‘The only time anyone ever talked to us about it was a policeman. We had an intruder in our garden one night and a policeman came up and, blow me, we couldn’t get rid of him! He started talking about this particular woman that they knew of. We knew … we knew her. Funnily enough, I’d had a delivery in her flat with her daughter … But we kept quiet.
‘She was the only one – but she carried on because, you know, later on, she was had up, wasn’t she. She and her son were had up for giving a woman a “noxious substance to produce an abortion”. What the noxious substance was, though, I don’t know.’
Elizabeth C., who worked as a district midwife in Battersea, South London, also described keeping her distance in order to protect the abortionist from prosecution. Midwives often insinuated a double message: the abortionist was creating life-threatening disasters but she was also providing an important service for women who were desperate not to bring another baby into an already impoverished home, as Elizabeth C. explains:
‘Women did try to get rid of their babies while they were pregnant. Oh yes, that happened a lot. They had brought on a miscarriage or had one brought on and then they sent for you and they thought it would be cleared, but often it wasn’t. It was awful.
‘I hated delivering a baby when it wasn’t wanted. Ah, well – after they were born they were often wanted … There was one, she had her baby in the bucket. I wasn’t going to tell you but, you see, she was just going to have the baby and let it drown. But she did accept it. It was the thought of having them, I think. She was a bit simple.
‘They took castor oil to bring on a miscarriage, or hot gin, I think, though I’ve forgotten actually. They could go to somebody, a local woman and pay, and then we cleaned up the mess, you see. But you never nursed them at home. You sent them to hospital. You had to send them in because they were liable to infection and lower pain. I never knew exactly who was doing it. You didn’t enquire too far because they would have got prosecuted.’
Elizabeth C.’s story of the woman trying to drown the baby brings up the issue of infanticide. While infanticide did occur, we have few references to it. Perhaps some of the accounts of premature babies born in the toilet and babies accidentally smothered in bed were not as innocent as they seemed. Handywomen were often said to have ‘graveyard luck’. In other words, they were skilled at saving the mother but losing the child.8
Elizabeth C. also talked about women trying to leave their babies behind at the hospital:
‘In hospital, you had to make sure they took their babies with them when they went out. They’d leave the baby behind. They didn’t disown their babies so much at home as they did in hospital. Sometimes it would happen that they didn’t want to take their babies home with them. Perhaps they were unmarried mothers, or … unhappy about having a baby. Maybe they had too many already at home. I don’t know what it was, but you had to watch them.’
The idea of purposely ‘losing’ or even killing one’s baby may be shocking, but it is important to understand it within the context of women’s lives in pre-NHS days when there was little or no contraception available to women. Yet another baby – if it survived – could bring even more poverty and ill health to the woman. Working-class women were unlikely to allow themselves the luxury of sentimentality regarding pregnancy and babies, and abortion was an acknowledged but unspoken part of everyday life. While midwives were careful to distance themselves from abortion, they were well aware that both abortion and repeated pregnancies could have disastrous consequences for women’s lives.
7
Unmarried Mothers
‘There was a terrible, terrible prejudice about all that kind of thing. A terrible stigma, and why I can’t think because it takes two to make a bargain! It’s always women who get the bad name.’
In the first half of the twentieth century, an unmarried woman with a child was seen as a disgrace to her family and a blot on the family name. There was often strong pressure on the woman to conceal the pregnancy from the eyes of the outside world, and bringing up a child outside of wedlock could mean social isolation. However, unmarried women had few options. Abortion was illegal and dangerous. Adoption was complicated and expensive to arrange.
Often, the family coped by sending their daughter away to relatives or to a ‘mother and baby’ home. At a safe distance from the family neighbourhood, the baby could be placed in an orphanage or offered for adoption. Often, though, the baby would be integrated into the family with the grandmother acting as mother. Since all women tended to hide their pregnancies under loose clothing, in some circumstances it was possible for the grandmother to appear to produce a ‘late addition’ to her family. Bronwen H., a Welsh midwife, remembers one such case:
‘It was in 1926 during the two and a half years when I worked on the district. I have to laugh at these things, [giggles] I was visiting one of my mothers who had just had a baby when another lady came in – “Ooh Nurse, will you come please? Grace is having an awful tummy-ache”.
‘So I said, “Yes, all right, I’ll call. But wouldn’t it be better to send for the doctor?” “No,” she said, “You call and see her.” So after I’d finished with mother – this is in a terrace, of course – I went down to the first house of the terrace, and there was Grace on a couch, an old-fashioned couch, having dreadful pains. You know, I’d seen dirty places before but I’d never seen one quite so dirty. It was dreadful, with frying pans and shoes under the table and a funny old stove and the girl – she’s a girl of about 17 – there on the couch.
‘I said to Mrs M., her mother, “Will you go and fetch so-and-so for me?” And while she left the house I said to Grace, “You know what’s the matter with you, don’t you?” She sort of said … “No?” I said, “Well, you’re having a baby …” She nearly had a fit! Now, you see, boats used to come into the Swansea docks from foreign places. So she’d been out with one of the sailors and this was the baby.
‘I said, “Your mother will have to be told you know.” So Mrs M. came in and I said, “You know what’s the matter with Grace, don’t you?” “No,” she says, “No, I don’t.” “Well,” I said, “She’s having a baby.” God, I think she would have killed her! So anyway, I calmed her down. I said, “Now look, the baby’s coming so just calm down, make yourself a cup of tea and get plenty of water boiling.”
‘So anyway, after about two or three hours – I had thought I might have to send for the doctor, but anyway – the baby came and everything was all right. “Now”, I said, “I want clean clothes, clean bed clothes, clean …” She said, “I’ve got nothing for the baby”. I said, “Well, that doesn’t matter. Get me a nice clean sheet and a hot water bottle, not too hot.” So I did the baby up and wrapped it – lovely baby. And then I saw to the mother and I said, “Now I want clean sheets to put on this couch …” The things we had to do, you know, it was dreadful. I attended her for about ten to twelve days. She got on quite well and the baby got on lovely.
‘Then about two years afterwards, I was in a council meeting and I looked round and there was Mrs M. with a bundle in her arms. I looked at her … “Yes,” she said, “This is Mary! This is Grace’s daughter!” And she loved that baby funnily enough. She took over looking after the child. The girl’s mother took to the baby straight away. It was amazing, really. And she brought the child up. Anyway, she didn’t murder her … like she threatened to!’
Statistics for illegitimate births in the first half of the twentieth century show a fluctuating pattern:
Illegitimate births in England and Wales for women aged 15–44 years
1911–1920
8.1
per 1,000 births
1921–1930
6.3
per 1,000 births
1931–1940
5.6
per 1,000 births
1941–1950
11.6
per 1,000 births1
These statistics do not show us how many women became pregnant before marriage. Many of them woul
d have procured an abortion, had a hasty wedding or perhaps even committed suicide. Elizabeth Roberts, in her oral history of working-class women in north-west England, was told of several reported cases of pregnant young women committing suicide by drowning.2
The women we interviewed made no mention of any personal experience of pre-marital sex. It was always something that happened to someone else and was often an awkward topic in discussion. None of them had an illegitimate baby themselves, but Ivy D. had two daughters, both of whom became pregnant in their teens:
‘Both my daughters got pregnant at 16 and that was terrible for me. I had to hide it both times. The first time would have been in the 1940s and the next time wouldn’t have been till the 1960s ‘cause I had J. very late in life. Both times it was all covered up. It was very shameful.
‘When E. got pregnant, the first one, I was too scared to tell my husband at first. I lost weight with worrying about it. I couldn’t tell anyone. When I did tell him, he was furious … with me really – for letting her go out so much. So he said, “I’m going to lock her in the bedroom so that she can’t go out.” But she climbed out of the window, over the roofs and out [laughs]! He’d previously done out her room, all in green, and he went up there and tore the curtains out and threw them out of the window. I never saw them again. Beautiful curtains, they were, so someone must have said, “Thank you very much!”
‘He kept locking her up but he didn’t do it unkindly. He did it for her … I put her in a nursing home for unmarried mothers up at Blackheath, but then they ‘phoned and said she’d run away. She wouldn’t go back. She didn’t like it there.
‘She had the baby in hospital and when she brought it home, my husband said, “Don’t make a fuss of it or she’ll go and get pregnant again”. So I did what I was told and didn’t hardly hold the baby in case she did. It was so upsetting. When my aunt came at Christmas we had to make out it wasn’t ours. She said, “Ooh, you’ve got a little baby!” I said, “Yes, I’m just minding it.” She said, “But it knows you a lot, doesn’t it, Ivy.” [Laughs] They all got to know after a while but they really looked down on E., like they did in those days. She never talks about it.
‘With my second daughter, we thought things would be different. You see, we were a bit better off. I’d saved some money from the little shops I ran, so I decided to get her educated. I thought, “We’ll have one that talks nice”, so I never ever thought that she’d get pregnant! When she told me, all the blood ran from my face. I thought to myself, “I can’t tell my husband. He was so cross last time”. I never did tell him until after the baby was a month old. I paid for her to go into a home. I said, “You’ll have to have it adopted.” But she wrote to me from the home and said, “Mum, they have to be perfect to be adopted, and he’s got crooked toes, so I’ll have to keep him,” [laughter] She really wanted to keep him – and I did too, really.
‘When I eventually told my husband, he pretended he knew. He didn’t really. He thought she was staying with her sister. I warned my daughter, “I’m telling Dad today, so make sure T. [the baby’s father] makes himself scarce ‘cause I’m sure he’s going to shoot him”.
‘Both times, I had no one I could turn to, no one I could talk to about it. It was terrible for me.’
Support
Between the two world wars there were a number of voluntary organisations that worked with unmarried women and their babies. Some tried to place ‘first offenders’ in domestic service. In the mid-1920s, Lily O’Connell, a nurse, had an adoption arranged by the National Vigilance Association, an organisation that put single pregnant women in touch with adoption charities. It cost her £50, which she had to pay back to the Roman Catholic Church Orphanage over a number of years at ten shillings a month.3
Adoption did not have legal status until 1926. Before then, it was arranged informally, often via local newspapers. The birth mother would advertise the child and actually pay the adoptive parents either a weekly or a lump sum.4
Florence W., who worked as a midwife with the Salvation Army, recalls how women made varying decisions:
‘Some of them were adopted and some of them kept the babies. There’s all different kinds of people’s circumstances. Some people come from very good circumstances and they have to go as far away as possible so that none of the neighbours or friends know about them. Sometimes these girls would change their minds and not have the babies adopted. There was a woman of 40 having her first child. She came right up to the last day when she was to have passed this baby over for adoption and then she couldn’t go through with it. So then she told her story of how she was the subject of a bigamous marriage. So she decided against all the odds, against the relatives, to keep this boy. And that’s what she did.’
From their rhetoric, it was clear that the voluntary organisations felt it their duty to reform offenders and induce in them a sense of shame for their past behaviour. A woman who went to a Church Army home in 1918 gives an indication of the miserable circumstances there:
‘Every day there we were marched through the streets for everybody to gaze at us and know we were single women expecting babies. It was terrible being stared at, with everyone knowing my shame. When we got back they put us to housework: washing up, cooking, cleaning, ironing and scrubbing. I was often hungry – they said we didn’t need any extra food though we were carrying babies.’5
An unmarried woman who did not go into a voluntary organisation home and who had no family support would often be forced to enter a workhouse to give birth. Florence W. has clear memories of such a case from her childhood in Great Yarmouth in the 1910s:
‘The neighbour’s daughter had twins and she wasn’t married so she had to go to the workhouse. This is what happened then, you see. You had to go to the workhouse and that must have been terrible. And I can remember her now bringing these twins home and sitting outside the house and everybody admiring them. She was received back into the family.’
Bronwen H., who was married to a GP and practised as a midwife in Wales, remembers being called out with her husband to attend an unmarried young woman who did not quite make it to the workhouse when in labour:
‘About 12 o’clock at night, the front door bell went and my husband answered it. “Please, doctor, will you come at once.” So he said, “Where is she?” The person said, “She’s in the Bridge Inn. I was taking her up to the workhouse to have this baby and she started having such pains. So she’s in the Bridge Inn.” My husband said, “You’d better come with me.” So just as well, off we went.
‘The poor thing was in “the snug” – a little room where someone who didn’t want to see who was in the big room would take a jug and a pint of beer. You see, they’d put her in the snug. Well, my husband was quite a big man, tall man. He couldn’t get through. She, poor dear, had struggled until you could only open the door about that much … so I had to make myself small and get inside …
‘And the baby came … And I had to hang on to her tummy for a bit and my husband had to hand me the things through the door for me to tie the cord. The wife of the pub man brought me a nice soft towel and I managed to wrap the baby in this thing and put it on a hot water bottle while I saw to the mother. She was about 17 or 18. Anyway, I managed to open the door and handed out the baby. So she, bless her, was able to stand up, just about. And they were all put in a taxi and taken up to Surrey Lodge [the workhouse]. I don’t know what happened to her and the baby after that.’
After 1927, the Poor Law authorities had new powers that entitled them to detain those young unmarried women who were in receipt of poor relief when their child was born and classify them as ‘mentally defective’. In practice, this meant that many young women were locked away for life.
In psychiatric hospitals, it is not uncommon to meet women who, in the early part of the twentieth century, were locked away for no reason other than the fact that they had illegitimate children. Billie, one of the authors of this book, remembers:
‘During my nursing t
raining I had to spend a month working in what was then known as a “hospital for the mentally handicapped”. It was a huge institution in the north of England, miles from anywhere, almost like a village in its own right. On the geriatric ward were two old ladies who had been there since its days as a workhouse. They had been detained because they were unmarried mothers who were considered “mentally subnormal”. The other situation I came across was in a psychiatric hospital, again an institution that had once been a workhouse. On the long-stay, psycho-geriatric ward was a woman who had been committed as insane during the 1910s. The only proof of her insanity was the fact that she had an “illegitimate” child. According to her notes, there was no other evidence of mental health problems. She had just been conveniently shut away to protect her family’s name. We were all told about her situation, but the doctors and nurses felt that she was now so affected by her 60-year long stay that she would be unable to cope with life outside, and so there she stayed.’
The state might have had a single, inflexible approach, but the midwives we interviewed varied in their attitudes towards unmarried mothers. Some were reluctant to discuss the issue at all – no doubt a reflection of the denial and cover-up that existed around illegitimacy throughout their working lives. Nellie H., for example, a middle-class woman who was a midwife in private nursing homes, obviously found the subject distasteful and claimed that she had never come across an unmarried mother. At the other end of the scale, Florence W. devoted much of her midwifery career to working with single women in Salvation Army homes. There, midwives tried to educate the ‘unfortunate women’ and introduce them to a world of middle-class values and skills that would have been of debatable use to them:
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