This article is part of a series on Risk and Uncertainty. Articles in this series aim to explore how ordinary people understood and coped with risk and uncertainty in times of personal crisis and in everyday life, helping to illuminate our own experiences of navigating an increasingly uncertain world. You can read an introduction to the series here. When young women in the working neighbourhoods of Old Regime Lyon accepted invitations to walk out with and publicly date young men, they set into motion an uncertain series of events that could endanger their mental wellbeing, their reproductive health, their reputations, and their futures.
The conventional steps from courtship to marriage involved a complex process during which young women had to negotiate sexual activity and its reproductive consequences as well as to assess the reliability of their potential marriage partners as household co-providers and compatible companions. Although most adults married, each of these steps entailed risk, and personal crisis was never far away. After weeks or months of flirtatious chat, a young man might ask a female companion about walking out together.
If the woman accepted, they started seeing each other many evenings and Sundays, spending their time chatting, hugging, kissing, and touching as they explored being potential life partners while walking around the city. Talk about marriage and sex often happened at the same time. Young couples usually began to have sex as they sought the blessing of their families and made marriage contracts. Frequently, they were pregnant by the time they married.
Many times, the relationship fell apart before the final step of marriage, a simple church service, was completed. The shift to walking out together had multi-faceted purposes: it was meaningful as the start of a courtship to the couple, it announced their status to the neighbourhood, it gave them opportunity to see each other often, and it defined the spatial parameters of their sociability as public spaces where people could watch them.
New couples saw each other often and the rubric of licit intimacy allowed them to experiment quite expansively in terms of the pleasures of kissing, cuddling, and touching.
