ABSTRACT
The men who had promised marriage did not respond in the same way when confronted on pregnancy with the girl’s request to fulfill that promise. Many girls were kept concealed locally during their pregnancy – a situation that placed them almost totally in the power of the concealers, usually the seducer or his friends, and it is little wonder that her friends and relatives were often alarmed and concerned about her fate. The simple offer to remain a friend to the girl, in a situation where her pregnancy had rendered her a social outcast, was often a sufficient pressure for her to name another. In Cricket Malherbie, a single woman, accused of being pregnant, was brought before the magistrates. The gentlemen ordered the girl to submit to a physical examination by a midwife, and ‘two other women that have been mothers of children’.
