The horrible truth is that previous societies wouldn't have tolerated children out-of-wedlock. The mother and the child would both be considered worthless.
No one would force them to bear children. They would see the woman as a threat to other families and women by being a drain on society and a home-wrecker.
The 'bastards are completely worthless scum with no rights and their mothers are degenerate whores with zero redeeming features' dealio was more-so a feature of the Early Modern period (with its attendant rise of Puritanism and other similarly hardline sects of Protestantism) than the actual Middle Ages, like most other things George RR Martin wrote down for edginess' sake and then tried to pass off as 'realistic'.
Well, but my point is the Church is the actual bulwark against that. The Christian Church asserts that all life has inherent value, even bastards. But generally, bastards & whores/home-wreckers seem to be seen as a plague on society by older societies.
I was kind of referring to non-western societies (which is not exactly appropriate given the context, so my bad on that, I didn't really elaborate any of that well). I know it was kind of a shock for soldiers going to Afghanistan to realize that if the father of a family died, the woman and her children were basically considered socially worthless, sometimes cast out, and forced to live in the mountains (American soldiers are western). Then you have the history of Indians (of the Indus Sub-Continent) burning their widows alive with their dead husbands. Again, the western Protestant British soldiers decreed they'd execute anyone caught doing that.
The horrible truth is that previous societies wouldn't have tolerated children out-of-wedlock. The mother and the child would both be considered worthless.
No one would force them to bear children. They would see the woman as a threat to other families and women by being a drain on society and a home-wrecker.
Not necessarily, bastards could do reasonably well for themselves in medieval Europe for example. Obviously it helped if they were of noble or royal birth, but even commoners weren't treated as worthless and could get help from the Church (up to and including getting a primitive form of child support from the father, if identified). And of course, most famously one bastard conquered England while another took over Castile (central Spain), three hundred years apart.
The 'bastards are completely worthless scum with no rights and their mothers are degenerate whores with zero redeeming features' dealio was more-so a feature of the Early Modern period (with its attendant rise of Puritanism and other similarly hardline sects of Protestantism) than the actual Middle Ages, like most other things George RR Martin wrote down for edginess' sake and then tried to pass off as 'realistic'.
Well, but my point is the Church is the actual bulwark against that. The Christian Church asserts that all life has inherent value, even bastards. But generally, bastards & whores/home-wreckers seem to be seen as a plague on society by older societies.
I was kind of referring to non-western societies (which is not exactly appropriate given the context, so my bad on that, I didn't really elaborate any of that well). I know it was kind of a shock for soldiers going to Afghanistan to realize that if the father of a family died, the woman and her children were basically considered socially worthless, sometimes cast out, and forced to live in the mountains (American soldiers are western). Then you have the history of Indians (of the Indus Sub-Continent) burning their widows alive with their dead husbands. Again, the western Protestant British soldiers decreed they'd execute anyone caught doing that.