Ok, let me do this in one go, because I got a lot of questions about this, including from southagermican, and I didn’t want to write this multiple times.
Yes, it’s true, a lot of patriarchal societies privilege being a virgin at marriage. But societies also need to show flexibility because human beings are human. So one adaptation, historically, was to adopt the “shotgun marriage” approach – as long as people got married after they got pregnant, they could fool around all they wanted.
To give an example of this: few people would disagree that as far as religious, patriarchal societies go, the Puritans of 17th century New England were pretty far up on that list. However, in that place and time, over a third of all first born children involved a pre-marital pregnancy (Laurel Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale). In fact, the Puritans even practiced something called “bundling,” in which parents would put their teenage kids – as long as they were suitable matches – in the same bed and let them go to it.
I think a similar attitude exists in Westeros, as Harwin’s quote indicates. As long as the parents get married before the kid’s born, then the kid’s legitimate, the daughter has a household to support her child rather than becoming a burden on her parents, and the lines of succession aren’t messed with.
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