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McCaffrey Seminar Series - Jennifer Baker
"Negotiating Belonging" examines how women who became pregnant outside of wedlock in seventeenth-century England were supported by family, neighbours, and parish authorities, challenging the common assumption that illegitimacy automatically led to ostracism. Drawing on legal records and testimony, I show that care — including household support, advocacy, and community intervention — functioned to maintain women's social belonging even as it regulated parental and parish responsibility to uphold social order.
For more information about the McCaffrey Seminar Series, please visit: https://history.uwo.ca/about_us/events/mccaffrey_seminar_series.html