ABSTRACT
In Old Regime France, specific conventions framed young women’s intimate relationships with men. This essay examines fertility as a site of negotiation and contention. It explores practices of licit, age- and stage-appropriate intimacy during the decade-long phase of emerging adulthood when women were single workers. It examines their efforts to manage intimacy and fertility through a range of ‘remedies’ in the context of official and local attitudes and with their intimate partners. Young women’s fertility provided a marker, a milestone, and a malleable process integral to the ambiguous and complex transition in youthful intimate relations between walking out and matrimony.
