Martha Ballard Quotes

According to Ellen Rothman, even in the early nineteenth century wedding rituals affirmed ties of community. A week of neighborly visiting following the wedding was more common than a journey, and when couples did take a trip, other people often went along. This practice began to change in the second half of the nineteenth century. “Beginning in the 1870s, etiquette books advocated that the couple leave the church—where middle-class weddings increasingly took place—together and alone, and that instead of the ‘harassing bridal tour,’ they enjoy ‘a honeymoon of repose, exempted from claims of society,’ ” By the 1880s, “honeymoon trips to ‘romantic’ locations were expected to follow weddings.” 8

the legal position of unwed mothers in eighteenth-century New England. Massachusetts law had always defined sexual intercourse between unmarried persons as a crime. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, courts had punished men who fathered children out of wedlock as rigorously as the women concerned, often relying on testimony taken from mothers during delivery to establish the fathers’ identity, but by the middle of the eighteenth century, most historians argue, fornication had become a woman’s crime.