Heart breaking photo of Dolly who was incarcerated for being pregnant.

[JenniferBooth]

This has made me cry and given me the fucking rage at the same time. What was going through peoples minds when they did this to her. Poor lady I hope she is at peace. How could they. Bastards. Psychopaths.

https://x.com/IanBeesleyphoto/status/1762216625518891090?s=20

From The Guardian

Dolly, The Moor Hospital, Lancaster, 1996In 1996 I was artist in residence for the city of Lancaster. I was invited to work with the long-term institutionalised patients in the Moor hospital. The hospital was in the process of closure and it was only the very elderly with no living relatives that were still there. I worked with them looking at old photographs as reminiscence therapy. One day I was looking through a magazine with Dolly. On seeing this photo of a young child she held the picture to her face and became distressed, crying and kissing it. The ward manager told me that Dolly had been incarcerated in the hospital at a young age (15 or 16) for having an illegitimate child. Dolly was in her late 80s or 90s when I photographed her. She never left the Moor. Dolly died about a year after this photograph

I’ve read about Dolly before. It’s an incredibly distressing story.

This is incomprehensible. How can people be that evil?

Heart breaking. Poor poor soul. What she must have gone through.

IYes its so upsetting. Barbaric and cruel

Have google of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland - last one only closed down in 1996 I believe
Absolutely shocking treatment of women

Oh yes i know about the Magdelene laundries Just as barbaric.

All those lives...............stolen

That's so awfully sad. Blamed for a young pregnancy (that very feasibly could have been the result of rape) and then had her child stolen and was incarcerated for life.

Poor Dolly, there was no need whatsoever for that cruelty

All those years grieving for her stolen child.

poor Dolly so sad

Oh no. That's so awful. That she was still there in 1996 (modern times for heavens sake) is beyond belief.

My heart breaks for Dolly and her child. Unimaginable heartlessness. Thank you for posting this @JenniferBooth

At the time such women were believed to be morally defective for having sex outside of marriage. Just shows how public opinion has changed in the last 100 years. It was a different world.

Around 35 years ago now I worked in a (long since shut down) psychiatric hospital. There were many elderly ladies there who'd been placed there due to having a baby outside wedlock. I found it both shocking and heartbreaking. Of course they were so institutionalised by that point they couldn't have lived independently. It's really sad.

It's an amazing photograph. The poor woman.

There was a Magdalene Laundry in Glasgow, too. Some girls escaped in the 50s and made a daring getaway.

That happened to my great aunt, @EmpressSoleil. I never met her and my mother always claimed her aunt was 'left at the altar', no baby was mentioned but I reckon that's what it was.

They let her out of the asylum in the 1960s but she was so institutionalised she couldn't cope at all. And so went back until her death.

A not uncommon story. I know from women who were in service as young girls that the man of the house (and often his sons too) wouldn't leave them alone. Then, when they became pregnant, they were thrown out.

Does anyone know where the institution of marriage came from to begin with? I am not religious but not seeing a marriage cert between any biblical characters (raised catholic so no idea about other religions) so just who made up this ideal that you had to have a wedding band to have a child to begin with? I am about to google as no twitter but incarcerated into a mental asylum for having a child without a father is actually the more insane crime here. Poor woman.

Something similar happened to my ex husbands aunt. She was working a a housekeeper for a wealthy family in the 1950’s and got pregnant by the homeowner (maybe raped??)

She was put into a psychiatric hospital at 17 in Essex - she stayed there her entire life despite her family’s attempts to get her released to their care. She died about 20 years ago having been institutionalised her whole life.

And this was post war - not another lifetime ago.

I was working in a convent back in 1990 and the adjacent nursing home opposite. There were five elderly ladies living in the convent section alongside the nuns but they wernt nuns. They didnt need personal care or help with eating. At 16/17 i didnt think much about it but now i wonder......

I came across women like this when working in nursing homes in the 1990s. They had been moved out of the psychiatric hospitals under Care in the Community, but were institutionalised and couldn't live/function independently.

The lady I remember most vividly always sat in the corner of the residents' lounge, very still, with her face buried in the crook of her arm. She sat like this everyday and must have done for years: she was stooped and it was as if her bones had reset. Apparently she had been taken into the hospital as a teenager, in the 1930s. Nobody came to visit her.

Sometimes when we put her to bed at night, she sobbed and called for the baby who had been taken from her.

Oh @ListToHunt 😢

That is one of the saddest things I've ever read.

I didn't know this was a thing that happened. For life? That's so cruel. Poor women. Thank god times have changed in this regard, I can't imagine the pain they went through. Sick world with sick people in it. Bless any ladies who suffered this

Shocking stuff 😓