I’m rewatching call the midwife from the beginning and I have some questions

[Soubriquet]

When was it more acceptable for young women to give birth out of wedlock, or as single mothers?

When was it “acceptable” for teens to give birth without bringing shame to the family?

When was it accepted that those same teenage mothers got to choose if they wanted to keep their baby, rather than the parents making the decision for you?

My grandmother was only just 16, and very pregnant with my aunt when she and my grandad got married in the early 1950’s.
She once told me that my great-grandfather took my grandad into the back garden when the pregnancy was discovered, and told him that he had two choices: either marry my grandmother or meet the hot end of his shotgun 😳🤯😂
In all seriousness, seeing how in love my grandparents still are 70 years later, I’m pretty sure they would have stayed together and got married regardless of the “oops” pregnancy.

"Illegitimate" haven't heard that one for a while. Better brush up on using it for my daughter to write in my mother day card

I've never heard of this. I'll google it.

My mother had a still born baby at 7 months in 1960. She wasn't allowed to see the baby or to know anything about it. However, a cleaner on the ward apparently felt sorry for my mother and asked her if she'd like to know the sex of the baby.

@Edithisoverthere I can suggest 2 books - one maybe out of print, its American, it has various short papers as chapters " "Bad" Mothers; the politics of blame in twentieth-century America" edited by Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umanksy. New York University Press. 1998
a more modern one
"the Good Mother" contemporary Motherhood in Australia edited by Susan Goodwin & Kate Huppatz Sydney University Press 2010
while these don't deal with religion and single motherhood directly they do deal with attitude
I read that in medieval time period there was not a specific marriage ceremony until a lot later aka the same reasons mentioned by pp.

As a teenager in Scotland in the late 1970s I had several school contemporaries, all academically bright girls from "nice" families, disappear for a few months "to stay with their aunt in London". One came back to help her mum look after the new baby sibling that nobody had realised her mum was expecting. I wonder whether anyone stopped to think about what she must have been through and ask how she was coping rather than maintaining the conspiracy of silence. The others didn't come back. Did they settle somewhere that nobody knew them, were they able to keep their babies, were they able to continue their education, did their families remain in contact with them? It was still a huge taboo.

I don't remember a time when unmarried women weren't allowed pain relief in labour, but around 1990 I worked for a consultant gynaecologist who remembered this having been standard practice as late as the period during which CtM is set.

By the early 1990s babies were rarely given up for adoption at birth, though women seeking an abortion were strongly encouraged to consider adoption as an alternative, and getting married "because you had to" was unusual.

The SW's arranged adoption immediately and the girl stayed to "work out her time" until the baby was legally adopted.

What doe sthis mean? Did th emothers have to stay and care for the baby they were (often) being forced to give up?

It would be a mixture of caring for / breastfeeding the baby while adoptive parents were found and recovering from the birth.

When they went home it should be like nothing had happened so milk needed to have dried up, bleeding stopped and tummy gone down.

We used to talk about the ‘permissive society’ late 60’s early 70’s when attitudes began to change. The swinging sixties caused this revolution. Single parents used to be called unmarried mothers till late 70’s. Boomers grew up during this period and had a higher tolerance to such permissiveness so I would say from the 80’s onwards it started to be acceptable

Jesus christ.

watch The Magdalen Laundries.
Heartbreaking.

The mothers whom I had contact with stayed at the M & B home for 6 weeks because that was the earliest that a baby could go to adoptive or foster parents. During that time they cared for their babies and the parting was just awful.

It wasn't all terrible though. Sometimes the families supported the girls and mother and baby could be kept together.

My mum has a friend who was a midwife in the 50s/60s. She had a mother who was 16 and had some learning difficulties. A very vulnerable girl who was abused by an older man. When her family realised she was pregnant they did all they could to support her. The midwife had to explain to her what had happened and how the baby would come out. I have a feeling the parents helped her to raise her child.

Janet Ellis (mum to Sophie Ellis Bextor) was, I think, made to leave her job as a Blue Peter presenter in the early 80s for being unmarried and pregnant. So at that point while you might have just about been OK if you weren't famous, it was apparently a step too far for the makers of kids' shows on the BBC.

There was definitely still stigma around unmarried mothers in the 1970s. My brother was born in the early 70s to my 18yo unwed mother. Her parents kicked her out because of the 'shame' and never really spoke to her again, she was then taken in by her sister and her husband and treated like an unpaid domestic servant until she met my Dad a couple of years later - he married her within a couple of months of meeting her, because his family wouldn't accept them living together unmarried and she needed to escape her awful living circumstances.

In 1971 my friend ‘had’ to get married, another girl I knew went off to have her baby ( presumably it was going to be adopted), I was shocked but I imagine they were a Catholivc family, and another had an abortion 1972. I don’t think the pill was that easily available and I had unprotected sex the first time.
Things just werent openly talked about.

I was adopted in 1968, which I am told was the peak year for adoptions. My birth parents were at university and went on to marry and have more children. I met my birth father once and he said he never told his parents about the pregnancy/me but when I left the hospital he was given a photo and my hospital wristband. He kept them in a drawer in his bedroom at his parents house and when he went home once he found them laid on his bed so he knew his mother had found them but they never spoke about it - very strange.

It wasn't just stigma to the unmarried mother, it was also stigma of being an illegitimate child.

I have friend who was born in 1965 to parents who had a holiday fling (not teenagers, early 20s).
They married in order to "give the baby a name" but split up before my friend's 1st birthday.
He and his mother moved back to her parents but they didn't face a stigma as she Mrs X and he had been born to married parents

I would say mid 1980's it changed.

It was certainly a step too far for senior management in my secondary school in the late 80s. One of our teachers got pregnant without being married (and no plans to get married either) and was verbally told by the head not to come back after maternity leave because it would set a bad example to the teenagers. Obviously massively illegal even then, and it wasn‘t even a Catholic or private school, just a bog-standard comp.
We knew what had happened because we were in Upper Sixth and got on well with some of the younger teachers - we weren’t that much younger than them - and so the pregnant teacher told us what had happened before leaving. I totally believe her, that school had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards equal practices in the 80s and 90s.

This was very close to WW1. All she had to do was say the dad died in the war. There were a few women, I imagine, who were false widows.

As in close to it after not before the end

Being called a bastard, as an insult because you were illegitimate was still being used in the mid to late 80's.

@IDontWantToBeAPie or a Spanish Flu victim.

Back then it was a lot easier to invent a dead husband and move to an area no one knew you.

There were so many war widows with young children it was easy to hide.

Thank you so much - that's really helpful!