8 Rates of prenuptial pregnancy in 9 Massachusetts towns were as follows:

 

 

Proportion of First Births Within

Town

Marriage Cohort

7 mos.

8 mos.

8.5 mos.

9 mos.

Hingham

pre-1660

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

 

1661-80

5.0

 

11.2

11.2

Watertown

pre-1660

 

11.1

 

 

 

1661-80

 

8.6

 

 

Nantucket

pre-1699

 

11.1

 

 

 

1700-1709

 

0.0

 

 

Dedham

1661-69

4.8

 

4.8

4.8

 

1671-80

2.8

 

8.5

11.1

Andover

1655-74

 

 

 

0.0

 

1675-99

 

 

 

12.5

Topsfield

1660-79

7.7

 

7.7

7.7

 

1680-99

2.3

 

4.5

6.8

Salem

1651-70

 

 

 

5.3

 

1671-1700

 

 

 

8.2

Boston

1651-55

3.6

 

6.0

14.3

Ipswich

1651-87

3.8

 

6.0

8.2

Daniel Scott Smith and M. S. Hindus, “Premarital Pregnancy in America, 1640-1971,” JIH 5 (1975), 537-70; Daniel Scott Smith, “The Long Cycle in American Illegitimacy and Prenuptial Pregnancy,” in Peter Laslett et al., Bastardy and Its Comparative History (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 362-78; Robert V. Wells, “Illegitimacy and Bridal Pregnancy in Colonial America,” ibid., 349-61. Rates of prenuptial pregnancy in most parts of England and the Chesapeake colonies were generally much higher in the same period. For another study which also concludes that the ratio of bridal pregnancy in the county of Middlesex, Massachusetts, was “minuscule in comparison with England or the Southern colonies” see Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699 (Amherst, 1986), 70.

9 As late as 1764, the rate of illegitimacy in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, was 7.7 per 1000 live births. This as we shall see was lower even than among Quaker families, and very far below bastardy rates in the Chesapeake colonies, which were ten to twenty times higher. See Robert V. Wells, “Illegitimacy and Bridal Pregnancy in Early America,” and Daniel Scott Smith, “The Long Cycle,” in Laslett, Bastardy and Its Comparative History, 349-61, 362-78.