slavery brought upon us by the curse of many colors within the Negro race but that is no reason why we should ourselves perpetuate the evil hence instead of encouraging a wholesale
bastardy of the race, we feel that we should now set out to create a race type and standard of our own which could not, in the future, be stigmatized by
bastardy, but could be recognized and respected as the true race type anteceding our own time.
'Yet touch this sparingly, as 'twere far off, /Because, my lord, you know my mother lives.' (93-4) A man who can be so mindful of his mother's reputation, while insinuating the
bastardy of her eldest son, will go far.
The family feud raises the specter of
bastardy that on the national level had marked the Protestant succession ever since the illegitimate Monmouth's ill-fated rebellion against James II.
1939: The
Bastardy Bill made blood tests compulsory in paternity cases.
I believe that these intestate succession statutes that require a father to take formal steps to acknowledge or legitimize a child before that child can legally inherit from him are remnants of the days of slavery and anti-miscegenation laws, when "fictions and presumptions about
bastardy and marriage served definite purposes in a legal system seeking easy ways to determine who was eligible to inherit property." (60) There is no place for such strict requirements in modern law.
1) What might a
Bastardy Law and White Slave Law be aimed at preventing?
Bastardy and paternity charges comprise only a fraction of these trials: Some 162 women were charged with conceiving illegitimate children in this period, and 142 men were charged with fathering those same children.
Common law in the American colonies incorporated many provisions of the English law of
bastardy but gradually modified them during the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries.
She was reviled for her sins--a dispatch from London to an American paper read, "It is a case of glaring, flagrant harlotry and
bastardy, taken into the pure homes of English wives and daughters, and condoned by the men because she is so beautiful, so fascinating." Yet Bernhardt was also lauded for her hypnotic performances.
It was a tribute to Henry's overwhelming personal authority that the tacit contradiction between his daughters'
bastardy (which had been enshrined in statute law in the 1530s) and their standing as his heirs was not challenged in his lifetime.
Bastardy, impotence, lack of physical strength in a physical world...
