I promise I Googled first -but while a fatherless Son is called a “bastard” What is a fatherless daughter? Or to match the relationship in this question What is a motherless daughter called? Are there any o0ther terms to fit the various missing parent circumstances?
Bastards aren’t fatherless. They are born out of wedlock.
A ‘Bastard Child’ can be male or female.
Perhaps ‘Bastardette’ fits?
A bastard can be a son or a daughter, and it does not mean “fatherless” – it means that the mother is unmarried. For example, William the Bastard (King William I of England and Duke of Normandy) did have a father (Robert, Duke of Normandy), and his father made William his heir, but his parents were not married to each other.
It’s probably true that we hear “bastard son” much more than “bastard daughter”, but the dictionary definition makes no gender distinction, so the latter is just as valid as the former.
ETA: what Deflagration and Giles said.
The title character of the movie Bastard Out Of Carolina is a girl.
Back in the old days, a child who had lost one parent but not both was a ‘half-orphan’ (and may well have been sent away somewhere to live in an asylum). The term wasn’t gendered.
Just to clarify - Bastard is a term indicating that the child in question (male or female) is illegitimate, either born out of wedlock, born to a mistress, or born to a morganatic wife. The term indicates that the child has a lesser social standing than the father (who is usually the only one who mattered). Sometimes this was simply a matter of inheritance law, sometimes it was a crippling social stigma. It varied.
Bastardy isn’t generally a term used in matrilineal societies - most mothers know who their daughter is, as they were there for the event. Adoptioned, step-mother/step-daughter, and orphan are terms which cover the exceptions, and disinheriting or shunning covers the casting off of existing daughters by a mother who doesn’t want her.
It was usually less noted or significant to have bastard daughters than bastard sons, as daughters couldn’t inherit most times anyway. Sometimes it was useful - a bastard daughter couldn’t expect to need the same level of dowry - or unfortunate - a bastard daughter couldn’t be used as a social token for the family’s advancement through her marriage - for individual families however, so the term did apply to both sons and daughters.
In contrast, a half-orphan was any child, male or female, with only one parent. In times and places where widows had truly limited choices, a child without a father was considered about the same as a true orphan, and were sometimes considered even worse off than total orphans, because he/she had the mother to support rather than only themselves.
A child could also be a half-orphan or an orphan and still stand in line for inheritance, or could be a bastard. The terms weren’t exclusive.
damnit - dinner made me miss edit window.
Adotioned = adopted.
So, when did bastard become a term of insult, irrespective of birth, primarily for males? One seldom calls a woman ‘bastard’ as an insult, just as one formerly seldom called a male ‘bitchy’.
(I have noticed that ‘bitch’ as a verb is used perjoratively about as frequently for men as women, but that ‘bitch’ used as a noun frequently is used as a compliment for both men and women when refering to a ‘big dog’ or someone who plays ‘hard ball’ - I don’t know if that is ironic or an accident of the language.)
OED’s earliest cite is 1830, but since it’s in a glossary, the term must have been in spoken use earlier – possibly much earlier.
Over all, bastards get less attention from their fathers. Their mothers may also be disadvantaged and have a history of poor decisions. Thus, bastards are a product of their upbringing and reflect it.
Heck, it’s used that way in Shakespeare much earlier than that. Consider the solilioquy from King Lear (Act I, sc. ii) that introduces us to Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Gloucester, who plots to take his legitimate half-brother Edgar’s birthright:
Interestingly, at the same time that “bastards” are considered “base” (socially inferior), they’re also thought to be more robust and vigorous for being “natural” rather than the result of arranged marriages.
Plus it’s a double insult. At the same time that you paint your target a social pariah with the label “bastard”, you’re also painting his mother with the label “dishonest” - she either got pregnant out of wedlock, or cheated on her husband (in which case, you’re also calling his father a cuckold too en passant). All traditionally very negative concepts.
There are only illegitimate parents.
Society labels the children that way because of what is called canon law and Civil law that would probable cross back to canon law IMO. Those that follow what is called cannon law mistakenly think they are Christians.
References,
I will stick with The Bible and the fact that a Christian is not bound by any legalism, of which canon law is all about.
But that’s different - that’s bastard being considered base because it means a child born out of wedlock, not bastard being used as a term of abuse that has nothing to do with the person’s actual parentage. You’re definitely right about the term bastard having huge import at the time of that play, but that makes it less likely that it would have also been used as a casual insult.
But that usage is **not **obviously an insult irrespective of birth; ‘bastard’ is not used to mean nothing more specific than ‘dick-head’ or ‘jerk’.
I will call a man a bastard as an insult when he is being a cruel or selfish jerk, but not a woman.
According to an old 1960s song by Diana Ross the term is “love child”.
True. One of my uncles revealed a surprise extra daughter, conceived with another woman while he was still married to his now ex wife, and the family all refer to her as his ‘love child.’
I just watched an Asian movie today where this was a major plot point. I would guess that illegitimacy (although not the actual term “bastard”) was an insult for thousands of years in Asia.
I should probably just drop this, but I’m feeling a little stubborn tonight.
That is not “irrespective of birth”; that is an example of using ‘bastard’ as an insult because it does refer to the circumstances of the birth.
I am talking about the very common use of ‘bastard’ as an insult that does NOT refer to illegitimacy, simply to mean cruel, unkind, etc.
I understand what you mean. The female equivalent would be bitch, which has nothing to do with female dogs. It might never have done, but for the way ‘bastard’ is used these days, it might as well not have anything to do with parentage either.
TBH, my real reason for posting in this thread is that thelabdude’s post was pretty fucking horrible and I kept hoping a mod would pull him up on it. I did report it, but I guess it must fit the posting criteria somehow.
As a point of interest: my daughter’s original long birth certificate (UK), issued in 1998, had a few short guidance notes on the back, one of which referred to the father’s name space and said ‘for bastard children, this is usually left blank.’ Subsequent reissues have left that out.