From Croft to Campus: Extra-Marital Pregnancy and the Scottish Literary Renaissance (Critical Essay‪)‬

[1] Teaching in rural Ohio, I have been surprised by the number of students who become pregnant, defying the current trend towards delaying motherhood. It is easy for those of us educating these students to shake our heads sadly, reflecting on the premature responsibilities and lost opportunities we imagine they will experience. Yet I am also impressed by how many of them, with or without the support of the father, choose to have their babies, return to the classroom within days, and graduate on time, posing for photographs with the baby nestled in one arm and the diploma tucked under the other. Relying on a supportive family network, they scarcely seem to skip a beat. Scotland in the 1920s and '30s may seem to be worlds away from southwest Ohio, but an examination of the literary treatment of single motherhood by avant garde writers of the Scottish Renaissance provides an alternate way to understand the choices and experiences of these young women. Nan Shepherd, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and Neil Gunn portray unmarried mothers unsentimentally but sympathetically, denouncing the cruelty of an institutionally imposed moral stigma. [2] Early twentieth-century Scottish attitudes towards unmarried mothers developed over centuries. According to Leah Leneman and Rosalind Mitchison, the disciplinary arm of the Church of Scotland, the Kirk Sessions, used both civil and church laws during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to punish "sexual irregularities," such as illegitimacy (41). Until dissent and a more mobile population undermined its authority, the Kirk was a "more or less monolithic structure," and a reduced illegitimacy rate in the 1780s suggests that it "was able to contain sexual expression" (45, 49). Following the Act of Union in 1707, Scottish women were also subject to the 1624 "Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children," which presumed that a mother who concealed the death of an illegitimate child must have murdered it. Josephine McDonagh writes that by the late eighteenth century, the law was increasingly considered ineffective and inhumane, but it had shaped attitudes: concealing not only a death but the pregnancy itself was now seen as "evidence of an intention to murder the child" (3). The repeal of the law in 1803 was followed by a series of acts ameliorating the legal vulnerability of single mothers. However, the prevailing moral code, administered from the pulpit, still left women with few choices. Concealed or not, pregnancy before marriage led to shame, scorn, and suspicion.