A quick tidbit here about this bit of court documentation– a recognizance for Susannah Williams of Raynham in Bristol County, Massachusetts. Raynham is south of Boston, due west of Plymouth and just a few miles from the county seat of Taunton. In 1778 Susannah Williams, a widow, was called to court for having sex and a baby with Joseph Stall.
In this court document you can see that the Justice of the Peace, George Godfrey, used a pre-printed form to record Susannah’s appearance and the two men who had come along to post a bond guarenteeing that she would come to court as summoned (she likely didn’t and negotiated a settlement with Stall, which was typical). But the form was printed before the revolution was serious enough to warrant new administrative apparatus. So Godfrey had to cross out the reference to the year as it related to the reign of “George the Third, by the Grace of God…King.” He actually missed a second reference to the king in regards to who would hold that bond if Susannah defaulted.
But revolution or no revolution, king or no king, there would be mothers with babies who needed support from those babies fathers. I have a new essay publishing at the end of the year with much to say about why and how these court proceedings look like they are an effort to try and enforce a specific model of family grounded in marriage– but they were really an efficiency in the extraction of child support. (Though to be clear that support was pitifully small.) There was and is absolutely nothing new about women not being married but having babies.