From Floating Brothels To Suburban Semirespectability: Two Centuries of Nonmarital Pregnancy in Australia

Abstract

The sexual revolution that through the 1950s and 1960s saw nonmarital fertility and marital childbearing following premarital conception rise rapidly in Australia, especially among women in their teens and early twenties, received considerable research attention. Now, in the mid-1990s, childbearing following nonmarital pregnancy has assumed a very different character. The pregnant teenaged bride is almost a thing of the past, and nonmarital births occur mainly at normative reproductive ages within consensual unions. Similar trends have occurred in other developed countries, but Australia boasts an unusual precedent for this new phase, in that during its early years of colonial settlement, convictism also gave rise to widespread childbearing within consensual unions. This precedent and the distinctive circumstances that produced it are explored in the context of tracing the full and varied history of fertility associated with nonmarital coitus in Australia.