For Victorian Scotland sex, love, and marriage were a confusing milieu of misinformation, double standards, and changing social mores. Victorian moral ideals of chastity, restraint, and female purity pressured women to avoid premarital, or illegitimate, sex upon their honor as women. Simultaneously the man was seen as a sexual figure, with a large appetite. In the words of T. C. Smout ‘Since... the middle-class male was disbarred from seeking sexual relief from women of his own class, where should he go?’ (Smout 61) Victorian morality placed men and women across all classes into precarious positions, and set their physical desires against the social mores of their generation. This created a confused climate of sexual misinformation, where rules of conduct were fluid, illegitimate births were on the rise, and changing notions of gender relations were experimented with. (Blaikie 221-41)

The Victorian standard of female purity placed enormous pressure on young women to avoid the stigma associated with any sort of sexual knowledge. This was important because at this time property was transferred through marital relations, and sexual fidelity was an integral part of this covenant. (Smout 166) In contrast to the ideal of female purity in the middle class, working class women (especially in certain areas such as Bannfshire and the Northeast of Scotland) experienced a rapid increase in the rates of illegitimate births during this time period.

The changing nature of public and private spaces gave couples new opportunities to engage in premarital relations, both sexual and plutonic, and the lack of effective birth control practices led to a high rate of illegitimate births. Relationships between the genders, especially amongst the working class, were also changing during this time. The increasing independence of women that stemmed from wage labor and seasonal migrations for work meant that illegitimacy became more socially acceptable. It may have been condemned on a moral basis, but the eventual caretakers of the child (usually the child’s grandparents) recognized practical reality, and usually accepted both child and mother back into the social fold. (Blaikie 233)

- Jon Doolittle