ABSTRACT
There are two approaches to the study of illegitimacy: the social welfare approach and the sociological. The latter tries to understand the institutional norms which define certain births as illegitimate and to explain, in terms of the functional and structural connections of these norms with the rest of society, why illegitimacy occurs in spite of the norms, and why the illegitimate child and its parents have an inferior social status. This type of analysis reveals the basic defects in existent proposals for the elimination or the diminution of illegitimacy, and indicates that the simple measures that would be necessary for abolition will never be taken so long as the reproductive institutions of society are familial in character.
The bastard, like the prostitute, thief, and beggar, belongs to that motley crowd of disreputable social types which society has generally resented, always endured. He is a living symbol of social irregularity, an undeniable evidence of contramoral forces; in short, a problem—a problem as old and unsolved as human existence itself.
Down the ages this problem has remained a matter of morals and policy rather than of scientific theory. It has been viewed as an evil occurrence, calling in each case for a distribution of blame, a manifestation of repentance, and an adjustment of rights and duties. Such moral preoccupation has contributed a great deal to the efficient operation of the institutional system, but it has given little to science except an added object of study. Scientific interest in a social problem emerges only when the moral norms by which the thing is judged evil are themselves subjected to analysis rather than taken for granted. In other words, the early preoccupation of social science with the irregular and contramoral aspects of human life was generally unscientific. It was the “problem approach.” Not until the regular and the moral aspects themselves were subjected to scrutiny could scientific validity be achieved, for the contramoral is always functionally related to the moral, illegitimacy to legitimacy. 1
