Perhaps nothing divides us more profoundly from the Victorians than our attitude towards the illegitimate child (even the word illegitimate has almost disappeared from use in this context, as being unfairly stigmatising). That the sins of the parents should be visited upon children, by regarding those children themselves as tainted, seems morally monstrous to us, self-evidently cruel and unjust. We cannot even imagine — and I include myself — how anyone could be so morally primitive as to disdain a child merely because its parents were unmarried: and this is so however much we may believe in the virtues of marriage as an institution. The idea of fallen women also seems to us now to be horribly censorious, and hypocritical into the bargain: for no one ever spoke of fallen men, though they were essential to, the sine qua non of, the existence of fallen women.
I am still shocked by the recollection that, as late as the early 1990s, there were still a few women in psychiatric hospitals in Britain who were there principally because they had been admitted seventy years earlier after having given birth to an illegitimate child. No doubt they had quickly become institutionalised and could scarcely have coped with life outside; but to think of a long human life passed in this impoverished way (the wards for “chronics” had beds so close together that they allowed for no privacy whatever) as a kind of punishment for what is now no longer regarded even as an indiscretion, reminds one of La Rochefoucauld’s dictum that neither the sun nor death can be stared at for long. One cannot fix one’s mind on such a horrible injustice for long.
Of course, it was stigma like this that gave stigma itself a bad name — stigmatised so to speak, in fact, to such a degree or effect that the very name of stigma has a completely negative valency. No one has a good word to say for it, though whether there ever was, or could be, a society completely without it, I am unsure.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Situational Nature of Scorn and Stigma”, New English Review, 2020-04-28.
May 2, 2025
QotD: The Victorian attitude toward illegitimacy
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