Wilma - I spotted the book at a friend's house and she's passed it on to me. Hard to put down. It's even more heartbreaking than the film. Poor toddlers, poor mothers. I didn't realise just how inhumane and greedy the church was.

Attitudes in the 60's depended very much on where you lived. The 'shame' and blame was still rife for many years and sadly even today it's not acceptable with some
.

In the fifties and sixties the British givernment were shipping children in himes to Australia , many had miserable lives, the mothers were not told ,

Wilma I thought that situation might not have changed until the big 1959 MH act reforms but I wasn't sure. Thank you.

I've got that to watch too.

I watched Philomena a couple of days ago and found it harrowing. The deliberate lies to prevent the adopted child and their mother being able to find each other decades later was just vicious. Now I want to read Martin Sixsmith's book.

chocolatepudding

acanthus I suspect something like that happened in my husband's family on his mother's side. It either involved his grandfather or his great-grandfather, but I doubt we'll ever find out now.

Until 1959 the mothers of illegitimate children could be categorised as moral imbeciles and locked away. It was down to what kind of community you live in as to how often this kind of thing happened, but unmarried women who had more than one child were prime candidates. Of course, nothing much happened to the men who got the women pregnant. We think we're so civilised, yet we don't need to look too far back to see what kind of behaviour was considered acceptable.

The Mental Deficiency Act 1913 included this category.

"Moral Defectives ~ moral defectives were people who, from an early age, displayed “some permanent mental defect coupled with strong vicious or criminal propensities on which punishment had little or no effect”.

*Unmarried Mothers also became absorbed into this category."

A lot of unmarried mothers were probably incarcerated by this legislation and even if the legislation changed a bit the stigma still went on for many years. Horrific!

Chocolatepudding, you kept your pride and can well do without anyone like that awful person in your life. I'm so sorry to hear about your little girl. Just when you needed a bit of warm support from those who should have known better.

chocolatepudding, what a horrible person she must be

Chocolate pudding. Well done you

Slightly off subject but relevant.........

My DD was born 4 months after we got married in the mid 1970s. my parents were happy to have a GD and brushed aside any nasty remarks . My DBs said nothing. It was one of my female cousins who decided to write and tell me exactly what she thought of me and the disgrace I had brought on the family name etc etc. This missile arrived on my birthday and I was very upset by it. I had not seen my cousin for 10 years as she lived abroad. She had 3 DDs and was 8 months pregnant when she wrote to me. A few weeks later she wrote saying "as my parents had accepted the child" she sent some dresses for my DD - which went straight in the bin. When my DD died suddenly aged 7 months she wrote expressing her sympathy to my parents as she "could not write to me".

At the funerals of both her parents I was very polite - good manners as I had been taught.

I have had nothing to do with her since.

The irony is that of all these unforgiving parents of pregnant unmarried daughters in earlier decades, many were probably illegitimate themselves without knowing. In the days before divorce became a fairly routine and accepted procedure, many people (mostly husbands) simply walked away from a marriage, went to another town and married someone else, albeit bigamously. I had a very prim and strait-laced paternal grandmother whose disapproval of most things blighted her family's life. Recently a search of family records suggests a very high probability that she was the product of a bigamous marriage - how I would have loved to have been the one to tell her!

I've just finished reading Jane Robinson's book, a very enlightening and interesting read.

I think I am one of the fortunate ones. I became pregnant when I was a student in the early 60s. My parents were shocked and upset initially. My boyfriend and I were married quickly and we are still happily together 51 years on.

It was if you were in that situation I guess!

I was working in a psychiatric hospital in the 80s and remember one of the nurses telling me that they had several women who had been there for over 20 years who were put there because they had had illegitimate babies.
These poor girls would have become completely institutionalised after about 6 months and probably developed psychiatric disorders as a result of their incarceration.
A lot of the above posts are heartbreaking and made me cry. What courage and determination to fight to keep your baby against your family's wishes......there but for the grace of God etc.

It would be very interesting to read a mirror of the stories on this thread, from the fathers' point of view. They are absent here literally and figuratively.

If the women had no choice, what choice would they have had?

I was on the edge of this, as I got pregnant in 1973, giving birth to DD in 1974. My parents were great, but the next door neighbours told my Dad we should be ashamed (he told them where to go) - and even DD's paternal grandmother told me not to go round to her house so that all the neighbours could see what condition I was in!

When she was about 8 years old, DD asked me what a bastard was as she had been called it at school. I told her it meant someone whose parents weren't married, so she was one - and she heaved a sigh of relief as she thought it meant she was a 'spastic'!

I have read right through this thread with a nagging feeling that there was something missing from the discussion. It seems to me that there is no consideration given to the circumstances in which the women and girls became pregnant. Nowadays, we would draw a distinction between those who fell pregnant within an on-going relationship and those who were coerced into sex e.g a 'one night stand', sexual harassment at work, and actual abuse e.g. incest, underage sex, rape. It seems that in the 50/60s no matter the circumstances, it was always the girl's own fault.

Bear in mind that many young women were very naïve as matters sexual were often not discussed in the home or school. I firmly believed, until I reached my teens, that babies were sent by God to happy couples who had been married for a while. Thankfully my mother ensured that I had full and frank information - including the danger of being under the influence of drink - well before I had my first date or boyfriend. The only session of formal sex/relationship education I had concentrated on warning us that once a boy had been 'led on' he was unable to control his urges and couldn't stop, so it was the girl's responsibility to ensure that things did not get out of hand. Various strategies such as always being part of a group, avoiding being alone together and staying sober, were recommended. Conversely, the boys, being taught in a separate group were told that their responsibility was to always carry a condom!

With these attitudes prevalent it is little wonder that blame always fell on the 'innocent' girl.

Hello Elrel, if I had your email address I could send you the JPEG file of the book and also the 'Update'. My email is: [email protected]

Yes, I think I achieved a lot, given that I grew up in a village where my mum was the only unmarried mum. Or at least, the only one in public. There was incest. A girl who grew up near me had an 'aunt' who was really her mum. The woman she thought of as her mum was actually her granny. Get the picture? But that was thought of as being OK because it was all hush-hush.

My very respectable and hard-working granny Hannah lied on her wedding day. I've never been able to find any trace of the man she put down as her father, stonemason, deceased. There was an awful lot of lying and things swept under the carpet.

It wasn't until many years later when I saw TV programmes about Barnardo's and about 'child emigrants' to Commonwealth countries, that I realised just how lucky I'd been.

Margrete - you must be so proud of both your remarkable family and your own achievements. Will you also be writing a book? Like Bralee's it would be well worth reading.

What a pity she didn't get to say what she felt she ought to and see what possible defence there can be for the things she omitted. My dear wife was in a home, there was one creep in there I would like to strangle but as far as I know he's dead and it was long ago. But she still feels the pain and indignity she suffered.

By the way, my book 'All my father's children' is now out of print, but I have it as a JPEG file.