less prior to 1920.[1] This however doesn’t necessarily mean there was community policing/shaming of the sort that I describe. Only that there were some prevention/punishment mechanisms in place that have eroded.
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/fgg.pdf