Selling Anonymity: The Market for Secrecy Around Illegitimate Births

Introduction

In the late spring of 1933, Mrs Petersson of Karlskrona, Sweden, guaranteed friendly treatment, sympathy and understanding to an unknown woman from the city of Gothenburg in a correspondence that was initiated by a newspaper advertisement. The woman, Miss MA, was pregnant outside wedlock and was searching for “unnoticed” accommodation in the countryside where she could stay during her pregnancy and thereafter have her child placed in foster care. Probably these were all measures to try to keep her illegitimate pregnancy a secret. Mrs Petersson offered to provide accommodation in a single room in a large house in the countryside for SEK 90 per month, and medical care through the family's house doctor. She also offered to adopt the child without any further financial claims. In the correspondence between them, Miss MA praised Mrs Petersson, saying that others had offered to help “but most of them seem to be very business-oriented”, while “(w)hen you offer that the child will be taken care of as your own child, it must be guided by a sincere desire and motherly love for a child…”. ¹ As events developed, however, Miss MA would find reasons to question this sincerity.

On 9 June, Miss MA arrived, and was installed at the home of 58-year-old Mrs Petersson and her husband, approximately 350 km from home. Three months later, she was told to move out because the landlord had stated that Mrs Petersson must not take in unmarried pregnant women as lodgers. Mrs Petersson suggested that Miss MA might find accommodation at Mrs Iversen's private maternity home in Växjö instead. While in labour, Miss MA travelled the 100 km there by taxi. On arrival, she gave birth to twin boys one month prematurely. A few days later, she received a letter from Mrs Petersson in which her former hostess stated that she had heard from “the authorities” that sadly she had not been approved as an adoptive parent due to her age. So now, although Miss MA had been promised that adoption as well as confinement and medical care would be included in the accommodation fee at Mrs Petersson's, she had to find another home for her newborn sons, and she had to pay Mrs Iversen as well.

It turned out that Miss MA was not the first unmarried pregnant woman to have bought Mrs Petersson's services. According to an inspection report provided by the priest Hagbard Isberg (1880–1960), who as a state social inspector inspected Mrs Petersson's and 185 other maternity and infant homes during the period 1928–1938, she had treated at least three other women in a similar way. Isberg argued that Mrs Petersson was taking advantage of these unmarried pregnant women, leaving them in difficult situations.

Giving birth out of wedlock has for centuries been associated with shame, economic burden, and secrecy. Unmarried expectant women could escape stigma in their communities by travelling away from home and purchasing a confinement at different establishments. They could hide there when the pregnancy started to show, give birth, have their children sent away for adoption or to foster care, and then return home. ² By 1933, when Mrs Petersson offered “unnoticed accommodation” to unmarried pregnant women and adoption of their offspring, a series of Acts to safeguard the wellbeing of children born out of wedlock and their mothers had been introduced by the Swedish state: the Foster Care Act 1902, The Act on Illegitimate Children 1917, the Adoption Act 1917 and the Public Child Welfare Act 1924. Despite these state regulations, or perhaps because of them, the stigma of illegitimacy continued to haunt unmarried pregnant women.

This article sets out to explore the social economy of this stigma by investigating the market for anonymous births in Sweden after child welfare became a public concern at the turn of the twentieth century, but before maternity care and childbirth became supported by public expenditure in the emerging welfare state in the late 1930s. We do this by studying advertisements promoting maternity homes, private midwifery, lying-in establishments and services addressed explicitly towards unmarried pregnant women, published in selected Swedish newspapers during the period 1905–1935. While this article focuses on those who, like Mrs Petersson, advertised their services, and not on the pregnant women seeking them, these advertisements, in combination with inspection reports and policies, document the social and economic costs of extramarital sex that women like Miss MA faced if they became pregnant out of wedlock.

Anonymous and Illegitimate Births in Sweden

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, extramarital sex was a criminal offence in Sweden, which meant that an illegitimate child was the ultimate proof of a criminal act. As a consequence, many illegitimate children were deserted or poorly cared for, and sometimes even deliberately murdered. ³ As a response to the numerous infanticide verdicts that were handed down in Sweden, King Gustav III established the Infanticide Act in 1778. This legislation protected unmarried mothers by giving them the right to give birth anonymously and to leave their children in someone else's care. ⁴ Both parents could be registered as unknown in the parish records and the midwife had no right to inquire about the father.

In 1917, the Infanticide Act was replaced by The Act on Illegitimate Children, which stated that men should take more financial responsibility for their illegitimate offspring. This meant that anonymous births were no longer possible. From that time on, an illegitimate child received the mother's surname, and a municipal child welfare officer was appointed to every child born out of wedlock with the mandate to conduct paternity investigations and make sure that the fathers provided economic support for their children. ⁵ This law meant that the state – represented by municipal officials known as barnavårdsman (Eng.: child welfare officers) – could, without the mother's consent, file a paternity suit against a man who did not willingly acknowledge his fatherhood, and in this way legally force fathers to pay for their children. However, the majority of illegitimate births did not result in a paternity lawsuit and the child welfare officers’ success in establishing fatherhood varied between municipalities. ⁶

One of the experts involved in the drafting of The Act on Illegitimate Children was Hagbard Isberg. Working as priest amongst the poor in the city of Malmö, he discovered that The Foster Care Act of 1902 did not safeguard illegitimate foster children from being maltreated in several cases of baby farming. As early as 1905, he was arguing in favour of the illegitimate child's right to both a father and a mother and that society should not punish unmarried mothers for their immorality, but instead focus on establishing means for unmarried mothers to keep their children. ⁷ Due to this work, The Act on Illegitimate Children contained several of his original ideas.

A decade after the Act became law, Isberg was clearly disappointed with how it was being administrated at the local level. In 1928, he was appointed official state inspector of private maternity and infant homes as a result of his observations alleging an increasing prevalence of small, private maternity homes due to their frequent advertising: “In a district in this country, for several years now, one small private maternity home after another has appeared, like mushrooms emerging from the soil.” ⁸ Isberg argued that the entrepreneurs running these maternity homes were deliberately exploiting unmarried mothers and their children and profiting from their vulnerable situation. Moreover, such arrangements made it possible to circumvent the law and escape the social and economic control the state wanted to impose on the parents of illegitimate children. A market for anonymous births and secret maternity services seemed to have arisen in the wake of the new law, according to Isberg's observations. In this article, we put Isberg's description to the test by mapping the number of advertisements over time and their qualitative character.

Theoretical Starting Points

The theoretical starting point for this study is that a pregnancy resulted in both social and economic costs for many expectant unmarried mothers. ⁹ This stimulated a demand for, and supply of, services that could reduce or eliminate these costs. The exact services that were demanded were likely to be dependent upon whether the expectant mother primarily needed to deal with economic or social costs. For wealthy women, the economic costs were probably not as daunting as the costs related to social stigma. For poor women, a combination of economic and social costs can be expected to have influenced their options, such as the risk of losing employment, accommodation, etc. ¹⁰

One can only imagine how desperate such a situation must have been. Professor of law, Margaret Jane Radin, provides a theoretical conceptualisation of how desperation is connected to commodification. She argues that desperate situations can result in desperate market exchanges, which in turn are rooted in different sorts of subordination or asymmetrical power relations. Radin provides examples of how people in desperate situations may sell contested commodities such as their organs, sex or surrogacy. ¹¹ This study, in contrast, will demonstrate how desperate situations could result in the purchase of contested services, such as silence and secrecy, in exchange for money or manual labour.

The unborn illegitimate child is at the centre of these desperate market exchanges, and therefore sociologist Viviana Zelizer's theory of the changing social value of children is important in this context. She argues that, before the valorisation of children transitioned from an economic value that children primarily possessed as labourers to a sentimental value in which they became perceived as “priceless jewels” to their carers or parents – unwanted babies had a limited sales value. Infants appeared on the market either for a very low price, or as “pay babies”, meaning that their mothers paid a “surrender fee” to foster carers or baby farmers. ¹² In contrast to Zelizer, we argue that the market in which both the care of babies and other services to expectant unmarried women were advertised, is affected not only by the changing social value of children, but also by the changing economic and social costs related to the stigma of illegitimacy. In the market we address here, it was not only the disposal or care of a baby that was commodified, but secrecy and anonymity as well. The desperate circumstances during which these market exchanges took place may have turned secrecy into a currency that could buy manual labour, generate cash profits or even buy a child.

Previous Research

Class is likely to have been a decisive factor in the costs of illegitimacy, but geographical location also mattered because illegitimacy rates were unequally distributed, both across Sweden and internationally. Previous research on such geographical variation has suggested that the social stigma faced by unmarried mothers was milder where illegitimate birth-rates were high, and harsher in areas with few illegitimate births. ¹³ As time went by, the geographical variation in social stigma has been said to have evened out until the early twentieth century, when illegitimacy rates increased all over Sweden. ¹⁴

Previous research on unmarried mothers in Sweden has predominantly been undertaken using demographic methods to reveal unmarried mothers’ social vulnerability through mapping their chances of getting married later in life, patterns of repeated illegitimate births and migration, ¹⁵ and by legal historical analyses of paternity lawsuits and the practical deployment of municipal child welfare officials. ¹⁶ This article, in contrast, will focus on how unmarried pregnant women were addressed in newspaper advertisements. This provides new knowledge about how everyday material, visible to anyone, positioned and visualised unmarried women and their illegitimate children. Through the lens of the marketplace, it is adding knowledge about the discourses and social status that surrounded these women and children. Studying what the women were offered, and how the market illustrated their needs, requires us to investigate the people who were offering these reproductive services; people who, according to Isberg, were profiting from pregnant women's situation. ¹⁷ Whether or not these women were exploited, the market is an arena for economic exchange, and those who advertised sought to make economic exchanges with unmarried expectant women. It is of great importance to gain knowledge about these “sellers” and the market in which they operated in order to illuminate the social and economic costs related to illegitimacy that unmarried pregnant women have faced in the past, and perhaps still face in various places today.

Advertisements have recently become a new source for socio-historical inquiry, as an effect of the digitisation of newspapers. One important study is Shurlee Swain's investigation into how children were advertised for adoption and how prospective adoptive parents advertised for children in classified advertisement columns in Australian newspapers. Citing Paul Bruthiaux, she contends that “…authors of classified advertisements choose from a well-established repertoire of words and phrases but sometimes sequence them in novel or unusual ways.” ¹⁸ One way to address the prospective consumers of services in the market we are studying was to use the concept of being “obemärkt”, translated into English as “unnoticed”. This was a euphemism for unmarried pregnant women who were seeking secrecy and discretion about their situation, and it functioned as a signifier for the newspapers’ readership. The fact that there existed a designated concept for keeping a pregnancy secret is noteworthy, as it demonstrates that this practice was widely known.

The term “unnoticed” has not previously been the focus of any major scientific investigation, but a couple of student and local history essays have studied how the concept was used in advertisements in local Swedish newspapers and women's magazines. Taken together, these essays show that advertisements using the concept “unnoticed” were quite frequent during the period spanning the 1920s to the early 1950s, with a sharp decline thereafter. Advertisers could be unmarried expectant women seeking confinement, accommodation or work, as well as midwives, maternity homes, children's homes or individuals offering services or employment to “unnoticed” women. ¹⁹ To our knowledge, no one has previously attempted to map such advertisements published in the largest newspapers with national coverage. This is exactly what we do in this article.

As will become evident in the analysis section below, many of the advertisements were published by midwives. For a long time, home birth attended by a hired midwife or untrained helper (Sw.: hjälpgumma) was the means for organising childbirth in Sweden. ²⁰ But as childbirth became a field for medical science, the professionally trained midwives had to compete with male physicians to determine the profession's content and boundaries. ²¹ Subsequently, scientific medicalisation led to a transition from home births assisted by midwives, to hospital births where both midwives and physicians were present. Nationally, this transition took quite some time, even though hospital births were favoured quite early in Sweden compared to other European countries. At the beginning of the 1920s, most births still took place in the home, but a rapid change during the late 1920s and ‘30 s led to most births in the early 1940s being handled in hospitals. This change occurred in conjunction with the expansion of the welfare state. The Swedish parliament decided in 1937 that child deliveries should become a national public expenditure, free of charge for women. ²²

It is important to note that home births were conducted not only by private midwives, but also by state or civil-society-employed district midwives located all over Sweden. ²³ Yet, it was private midwifery that was most affected by the trend towards hospitalisation. The transition to hospital births started in the cities and subsequently outcompeted private midwifery. In the city of Stockholm, the highest number of private midwives can be found at the turn of the twentieth century, when 100 were operating. Thereafter, their numbers decreased. ²⁴ In her study on the institutionalisation of childbirth in the city of Sundsvall during the period 1900–1930, Maria J. Wisselgren shows that unmarried mothers converted earlier to public hospital births than married mothers. In effect, home births decreased more rapidly amongst unmarried women than amongst the married. ²⁵ However, the concept of home birth can be debated. Did a home birth take place in the woman's home or in the home of the midwife? Öberg discloses that, in her statistics for home births, she included births conducted at the home of the midwife or at a private maternity home. ²⁶ Wisselgren, on the other hand, did not find any evidence of midwives who took in unmarried mothers to deliver in their own homes, or of any private maternity homes in Sundsvall, in her sources taken from parish censuses, hospital records and child welfare officials’ notes. ²⁷ Depending on the sources we use, we are likely to see different descriptions of home births.

Similarly, the concepts of the maternity home and lying-in establishment can also be debated. In this article, we make a distinction between maternity homes that branded themselves as institutions, and lying-in establishments that did not advertise themselves as institutions, but rather as facilitators of specific services. In his articles, Isberg employed the concept of the maternity home (Sw.: förlossningshem), but exactly what he included in this term is somewhat unclear. It is not evident whether he envisaged a private midwife advertising accommodation and confinement in her home as being the matron of a maternity home, but he did maintain that the worst maternity homes were run by midwives. ²⁸ Citing a state committee report, Wisselgren shows that in 1929 a total of 114 maternity homes were operating in Sweden. These were not exclusively private enterprises as 46% were run by municipalities and civil society organisations, mainly the Red Cross. But, interestingly, 24% of the 114 maternity homes were run by individuals without professional training, while 30% were run by midwives and, to some extent, physicians. ²⁹ This indicates that, during the 1920s, there existed a childbirth market in which private midwives and physicians, as well as other people, were operating, alongside the more dominant trend of welfare-state-organised institutionalisation and hospitalisation of childbirth.

Method and Material

In this study, we analyse advertisements published during the month of March in the years 1905, 1910, 1915, 1920, 1925, 1930 and 1935. The data collection was characterised by a mixed-method approach. We started out by collecting advertisements through searches in the digitised newspaper database Svenska dagstidningar (Eng.: Swedish newspapers) available from the Swedish National Library. Today, this database covers about 900 different scanned and digitised newspaper titles published between 1645 and 2020. ³⁰ However, the database is not yet complete, and it is an ongoing project to scan and digitise old newspapers. ³¹ We focused on two of Sweden's largest newspapers that have been fully digitised: Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter. Another influential newspaper during the first half of the twentieth century was Stockholmstidningen, which is not yet completely digitised. Therefore, additional searches were made manually using microfilm. This mixed-method approach illuminated the pitfalls of the two different collection methods, and during the course of collection and systematisation of our findings we became aware that, depending on whether we had used a digital or manual search, the data collection was affected. Below, we present how we dealt with these issues.

The starting point for our searches was to look for advertisements that might indicate the existence of a private market directed towards unmarried pregnant women, which we had learned about during previous research. In particular, we wanted to determine whether there were maternity homes, lying-in establishments and/or midwives advertising care services explicitly to “unnoticed women” (Sw.: obemärkta). However, because we expected that illegitimate pregnancies would be surrounded by a culture of silence within which the advertisers would not explicitly direct their message towards “unnoticed women”, we also collected advertisements addressing a more general audience. For example, we collected all advertisements published by private midwives. This group of more general advertisements later became a very important backdrop against which to contrast the explicit advertisements.

A great benefit of a digitised newspaper database is that it is possible to scan for keywords instead of reading the entire publication. Searches in the database were made for the following keywords: “förlossningshem OR mödrahem OR barnm* OR obem* OR obem.”, which are Swedish terms and abbreviations for maternity home, midwife and “unnoticed”. However, our search generated a large number of hits, many of them located in articles that were of no interest to the study and in advertisements for other products and services. ³² Consequently, all hits had to be scrutinised in a selection process to identify the relevant advertisements.

Eventually, we found that many advertisements of interest to this study were published close to each other in the same column on the advertising pages of the newspapers. Thus, relevant advertisements that did not include the search terms could be spotted and added to the collection; for example, advertisements that did not use the term for midwife (Sw.: barnmorska), but the old-fashioned term ackuschörska. In this way, our data collection through the database combined digital and manual searches. While this combined method made the collection from the database and the microfilms more similar than would otherwise have been the case, we identified some pitfalls too. Firstly, any digital search is dependent on the accuracy of the search engine of the database ³³ and the selection of keywords. Advertisement pages that did not include any of our search terms, but only included advertisements using the old-fashioned term ackuschörska, were not identified when using the database. Secondly, the manual addition of advertisements from both the database and microfilms was dependent on what we were able to see and detect. As some advertisements consisted of just a line or two, and were published in very condensed advertisement columns, there is a risk that we may have overlooked relevant advertisements. Therefore, the number of advertisements found and scrutinised in this study should be considered minimum figures. Despite this, we argue that the collection of advertisements still is valid for drawing conclusions about the overall publication trends of the private market specialising in unmarried pregnant women. The data corpus gives a clear impression of what a reader of the three major newspapers at the time would have found to be marketed.

In line with the majority of advertisements for other products, services and communications published on the newspaper advertising pages in question, the advertisements were purely text-based. No relevant advertisement included images or decorations.

The collected advertisements were saved as digital images, then typed into a Word file which made the data searchable so that it could be thematically sorted. This made it possible to identify how many times a specific formulation was used, and how often a certain unique advertisement was published. It was also possible to identify how many unique ads were published by a certain advertiser. After this initial coding process, we ended up with 584 unique ³⁴ advertisements, which had been published 921 times altogether.

How did Advertisements Change Over Time?

The collected advertisements could be classified into three categories. The first consists of advertisements in which midwives and other professionals marketed their services to a general audience. The second consists of advertisements in which midwives and others offered care services to those we can assume to be unmarried pregnant women, because they use the concept “obemärkt” (Eng.: unnoticed women) or talk about discretion. The third category consists of advertisements from more or less anonymous advertisers offering accommodation and employment, also explicitly, to “unnoticed” women. This article will address each of these categories in separate sections, but first we will consider the numbers of published advertisements and how they varied over time.

Overall, the first category consists of 95 unique advertisements in which midwives communicated their services to a general audience, published 249 times. In the second category, we found 142 unique advertisements, published 299 times, in which midwives and others offered care services explicitly to “unnoticed” women. Finally, the third, and largest, category consists of 347 advertisements, published 373 times, explicitly offering accommodation and employment to “unnoticed” women (see Table 1).

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Table 1.

Advertisements in Swedish Newspapers 1905–1935 Offering Services and Work to Pregnant Women. Numbers of Unique Advertisements (Total Number of Publications in Brackets).

Year of publication	Category 1. Midwives and other professionals advertising services to a general audience	Category 2. Midwives and others offering care services to “unnoticed” women	Category 3. Semi-anonymous advertisers offering accommodation and/or employment to “unnoticed” women	Total /year of publication
1905, March	19 (88)	21 (21)	22 (22)	62 (131)
1910, March	23 (47)	23 (49)	148 (156)	194 (252)
1915, March	26 (64)	44 (138)	130 (144)	200 (346)
1920, March	10 (14)	12 (14)	27 (30)	49 (58)
1925, March	15 (34)	20 (55)	10 (10)	45 (99)
1930, March	1 (1)	11 (11)	6 (7)	18 (19)
1935, March	1 (1)	11 (11)	4 (4)	16 (16)
TOTAL:	95 (249)	142 (299)	347 (373)	584 (921)

A newspaper reader in any of the selected years was more than twice as likely, and in some years much more than twice as likely, to lay eyes on a unique advertisement explicitly addressing an “unnoticed” woman (categories 2 and 3) than one in which a midwife marketed her work to a general female audience (category 1). This shows that there was a vibrant private market specifically targeting unmarried pregnant women.

As shown in Table 1, there was a much larger number of unique advertisements published in 1910 and 1915 compared to any of the other years. The year 1915 stands out, with 346 publications. In fact, this was due to one particular advertisement that was published many times with slightly different wordings. This advertisement had the headline “Unnoticed birth”, and was published by a “skilled midwife” offering safe, discreet maternity care for unmarried pregnant women (Figure 1). Two slightly different versions of this advertisement were published in Dagens Nyheter, Stockholmstidningen and Svenska Dagbladet almost every day during the period 3–31 March 1915. In total, the two variants of the ad were published 83 times. This means that, whichever of the three newspapers a reader browsed on any day during March 1915, this advertisement was probably present.

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Figure 1.

Dagens Nyheter, 3 March 1915, p. 15. (Approx. translation. Eng.: Unnoticed birth. Skilled midwife offer safe and unobtrusive stay on the countryside, close to a town. Response to “Really good care”.).

Table 1 shows an increasing trend in unique advertisements and publications between 1905 and 1915, but a rapid decrease between 1915 and 1920. In accordance with Isberg's observations and the legislative changes, we would have expected to find a rise in maternity homes and other actors marketing care services for unmarried pregnant women after 1917. However, the material rather shows the opposite. What we see instead is a market intended for unmarried pregnant women already in existence before the change in the law in 1917. How this can be understood will be discussed later.

There could be many different reasons why the publication of advertisements for these services declined, and probably several factors affected the outcome. One possible reason is changes in the three newspapers’ conditions for the publication of advertisements. The price might have gone up, for example. We do not have any indication of increased advertising costs, but we do know that during the 1920s Stockholmstidningen became stricter about the content of advertisements. Based on a tightened moral compass, advertisements considered immoral or indecent, for example the marketing of contraceptives, were rejected for publication. It might be that services directed towards unmarried expectant women and the work of midwives were also affected by these new moral standards and censored. Gunnar Sundell, who has studied the history of Stockholmstidningen, argues that this decision led advertisers to Dagens Nyheter instead. ³⁵ The decline in the number of advertisements in our data during the 1920s is not, however, specific to the advertisements published in Stockholmstidningen only; the trend is similar for all three of the newspapers studied. Therefore, the decline is probably not only dependent on changes related to conditions of publication. It is plausible that the entrepreneurs turned to other media to market themselves, for example women's magazines and/or female teachers’ journals, in which we know that advertisements for maternity homes were published up to the 1940s, and advertisements for private midwives up to the 1950s. ³⁶

Moreover, the decline could be related to altered marketing strategies due to either fear of attracting the state inspectorate's attention, or fame. Some entrepreneurs may have become famous enough to attract customers without using advertisements. But, in 1928, the State Inspectorate for Poor Relief and Child Welfare initiated state inspections of both maternity and infant homes, in response to Isberg's observations about an exploitative market. As a state inspector, Isberg then travelled all over the country for ten years, during which he visited 185 maternity and infant homes. His inspection reports often contained serious criticisms of the quality of care, and he also had a few homes closed. ³⁷ From his initial pamphlet, we know that he gained information about maternity homes through advertisements. ³⁸ It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the decline in advertisements, at least after 1925, could have been related to the emergence of state inspections.

In addition, the decline in advertisements offering pregnant women “unnoticed” care occurred in parallel with private midwives becoming more and more displaced by hospital maternity care. Confinement was transferred from the private to the public sphere. Öberg concludes that, in Stockholm, private midwives were entirely absent by 1930. ³⁹ After 1919, midwives had to be authorised by local authorities if they intended to provide professional care and accommodation in their own homes. Then, in 1931, new legislation was enacted stipulating that anyone who wished to run a maternity home or lying-in establishment must be authorised by the National Board of Medicine (Sw.: Medicinalstyrelsen). ⁴⁰ From this time on, legal requirements such as national authorisation and strict supervision probably made it more difficult and costly to run a private maternity home or lying-in-establishment, midwife or not. Bearing all this in mind, the declining numbers of publications of advertisements in categories 1 and 2 in the years 1930 and 1935 are quite expected.

Advertising Midwives Reaching out to a General Female Public

The first category of advertisements includes those in which midwives and maternity homes marketed their services to a nonspecific audience, reaching out to a general female target group. These advertisements are neutral in the sense that they present their services without specifying whether the women who may be interested are unmarried. Neither do these advertisements specifically mention discretion. Nor do they specify whether their customers are exclusively pregnant women, thus opening up opportunities for other reasons than pregnancy to seek out a midwife.

An analysis of when and how these advertisements, targeting females in general, were published shows that the largest number of unique advertisements appeared in 1915 (26), followed by 1910 (23). The most publications, however, were in 1905 (88 times), and then in 1915 (64 times). Thus, the year in which a newspaper reader was most likely to find an advertisement of this sort was in 1905.

The advertisements in this category make use of the term midwife as a title, adding an impression of professionalism. The advertiser thus appears to be trained and competent to perform services linked to the midwifery profession. Exactly what services were being offered is, however, only vaguely communicated. In some cases, they addressed women “in need of a midwife”, but exactly which services were being offered the readers had to interpret for themselves. Only in exceptional cases was any term equivalent to childbirth or delivery used; rather, the advertisements mention good care and accommodation.

A common feature of advertisements in this category is transparency regarding who the advertising entrepreneurs were. Often both the first name and surname of the midwife are presented and both midwives and maternity homes state their address and phone number. It was therefore easy to understand who the advertisers were, and how to get in touch with them. In this regard, it can be argued that advertisements of this type were transparent about their business, easily accessible and did not explicitly market secrecy.

Care Services Addressed to the “Unnoticed”

Some midwives and maternity homes imply that their business might touch on a sensitive topic. One is the midwife Mrs Augusta Thorén, who advertised that she offered accommodation and conducted deliveries at home, with “deepest silence”. ⁴¹ Thus, she guaranteed her patients professional secrecy, which could be read as complete silence, including the very fact that a woman had ever come to see her due to pregnancy. Another example is a maternity home, Skänninge Privata Förlossningshem, which emphasised its code of silence when informing readers that any inquiries would be answered with discreet correspondence in neutral envelopes. ⁴² This meant that a woman contacting this maternity home did not have to fear that her correspondence with them might be disclosed by arriving in an envelope with the maternity home's company brand on it. Most advertisements in the second category also explicitly targeted pregnant women seeking secrecy and discreet care. The great majority used the concept “unnoticed”, often in the heading. The fact that the term “unnoticed” was used shows that the advertisers were aware of the social stigma attached to illegitimate pregnancies, meaning that some pregnancies should not be seen or spoken of, and that they were maintaining the practice of preserving this stigma.

The entrepreneurs behind this category of advertisements were sometimes midwives and maternity homes, but there are also other advertisers. Some claimed to be nurses, others presented themselves as Mrs, and many did not disclose who they were at all, either by name, address or phone number. To contact them, a potential client had to go through the newspaper's advertisement office, an external advertising bureau or a secret mailbox.

Advertisers in this category offered maternity care services, but also accommodation for women before confinement, and many offered to take care of the child after it was born. It was either stated that the child could stay, that there was a home available for the child or that adoption could be arranged (see Figure 1). The fact that advertisers turned explicitly to “unnoticed women”, offering accommodation before the pregnancy started to show, and solutions to leave the child behind, means that it was a complete package of services being offered, enabling the woman to keep her secret and return home as though nothing had happened. This is for example evidenced by an advertisement stating that unnoticed women would receive good and cheap accommodation, and adoption or a monthly stay for the baby. The advertisement ends with the signature “Everything will be seen to”.

As shown in Table 1, the market for care services to “unnoticed” women existed long before the Act on Illegitimate Children was passed in 1917, replacing the right to anonymous birth that had previously been guaranteed by the Infanticide Act. We can conclude that, during the time when anonymous births were legally sanctioned, offering secret confinements harmonised with the instructions to midwives in the Infanticide Act. Moreover, we can expect that the demand for services relating to secret confinement would have increased by the end of the nineteenth century, when new forms of transport, such as railways and steamboat lines, made it easier and cheaper to travel in order to escape stigma in one's local community. Our data goes back to 1905, and we can clearly see that advertisements offering care services to “unnoticed” women already existed then, even though they became even more prevalent in subsequent years.

Stockholm had one of the highest illegitimacy rates in the country. At the beginning of the twentieth century, more than 30% of births in the city were illegitimate, while the figure for the nation oscillated between 11 and 15% during the period 1900–1915. ⁴³ This has been explained by the huge migration of young people from rural areas, who settled down in the city to work but had limited opportunities or interest in marrying, resulting in many children born out of wedlock. In fact, it was quite usual for men and women to cohabit without being married, which gave rise to the term “Stockholm marriage”. ⁴⁴ But another reason is that many unmarried expectant women from other parts of the country came to Stockholm to seek confinement, since the General Orphanage (Sw.: Allmänna barnhuset) was located there, at which unwanted babies could be enrolled. ⁴⁵ There were different ways to enrol a child at the orphanage: full payment was a solution for parents with the means to pay to remain anonymous, but it was also possible for a single unmarried mother to reduce the fee by serving as a wet-nurse at the orphanage for eight months. ⁴⁶ Breast-milk was in short supply at the orphanage and women with enough breast-milk to feed two or more children received a small monetary compensation. ⁴⁷

It is likely that mothers who enrolled their infants at the orphanage delivered them at the city's public maternity hospital or at private midwives’ lying-in establishments offering unnoticed care and confinement. The fact that there was access to discreet accommodation and care in the city, which women could hire before their pregnancy started to show, may have been a solution for many women who came to Stockholm from other parts of the country. However, from 1910, the regulations at the orphanage changed, and it no longer allowed unmarried mothers residing in municipalities outside Stockholm to enrol their children. ⁴⁸ This could have had an impact on the market for anonymous births in at least two ways. Either the market expanded for private midwives in Stockholm who offered a complete solution with accommodation, confinement and a place for the child, or the market decreased for midwives who were not able to offer a place for the child. In our material, there are advertisements offering care of the child in every year except 1905.

According to our data from advertisements in three newspapers with national coverage, accommodation and care for “unnoticed” women was mainly offered in Stockholm, but these services were also available in rural areas and other cities. There are 27 different Swedish towns mentioned in the dataset, stretching from Malmö in the south to Umeå in the north. This demonstrates that the sellers of secrecy and anonymity were not limited to Stockholm, but that it was a geographically widespread market. There are also advertisements from Copenhagen in Denmark and Kristiania in Norway, showing that there were entrepreneurs in other countries offering Swedish women secrecy on the other side of the border.

An important aspect of the social economy around illegitimate births is the resources that were available to unmarried mothers. Resources could consist of a social network of support, financial means, and also what services the expectant mother could perform herself. ⁴⁹ We have already seen that wet nursing was a way to reduce the enrolment fee for an infant at the General Orphanage. Moreover, the advertisements in our dataset show that some midwives explicitly stated that domestic work could be a valid exchange for their services. Some offered reduced or charged no fee for care and accommodation if the woman could help out with domestic chores. Figure 2 is an example of such an advertisement, in which an anonymous midwife is searching for an unnoticed girl who is accustomed to domestic work and good at sewing (Figure 2). While on the one hand this could be thought of as an act of solidarity in which midwives sought to help poor girls who would otherwise find it difficult to pay for a safe and proper delivery, on the other hand it could be seen as a way for midwives to get their domestic chores done without hiring a maid. Paying with money or paying with work differentiated the unmarried pregnant women's situation, as Shurlee Swain and Renate Howe argue:

The ability to pay gave the single mother the opportunity to determine the conditions under which she would be confined. Though the midwife could exploit her vulnerability she remained a customer, rather than a recipient of charity. It was a business rather than a benevolent relationship. ⁵⁰

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Figure 2.

Stockholmstidningen, 17 March 1915, p. 12. (Approx. translation. Eng.: For free subsistence, a simple unnoticed girl used to household chores and preferably also good at sewing immediately get a position at a midwife's.).

However, a business relationship did not always guarantee a distinct contract with predetermined responsibilities and obligations. On many occasions, unmarried pregnant women found themselves in a desperate situation with limited ability to negotiate their options. Isberg, who argued that the private maternity homes exploited women and children, gave the following example:

During the stay, new, unexpected costs appear one after another: 30 SEK for the midwife, 25 SEK in extra payment to F [the matron], expenses for pharmacy goods, for the loan of bandages (in many cases), for car trips, the acquisition of foster homes, children's wear, blankets, baby bottles and “customary gifts”. I have been told by several mothers that there was a lot of crying in this home in the face of the difficulty in obtaining the money demanded by F. […] “The mother may remain in the home in pledge”, or the fact that she has had an [illegitimate] child would be announced at her place of residence, or the child's father would be contacted, or the new employer would be notified, or a lawyer threatens with a lawsuit. ⁵¹

Isberg was describing a situation in which, once they had been taken into a maternity home, the women had their pockets drained of money, and were under constant threat that the secrecy they thought they had purchased could change to full disclosure if they did not agree to pay additional costs. If Isberg was correct, the cost of secrecy must have been difficult for an expectant woman to calculate, and she was always at risk that the person from whom she had hired services might blackmail her.

Other Offerings to the “Unnoticed”

The third category of advertisements is also explicitly addressed to “unnoticed women”, but the advertisers did not present themselves as caregivers, nor did they market any care services for the woman or child. Instead, these advertisements explicitly marketed accommodation and/or short-term employment to “unnoticed” women.

The most common service these advertisements offered was “a room”, “accommodation” or “a home” for the “unnoticed”, i.e. the possibility of a discreet stay during their pregnancy. Above all, it is the opportunity to move in with somebody that is offered. In most cases, it is not stated with whom, in other cases it is a lone wife, a widow or a family. One unusual advertisement offered accommodation in a guest house. Most advertisers within this category, however, are quite uninformative about the details of their own identity. Often, they only state a phone number or an alias with further contact to be made via the newspaper's advertisement office or an external advertising bureau.

In many cases, the offer of accommodation was merged with a job opportunity. The “unnoticed woman” was then offered housing and sometimes food in exchange for domestic work, needlework or babysitting, which is similar to the way in which we saw midwives advertising care and accommodation in exchange for domestic work. But a clear distinction between advertisements in the second and third categories is that those who were advertising services other than care to “unnoticed women” usually only had their unique advertisement published once or twice, and it was less common for a single advertiser to publish many different advertisements. In comparison with advertisements offering care, these advertisements thus appear to a greater extent to be one-off occurrences. This indicates that these advertisers were trying to solve a problem in the moment, rather than advertising a systematised business. Consequently, this category of advertisements seems to address an exchange between individuals, rather than between entrepreneurial businesses and unmarried pregnant women. Thus, these advertisements bear a greater resemblance to the notices that people put up on public billboards than to professional business print advertising.

Why the advertisers in this category should turn explicitly to “unnoticed” women is puzzling. If looking for someone to share your rent or to perform domestic work, why specifically ask for a pregnant woman who is wishing to secretly withdraw from the world? What was especially appealing about them? The advertisements do not give explicit information about this, but through a close analysis of wordings and patterns in the data, we are able to offer some tentative conclusions.

First and foremost, it is possible that directing these advertisements towards “unnoticed” women is to some extent reflecting an act of solidarity – that people were motivated by the desire to offer help to someone in hardship. Conversely, individuals advertising for “unnoticed women” may have identified certain benefits from engaging with such women. One reason could be that the pregnancy would ensure that the contract would only be short term, which could be appealing to some. Another reason, related to the desperate situation of many pregnant unmarried women, is that they were the ideal lodger or employee in the sense that their bargaining power was limited. While the social stigma could be one aspect that influenced this subordinate position, economic costs could do so as well, since unmarried maids who became pregnant outside of wedlock risked losing their homes as well as their employment if fired. The need to find a new home and job quickly could be extremely pressing. In Australia during the same period, Swain demonstrates that there was a greater tolerance for pregnant domestic servants than for domestic servants with children. ⁵²

It is possible that what we are looking at when reading the advertisements targeting “unnoticed women” under the columns “vacancy” and “for rent” is a very distinct market for recruiting low-paid domestic servants. This conclusion is supported by two arguments. Firstly, there is the fact that most advertisements of this kind seemed to offer only accommodation in exchange for work, without any additional monetary salary, in contrast to how domestic servants in general were paid during the early twentieth century. In 1911, for example, the average annual salary for a maid in Stockholm County was SEK 202, while the food and accommodation she received from her employer equated to a value of SEK 292. Consequently, the cash payment made up some 40% of a female domestic servant's total salary. ⁵³ Siding with the “unnoticed” woman by offering her food and accommodation, keeping her hidden and her pregnancy a secret would be what the advertiser was offering instead of wages. Tolerance towards her stigmatised condition was the value she could expect as compensation – she got silence instead of money.

The second argument is that, when advertisements explicitly stated a suggested cash salary, it was a remarkably low sum that was offered. In an advertisement in Stockholmstidningen in 1930, an “unnoticed girl” with cooking skills was offered employment in Stockholm for SEK 25 per month. ⁵⁴ As the average cash salary for a maid in Stockholm city was SEK 50, this was a very modest sum indeed. ⁵⁵ What we might be witnessing here is labour wage dumping.

A final reason for advertising explicitly to “unnoticed” women could be that there were actually other hidden offers included, offers that the woman would discover only after contacting the advertiser. By comparing phone numbers registered in the whole dataset, we have identified that, without revealing their names, some midwives made offers through all three advertising categories. This means that they sometimes addressed women in general with their full name and professional business (the first category). But sometimes they offered care addressed explicitly to “unnoticed” women (the second category) and, without mentioning their names, professional competence or care services, they also published advertisements in the third category. One example is the midwife Mrs E. Högberg, who published one advertisement in which she specified who she was, that her business was in Härserud in Lidingö and that she was to be contacted on phone number A. T. 137. In the next advertisement, she turned to addressing the “unnoticed”, offering such women accommodation, and here she did not reveal either her name, profession or the location in which she was operating. One can only tell that it is midwife Mrs Högberg advertising from the identical phone number, A. T. 137. This second advertisement provides no transparent information that the advertiser was a midwife. For a midwife who cared about her reputation, this discreet address could have been a way to reach “unnoticed” women who might need her services, but without officially connecting her name and brand with this stigmatised group. This in turn indicates that, within the third category of advertisements, which seemed to offer accommodation and work only, other services than those first anticipated were sometimes hidden.

Aside from midwives, other advertisers also appear within more than one category. For instance, we have identified advertisers who offered accommodation for “unnoticed” women (third category), but in other advertisements also promoted care of the baby (the second category). This practice reminds us that advertisements give only glimpses of insights into the business that evolved around “unnoticed” women. Some of the advertisers might even have offered maternal care services that were unsafe, without having a midwife's professional training, or illegal (abortion). We cannot detect the “real” services they offered, but we can conclude that more parties than the pregnant woman herself were eager to maintain secrecy.

Conclusions

The conclusions we draw from our analysis of advertisements targeting unmarried pregnant women are to some extent in line with Isberg's observations that unmarried pregnant women risked exploitation when entering this market, but with the distinction that he turned his critical remarks towards private maternity homes and midwives’ lying-in establishments, rather than against the accommodation and employment market we have identified in this article. But it is also important to note that midwives, entrepreneurs and others offering services on this market had a complex relationship with their customers. As Shurlee Swain has pointed out, this could be exploitative, but at times it could also be empathetic, entrepreneurial but not always successful, and the advertisers often had to struggle to keep their services secret in order to maintain their own respectability. ⁵⁶ Mrs Petersson, who accommodated pregnant women, earned SEK 75–90 per month from this service, which in the 1933 was only slightly more than the salary for a maid. ⁵⁷

The expanding Swedish welfare state meant that the financial costs of maternity care and childbirth, which had previously been the burden of parents, and especially mothers, were transferred to the public sphere. ⁵⁸ In effect, it became more economically rational to give birth in a public maternity hospital than in a private maternity home. However, as long as the social stigma around illegitimate pregnancies existed, the demand for and supply of services that facilitated the secrecy of pregnancies prevailed. This article demonstrates that, in tandem with increased state regulation, the marketisation of such services underwent transformations from marketing secrecy in plain sight in newspapers, to a reduced prevalence of such open marketing. In 1937, in a bill aiming to introduce improved maternal care, Isberg's employer – the Official State Inspector for Poor Relief and Child Welfare – expressed the fear that when the state took action to ensure that public maternity hospitals or maternity homes were available in every municipality, it would not decrease the commodification of keeping illegitimate pregnancies a secret. Instead, he argued that the incentives for unmarried expectant women to purchase accommodation far away from home and give birth in that location's public maternity hospital/home, would rather increase. Therefore, the Official State Inspector emphasised that offering accommodation to “unnoticed” women would be equivalent to running a maternity home or lying-in establishment, and thus the same legal regulations must apply. ⁵⁹

Clearly, an increased tendency towards giving birth in public maternity homes and hospitals must not be confused with a diminution of the stigma of illegitimacy. Secrecy around illegitimate pregnancies still had a sales value in the late 1930s, the Official State Inspector argued. In effect, reducing the economic costs of childbirth could not on its own alter the social economy around the stigma of illegitimacy, other factors were influential as well. The market for secrecy was eventually challenged, probably by changing attitudes to extramarital sex, further social reforms addressing single mothers and childcare, and medical techniques to prevent unwanted pregnancies, such as contraceptives and abortion.