Stephanie Coontz: Anna Nicole Smith's baby could have it a lot worse
[Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families, is the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”]
PITY poor little Dannielynn, just 5 months old and already the potentially multimillion-dollar prize in a paternity battle waged by three of the unsavory men who partied with her mother, Anna Nicole Smith, in the last years of her troubled and tawdry life. There’s an even creepier fourth potential candidate: Ms. Smith’s half-sister claims that Ms. Smith’s late husband, the nonagenarian billionaire J. Howard Marshall, left behind frozen sperm. And now Ms. Smith’s estranged mother has also rushed forward to claim custody of the baby. Could anything be worse for this little girl than to be at the center of such a media circus or to end up with one of these characters?
Actually, yes. For thousands of years, the future of a child born out of wedlock was of absolutely no interest to anyone, especially if she was an orphan. The only people likely to take her in were people who needed free labor on their farms or required a child “helper” small enough to run under dangerous factory machines piecing together broken threads or picking up dropped objects.
For 500 years, British law, on which American law was modeled, held that a child born to an unwed mother was a “filius nullius” — literally, a child of no one, entitled to support from no one. Little Dannielynn would not have had a right to her mother’s inheritance, much less a legal claim to receive support from the family of either her deceased mother or her father.
Until a little over a century ago, if an unwed mother died, her parents and siblings, not her child, had first claim to her property. If the child’s mother lived, she was often forced to abandon the child to ensure her own survival. For most of history, a woman’s sexual partner or estranged mother would never have fought for the right to raise a little Dannielynn.
Only for the last 100 years have European and American laws protected the right of children like Dannielynn to inherit from their mothers’ estates. It was not until 1968 that the child of an unmarried woman could collect on debts owed to her mother or sue for a mother’s wrongful death. And the right to inherit from an unwed father was not guaranteed until 1977....
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PITY poor little Dannielynn, just 5 months old and already the potentially multimillion-dollar prize in a paternity battle waged by three of the unsavory men who partied with her mother, Anna Nicole Smith, in the last years of her troubled and tawdry life. There’s an even creepier fourth potential candidate: Ms. Smith’s half-sister claims that Ms. Smith’s late husband, the nonagenarian billionaire J. Howard Marshall, left behind frozen sperm. And now Ms. Smith’s estranged mother has also rushed forward to claim custody of the baby. Could anything be worse for this little girl than to be at the center of such a media circus or to end up with one of these characters?
Actually, yes. For thousands of years, the future of a child born out of wedlock was of absolutely no interest to anyone, especially if she was an orphan. The only people likely to take her in were people who needed free labor on their farms or required a child “helper” small enough to run under dangerous factory machines piecing together broken threads or picking up dropped objects.
For 500 years, British law, on which American law was modeled, held that a child born to an unwed mother was a “filius nullius” — literally, a child of no one, entitled to support from no one. Little Dannielynn would not have had a right to her mother’s inheritance, much less a legal claim to receive support from the family of either her deceased mother or her father.
Until a little over a century ago, if an unwed mother died, her parents and siblings, not her child, had first claim to her property. If the child’s mother lived, she was often forced to abandon the child to ensure her own survival. For most of history, a woman’s sexual partner or estranged mother would never have fought for the right to raise a little Dannielynn.
Only for the last 100 years have European and American laws protected the right of children like Dannielynn to inherit from their mothers’ estates. It was not until 1968 that the child of an unmarried woman could collect on debts owed to her mother or sue for a mother’s wrongful death. And the right to inherit from an unwed father was not guaranteed until 1977....