# Was premarital sex uncommon in days past? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 16, 2006, 7:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716 "2006-07-16T07:02:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/41 "2006-07-18T02:40:05Z")
“Days past” covers a lot of eras – and cultures. In some Arab cultures, where girls are married as teenagers and then kept in purdah, I doubt there’s much premarital sex. Nor that any married woman gets much, either, if her husband has to spread it around so much. Which probably goes a long way towards explaining the, you know, general anger level among young men . . . I think it was Bertrand Russell who remarked that the Islamic conception of paradise (with an abundance of black-eyed houris for every believer) was to be expected of a society where all the women disappear into rich men’s harems. ---
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 10:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/42 "2006-07-18T10:48:37Z")
[QUOTE=saoirse] It also depends on what you mean by sex. I recall a writer in the NYTBR who discussed the “sexual culture of ‘anything but’” that was prevalent in the 40s and 50s. ::remembers parents’ birthdates:: ::shudders:: [/QUOTE] Not just the 40s and 50s, if it comes to that. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/43 "2006-07-18T12:24:05Z")
It was common in the 1900’s to pass off the child born of an unwed mother as a “sibling”–send the pregnant girl away, tell everyone that her mother is pregnant or that you are going to adopt, and then right after the daughter comes back, have a new baby in the house. This was how the births of both Jack Nicholson and Ted Bundy (and a whole lot of other people) were explained. I doubt that anyone was ever fooled. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/44 "2006-07-18T13:30:59Z")
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton] Nor that any married woman gets much, either, if her husband has to spread it around so much. [/QUOTE] I see ignorance needing to be fought here. In real life, almost all Muslim marriages are single wife. Double wife marriages are a small minority, and the ones with 3 or 4 are rare. I don’t have statistical cites and I don’t know if statistical cites exist. This is based on my travels in Muslim countries. The maximum number of wives in Islam is 4. When African guys with 20 wives convert to Islam, they have to pick 4 they want to keep and divorce the rest. Nowadays it looks like Islam is the great polygamous demon, but originally the rule was meant to _restrain_ the former unlimited polygamy. That said, as a feminist I think all polygyny is vile because of the inherent inequality. If they threw it open so women could marry 4 husbands equally, I would have no objection. Muslim apologists will tell you the rule provides for widows in wartime when too many men have been killed and there aren’t enough husbands to go around. But that is just a reflection of the larger gender inequality endemic in society. Other cultures have had warrior women, including 21st century America. ---
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 1:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/45 "2006-07-18T13:43:56Z")
[QUOTE=Johanna] I see ignorance needing to be fought here. In real life, almost all Muslim marriages are single wife. Double wife marriages are a small minority, and the ones with 3 or 4 are rare. I don’t have statistical cites and I don’t know if statistical cites exist. This is based on my travels in Muslim countries. The maximum number of wives in Islam is 4. When African guys with 20 wives convert to Islam, they have to pick 4 they want to keep and divorce the rest. Nowadays it looks like Islam is the great polygamous demon, but originally the rule was meant to _restrain_ the former unlimited polygamy. That said, as a feminist I think all polygyny is vile because of the inherent inequality. If they threw it open so women could marry 4 husbands equally, I would have no objection. Muslim apologists will tell you the rule provides for widows in wartime when too many men have been killed and there aren’t enough husbands to go around. But that is just a reflection of the larger gender inequality endemic in society. Other cultures have had warrior women, including 21st century America. [/QUOTE] I know you to be an informed and fair-minded poster, **Johanna** , so have you canvassed the opinions of polygynous wives to find out if they would rather be supporting four husbands? On the issue of warrior women, where do you stand on the concept of military service being as _obligatory_ for women as it has historically been for men? How do you feel about warrior women whose physical weakness obliges men to do extra fetching and carrying to make up? And do you feel this is wandering way off topic? ---
**Author:** ![RachelChristine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/7ab992/32.png) [@RachelChristine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RachelChristine)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/46 "2006-07-18T15:17:41Z")
[QUOTE=Annie-Xmas] It was common in the 1900’s to pass off the child born of an unwed mother as a “sibling”–send the pregnant girl away, tell everyone that her mother is pregnant \ [/QUOTE] I have a friend like this. She was born in 1976. I’ll never forget the day she came into school just totally devastated to find out that her “sister” Pam, who was about 16 years older than her, was really her mom. Her parents were really her grandparents, her other siblings were really her aunts and uncles, and so on and so forth. It was pretty bad for her. My parents had gone to church with her family when it all happened, and they said everyone knew what the truth was, but you just didn’t talk about it. I also have a friend with a sister who is 17 years older than her, and her mom made sure to take lots of pictures of the obviously pregnant mom with the obviously not-pregnant 17 year old. She didn’t ever want anyone to question it! And to make this not all anecdotal, like everyone else said – sex has always been there, and everyone’s always been doing it. Our mores may have changed to where it is an acceptable practice now, and you don’t look down on someone the way society once did, but that doesn’t mean people weren’t getting it on back in the day. It’s kinda like the gay thing too. If you just look at society, literature, etc., you’d think that there were no gay people before the last 50 years! (Over-generalizing here.) We over-romanticize The Past, and picture all people as only having heterosexual sex with the person they are married to. And those few deviants who have sex outside of marriage or with a same-sex partner are just really really in the minority. But people were the same then as now, just the cultural expectations were different. ---
**Author:** ![Blanche](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a183cd/32.png) [@Blanche](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blanche)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/47 "2006-07-18T16:20:11Z")
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase] There was a presumption that lower (working) class kids had lower morals than middle class kids but I don’t think this is confirmed by what limited data is available. Same with the presumption that “Negro” youth had lower morals. Although they may have had somewhat higher percentages of unwed mothers, they also didn’t have the ability to go “visit an out-of-town aunt” the way middle class pregnant teens once did. [/QUOTE] I read somwhere that in 1946 or so a study showed that blacks as a whole had a lower percentage of unwed mothers than whites. The 1950s were the decade where the average age of having your first child was at it’s lowest in the USA. This was blamed on the practice of “Going Steady”. After WWII this practice of what was seen as a kind of “mock marriage” was seen as immoral by the older generation, who believed that people should date multiple partners until they accept a marriage proposal. They felt (apparently rightfully so) that dating one person exclusively would lead to more ‘serious’ relationships and teen sex. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/48 "2006-07-18T17:57:59Z")
[QUOTE=Blanche] I read somwhere that in 1946 or so a study showed that blacks as a whole had a lower percentage of unwed mothers than whites. [/quote] Extremely unlikely. Check the fourth graph on [this .pdf page](http://www.economics.ucr.edu/papers/papers03/03-11%20graphs.pdf). This correlates with figures I find elsewhere that say that the average for whites was about 4% as opposed to 19% for blacks. > [@](#): > > The 1950s were the decade where the average age of having your first child was at it’s lowest in the USA. This was blamed on the practice of “Going Steady”. After WWII this practice of what was seen as a kind of “mock marriage” was seen as immoral by the older generation, who believed that people should date multiple partners until they accept a marriage proposal. They felt (apparently rightfully so) that dating one person exclusively would lead to more ‘serious’ relationships and teen sex. Since the average age of marriage was at its lowest in the 1950s, so would the average age of having the first child. Why do you need a false construct like “Going Steady” to intervene? Do you have any sources for your notion that opposition to “mock marriage” was a social force in the 1950s? I don’t know of any evidence that dating multiple partners was any different in the 1950s from decades before or after, or that dating only a single partner was. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/49 "2006-07-18T17:58:12Z")
> [@](#): > > I suspect people have been saying that for as long and as often as humans have been screwing. In other words, throughout our evolutionary history (well, at least since the development of language). “O, tempores! O mores!” (“Oh, the times! Oh, the morals!”) –Cicero Yup, it’s been going on for a long time, and Cicero probably wasn’t the first, either. ---
**Author:** ![CC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f1d935/32.png) [@CC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CC)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/50 "2006-07-18T19:38:46Z")
[QUOTE=Chronos] “O, tempores! O mores!” (“Oh, the times! Oh, the morals!”) –Cicero Yup, it’s been going on for a long time, and Cicero probably wasn’t the first, either. [/QUOTE] Indeed, **Chronos** , These kids today! People have been saying that for a long, long time! “I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint” (Hesiod, 8th century BC). ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/51 "2006-07-18T19:47:01Z")
[QUOTE=Annie-Xmas] It was common in the 1900’s to pass off the child born of an unwed mother as a "sibling… [/QUOTE] “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” ---
**Author:** ![Blanche](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a183cd/32.png) [@Blanche](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blanche)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/52 "2006-07-18T20:09:54Z")
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase] Extremely unlikely. Check the fourth graph on [this .pdf page](http://www.economics.ucr.edu/papers/papers03/03-11%20graphs.pdf). This correlates with figures I find elsewhere that say that the average for whites was about 4% as opposed to 19% for blacks. Since the average age of marriage was at its lowest in the 1950s, so would the average age of having the first child. Why do you need a false construct like “Going Steady” to intervene? Do you have any sources for your notion that opposition to “mock marriage” was a social force in the 1950s? I don’t know of any evidence that dating multiple partners was any different in the 1950s from decades before or after, or that dating only a single partner was. [/QUOTE] Well, it’s a geocities site, and not where I read about this originally, but here’s a little background until I can find a better cite: > **[Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos](https://www.yahoo.com/)** > > Latest news coverage, email, free stock quotes, live scores and video are just the beginning. Discover more every day at Yahoo! “Parental reaction to going steady was not positive, especially as parents feared additional sexual experimentation.” ---
**Author:** ![Blanche](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a183cd/32.png) [@Blanche](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blanche)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/53 "2006-07-18T20:19:41Z")
[http://www.ewtn.com/library/FAMILY/FAMHNDBK.TXT](http://www.ewtn.com/library/FAMILY/FAMHNDBK.TXT) Catholic Family Handbook from 1959 has info on the dangers of going steady “too soon” (do a Ctrl F or just read Chapter 14). In the 1930s, when the term first started showing up, “going steady” was seen as a preliminary to getting married by young adults, but the period of “going steady” continued to increase, and around WWII children started “going steady” earlier and earlier. ---
**Author:** ![saoirse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/5daacb/32.png) [@saoirse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/saoirse)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2006, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/54 "2006-07-18T20:43:21Z")
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase] Do you have any sources for your notion that opposition to “mock marriage” was a social force in the 1950s? I don’t know of any evidence that dating multiple partners was any different in the 1950s from decades before or after, or that dating only a single partner was. [/QUOTE] I have read humor and prody bits that made fun of people who were scandalized by the practice of “going steady.” I figured it was something that teens, at least younger ones, weren’t supposed to do. I don’t think it would have led to a rash of pregnancies, though. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2006, 2:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/55 "2006-07-19T14:22:19Z")
[QUOTE=Malacandra] so have you canvassed the opinions of polygynous wives to find out if they would rather be supporting four husbands? [/quote] Nonsense. That does not follow from anything I said. I don’t know about your country, but here in America all married couples I know are two-income earners, including the Muslim couples. The concept of one spouse “supporting” another seems archaic. Undoubtedly single-income couples still exist, especially if one person is disabled, but it certainly isn’t the norm any more from what I can see. As for the Islamic world, there have always been female business entrepreneurs (starting with Khadijah herself), even in the most conservative Islamic societies like Saudi, because _shari‘ah_ law gives women their own clear ownership of their own capital, unlike in the pre-20th century Christian world where women could only hold assets in the name of their husbands. > [@](#): > > On the issue of warrior women […] do you feel this is wandering way off topic? You got that right, babe. ---
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2006, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/56 "2006-07-19T14:35:28Z")
[QUOTE=Johanna] Nonsense. That does not follow from anything I said. I don’t know about your country, but here in America all married couples I know are two-income earners, including the Muslim couples. The concept of one spouse “supporting” another seems archaic. Undoubtedly single-income couples still exist, especially if one person is disabled, but it certainly isn’t the norm any more from what I can see. As for the Islamic world, there have always been female business entrepreneurs (starting with Khadijah herself), even in the most conservative Islamic societies like Saudi, because _shari‘ah_ law gives women their own clear ownership of their own capital, unlike in the pre-20th century Christian world where women could only hold assets in the name of their husbands. [/quote] Given your vehement support for the enlightenedness of Islamic society, I’m astonished you can’t just let them make up their own minds about polygamy, then. > [@Johanna](#): > > You got that right, babe. I’m not a babe. And I’ve no ambitions to be one. We can discuss your warrior-women notions some other time. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2006, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/57 "2006-07-20T00:25:18Z")
I’m by no means wholeheartedly endorsing everything in shari‘ah, not when it imposes inequality on women. I wholeheartedly support the Muslim feminists working against such inequality. But in cases where it does provide for equality, I say give it credit for being many centuries ahead of the West. I see a lot of poorly understood or just plain wrong assumptions made about the subject and this is the Straight Dope, remember. I’m a Western feminist but I criticize a lot of other Western feminists when they don’t understand what the Muslim feminists are really saying, and try to bridge the gap in understanding. ---
**Author:** ![Mandarax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@Mandarax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mandarax)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2006, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716/58 "2006-07-20T00:43:58Z")
[QUOTE=Alive At Both Ends] > [@ShibbOleth](#): > > At what point in history were people aware that gestation was roughly equal to 9 months? Probably at the same time that they realised that sex was what caused babies. And I find it hard to believe that was anytime in recorded history. I suspect even Neanderthals knew that. [/QUOTE] [When did mankind figure out that SEX = BABIES?](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_210.html) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-premarital-sex-uncommon-in-days-past/364716.md?page=2)