If I like my nuclear family, may I keep it?

SFGbob

creepycoug said:

SFGbob said:

What stopped people from having children out of wedlock in years past? What changed? There was no government policy or law that prohibited people from having illegitimate children and yet just a small percentage of all children were born out of wedlock. So what happened?

In the old days, the term "bastard" was a legitimate insult to another human being, and something about which to be very ashamed. Society treated women who did this like shit and they were shunned by many people. It was just a bad look, if you will, for everyone involved.

Out of some understandable effort to not be dicks to people who, for whatever reason, made a mistake, it slowly became ok, and through movies and other means of social communication it become romanticized.

Then, through the outer edges of feminist theory, we've come to think fathers are optional. I don't discredit the entire feminist movement, but I do find the outer fringe to be tiresome and often misled.

Outer fringe is now mainstream feminism.

I don't entirely disagree with your answer but I'm not sure how much of a sting the word "bastard" had in the late 50s. Could it be that society "shunned" people who had children out of wedlock because society knew what the cost would be if you had children growing up without fathers? We attached a stigma to the behavior because of the social costs of the behavior, just like we now do with smoking.