Fallen Women
“Single mothers are fallen women and grave sinners, whose children are the product of wickedness” - Father Cecil Beaton, Head of the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau, 1952 [1] The severe and judgemental attitudes towards women who became pregnant outside of marriage permeated the ethos of virtually all Church and State agencies in 20 th Century Ireland. Church and State were bound in their conceptualisation of unmarried motherhood as degenerate and sinful. Generations of mothers and babies forced apart are the tragic outcome of the power and influence of this judgment on society. As a young unmarried mother at the age of 21 and in the Ireland of 2002, I had the choice to keep my daughter. For my mother, age 20 in 1975 Ireland, there was no choice and she was forced to give her son up for adoption shortly after his birth. A similar story can be told of two more of my aunts, one as recently as 1985. Stirred by the secrecy and concealment of these events within my family, and inspired by an emerging familial and societal consciousness of the experiences of unmarried mothers and their children in Ireland in the last century, this project seeks...
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