ABSTRACT
For Victorians, illegitimacy was a moral litmus test. Although less obviously censorious, historians have used the incidence of bastardy in a similar manner, as one of the few available means for exploring the otherwise obscure relationship between the sexes in past generations. Illegitimacy statistics provide the principal evidence for Edward Shorter’s well-known thesis concerning female emancipation in the nineteenth century. His critics, including Joan Scott and Louise Tilly, use virtually the same evidence to come to the opposite conclusion that women, while acting in new ways dictated by their new industrial and urban circumstances, continued to be motivated by traditional values. 1
