The book Illegitimacy, Family and Stigma in England, 1660-1834 (Oxford, 2022) by University of Manchester Leverhulme Early Career Fellow Kate Gibson has won the 2022 Women’s History Network book prize. Kate shared the £500 prize with joint winner Jane Freeland for her book Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism in Divided Berlin, 1968-2002.

The book examines the impact of illegitimate birth on individuals throughout their life cycle, measuring its effect on parent-child relationships, upbringing, relationships with siblings and wider kin, and on education, occupation, and marriage. It investigates the operation of stigma, and its relationship with shame and self-identity for illegitimate individuals. The book was the first study to compare illegitimacy according to socio-economic class, gender and race, finding that stigma was heavily variable and operated on a spectrum.

The judges commented:

‘This exploration of illegitimacy is a very ambitious and engaging project, based on an impressive range of archival sources as well as a huge range of printed primary material. Gibson forensically documents the spectrum of attitudes towards those who were illegitimate and charts the resulting social experience over a long time period, alongside different kinds of cultural representation. Her attention to the life-cycle is an important historiographical contribution and clearly demonstrates both change over time [and] differences across the social scale, with those from the labouring poor experiencing greater hostility since their children might become chargeable to the parish. Vivid portraits of lived experience and self-presentation abound, and the book is particularly interesting on role of fathers, as well as its sustained attention to impact of race and empire. The wide range of evidence is expertly deployed to support her arguments and the result is a nuanced and convincing social and cultural history of illegitimacy.’

Huge congratulations on such a fantastic achievement Kate!

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