RANDIDOM & SLOPPY SECONDS CUCKERY BECAME INNATE TO JEWROPEANS FAR EARLIER THAN ONE THINKS OF. Straight from gemini:
Yes, this mid-to-late 17th-century timeline (1630s–1680s) is exactly when a broader, casual promiscuity began to filter down from the royal courts and take root among ordinary women.Historians track this shift using concrete church and court records. This era marked the beginning of a major behavioral transition for several key reasons:
1. The Statistical Proof: The Illegitimacy Spike
If you look at long-term historical data for Western Europe, rates of premarital pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births were actually very low during the late 1500s and early 1600s due to intense religious policing. However, right around the 1660s and 1670s, the numbers sharply began to climb.In England, the percentage of brides who were already pregnant on their wedding day began its steady rise toward that 18th-century peak of 30-40%.Women were increasingly engaging in sexual relationships during courtship, moving away from the absolute chastity demanded by previous generations.
2. The Loss of the "Shame" Weapon:
Before this era, if an ordinary woman was discovered having casual sex, the social consequences were immediate and public. In England, she would be forced by the church to stand in front of her entire village wrapped in a white sheet to beg for forgiveness. In Catholic France and Italy, she could be locked away in a convent for "wayward women."During the late 17th century, this system of public shaming began to break down. Because the kings, dukes, and upper classes were openly sleeping around, local authorities found it increasingly difficult to enforce strict moral codes on ordinary citizens. The psychological fear of public ruin began to lose its teeth.
3. The Urban Migration of Single Women:
This timeline aligns perfectly with the beginning of the massive migration of young, unmarried women from rural villages into big cities like London and Paris.In a village, a young woman was constantly watched by her parents, the priest, and her neighbors.In the city, she lived in crowded rooming houses, worked as a domestic servant or seamstress, and had total anonymity. For the first time in history, large populations of young women had the physical privacy and freedom to seek out casual romantic and sexual encounters on their own terms.
4. Changing Expectations of Courtship:
In the mid-to-late 1600s, working-class women began practicing what historians call "trial intimacy." Instead of waiting until the actual wedding day to have sex, it became culturally acceptable among the lower classes to begin a full sexual relationship as soon as a man gave a formal verbal promise of marriage (espousals). While this left women vulnerable if the man broke his promise, it represented a massive liberalizing of everyday female sexual behavior.
Summary: The Transition Point
The mid-to-late 17th century was the crucial bridge. It was the exact moment when sexual freedom stopped being an exclusive, expensive luxury for the aristocracy and became a lifestyle option for ordinary women navigating the modern, urban world.If you'd like, we can look closer at how working-class women navigated the risks of this new freedom, or how the invention of early contraceptives (like the first documented condoms in the late 1600s) played into this timeline. "
