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

I haven't heard about Dolly before, but reading this thread is heartbreaking. These poor poor women.

Women were property. Literally. We still, "give away" the bride.

If an unmarried woman was raped then the rapist paid compensation to her father. If she was married it was to her husband.

This is why traditionally women wear a wedding ring, men don't. I know that is changing and male engagement rings also exist.

Anyone who didn't 'make the grade' could be incarcerated, even the late queen's cousins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerissa_and_Katherine_Bowes-Lyon

Makes me think about Rosemary Kennedy; she had mild learning difficulties and was lobotimized in part because her father was worried that she might get pregnant and cause a family scandal.

This was how my grandfather was born. He was a child conceived by a maid and the owner of a house.

He was handed over after the birth to a couple in a train station in 1905.

He never really found peace.

In the 1980s my brother was sectioned and there were a few elderly people who had been sent there but become so institutionalised that they could not leave. Most were women but there was also a man who was deaf and non verbal. They’d only realised he was perfectly capable, just deaf, many years later.
There is so much forgotten history of women. I went on to look at women and ‘madness’; when I was at uni in the later 80s, early 90s when there was a huge amount of interest in this and the lost history and literature of women. This was often explored in what we used to call ‘Gender Studies’. Now I do fear that women’s history and the understanding of what they went through (still do) is ignored again.

I also came across these women during my training at a hospital for people with 'learning disabilities'. They were clearly institutionalised but also stood out as they were quite able at the daily tasks they were allocated.
I remember one woman especially who was articulate and interested in the world but fearful. They worked in the hospital 'factory' where they counted and bagged up bottle tops which were then sold. It was a mind numbingly repetitive task and someone was making money out of them.
The other thing I clearly remember was that they all had a particular haircut. It was not the typical haircut for that time but from the 1920s ( a sort of Lucy Worsley style bob). It was just as if time had passed by without them.

Men's ownership of 'their' children. No different to the alpha lion's control over his pride.

In biblical times there was no marriage ceremony, just the father (or high male author figure) publicly handing his daughter over to her husband. All our wedding ceremonies stem from that transfer of 'ownership' of the woman, and hence of her children.
I don't know about the non-biblical cultures, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same.

It’s just shocking how women were treated in the past.

My great great grandmother became pregnant outside of marriage and gave birth in 1893 to my great grandfather. She continued to live with her parents and eventually married another man who took on her son also (we know he wasn’t the child’s father). So who made the decision for women to be incarcerated? Was it the woman’s father? Were my ancestors unusually supportive? My GG grandmother lived in rural Derbyshire and illegitimacy seems quite common at this time. I wonder if the idea of ‘respectability’ was more rife in towns and cities. My GG grandmother was also 25 when she gave birth so not a teen. She had a happy life all told. It could have been so different.

At one time 9 out of 10 brides in Scotland were pregnant. It was more important to be fertile than a virgin. In rural communities it was probably important because you needed farm hands.

My great grandfather came from Scotland to Yorkshire, he and the young lady he was 'walking out with' were not allowed to mary when she was pregnant because he was a protestant the the young woman was RC.

She married someone else before the baby was born. She hired a local good RC girl to look after the baby.

The baby's father, my great grandfather, would meet the young woman in the park while she was walking the baby. One thing lead to another and this time he was allowed to marry my great grandmother.

My grandmother was also in 'the family way' and her mother refused her permission to get married (her father had passed away at this time) so her fiance went to court to get a judge to overrule her. My grandmother was 19 or 20 and you had to be 21 to get married without parental permission.

I can't believe that many people still don't know about these places!

This was often a class issue - those who were worried about family “reputation” and had the money to pay for their daughters and sisters to be institutionalised (pre NHS) may have been more likely to do so. There would have been a lot of stigma attached to a woman from a “good” (well off, “respectable” family) getting pregnant.

For working class families unmarried mothers were likely less stigmatised and for a rural family another pair of hands to work wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Women had to go out to work, often in service and weren’t as protected as girls from upper class families - pregnancy outside marriage was a more common risk.

People couldn’t always afford to get married (as they would have to leave the family home and survive on their own). Lots of workers would have only married when a baby was on the way (or even born). My grandfather was born a couple of months after his parents married (1921) and there never seemed to have been any problem with that.

Women who were unmarried and pregnant who didn’t have the support of their families would have ended up in the workhouse.

Desperately sad. One of the elderly ladies I used to look after told me about her best friend who suffered post natal depression after her babies birth. She was admitted to a mental hospital and just left there. Never saw her baby again.

The care worker I mentioned upthread said that the women institutionalised in this way tended to be middle class and had initially been signed over by their families. She mentioned one case where a woman whose father was a doctor had been locked away since the 1930's. It does make you think that there were probably cases where women were sexually abused within the family and then locked up on the say-so of their abusive father or to protect the reputation of another abusive male family member.

I did think it might be a class issue. And to think that the rural poor who the middle classes often looked down upon looked after their unmarried, pregnant daughters in a more humane way.

@jolies1 my great grandfather (different line) was born one week after his parents’ marriage, this time in industrial Derbyshire. She must’ve had Braxton Hicks coming down the aisle!

This is so interesting and heartbreaking. I worked in an old-style psychiatric hospital for a few months in the early 80s, and met an elderly woman who’d been incarcerated when young because of pregnancy. I’ve never forgotten her. Her name was Elizabeth.

Men have always found a way to institutionalise unruly women, or use violence and threats of it to control behaviour, since the birth of patriarchy about 8000-3000 years ago (depending on area)
Most of the early laws were about what women could or could not do. Or about property rights, which was basically the same thing.
Historically women went along with it because of fear of it happening to them too, or as a way of proving their own worth, and hence raising their status. Unless you were a very wealthy woman in your own right the only way to advance in society, was to marry up. Single wealthy women had their own sets of issues, but the wealth sometimes allowed them a certain freedom - hence illegitimate babies, independence, unruly behaviour. Although there was always a risk that someone may try to have you classed as insane to get hold of your cash. Men were rewarded for their work, or their worth/loyalty to the next level up, so could advance on their own merit.
In my own family there are members who were sent to the church when unmarried and pregnant - in the late 60s. However that child was kept, against everyones wishes apart from the mothers, rather than being adopted out. Still sent away though, so as not to cause family shame.

I read an excellent novel recently called The Vanishing of Margaret Small. It's very well researched and tells the story of a woman who grew up in one of these institutions,

@WildCherryBlossom I hve just added that to my audible list and going to listen on way to work thank you.

About two years ago I read "The Girl behind the Gates" by Brenda Davies about this very topic.
It was based on a true story and utterly appalling. How women could simply be shut away for becoming pregnant, but men got away without any retribution.

My grandmother was born at the end of December, her parents got married in early June that year. Catholic as she was. Grandmum insisted all her life that she was premature.

Cary Grant's mum, Elsie, was put away by his father. Ostensibly because she was depressed, she lost a child from meningitis as a toddler and her husband was an alcoholic. He told Cary (then Archie) that she'd left them, then later that she'd died. They'd been very close. His dad confessed on his death bed, in the interim he'd taken up with another woman, likely the motive for the incarceration. Cary found his mum and cared for her for the rest of her life. Obviously most women weren't lucky enough to have a child grow up to be a millionaire film star.

These stories are horrific and heartbreaking. It seems how to dispose of a troublesome woman was commonly know, whilst also being a dirty secret. I bet it was used to keep other women in line too.

Re women in service
I grew up with it being referred to as being 'taken down'. I don't know if that was or is a widely used term but it's the term my family used to describe it.

My great grandma was abused like this when in service down south to a very high society family.

In the early 1930s she appeared back home (the north). She spent the rest of her life pretending she was married at the time. A wedding ring and a married name and parents who thankfully supported her story. She later married an absolute arsehole and that's a story in itself! They used the fake married name my great grandma had given herself when she fled home. They pretended both children were his not just the one they had together and the children didn't find out the truth until they needed their birth certificates to get married. After my grandma died my grandad confided in us that when grandma got her birth certificate she sobbed, saying all her life she'd had a name that wasn't hers. My great uncle died never knowing who his father actually was apart from it clearly being connected to this aristocratic type household she was in service to. Member of the household perhaps or a fellow servant, we'll never know. She never spoke of it.

Thankfully she had parents who supported her, many women were not so lucky. although the fake marriage story in order to appear respectable to the neighbours is heartbreaking.

And we tell ourselves that things have changed now, (you even hear people saying we don't need feminism any more 🤦) but have they fuck. Ok, women aren't taken away any more but only a fool can't see that we are still suffering the same attitudes.
Single mothers are seen in awful ways and little is heard about the men who walk away leaving the women holding the baby!!!

The old 4 by 4 bullshit.

The misogyny of men who have sex being studs and women being sluts.

We think we have moved on so much from the days of women being punished for wanting sex, having sex or being abused but we haven't.

You scratch the surface and attitudes are basically the same. Contemptuous and judgemental.

My grandmother was an evil cow-really nasty,narcissistic and would fly into a rage if you blinked

I also think she was a lesbian (or at least bi) but couldn't 'come out' in the way we can now and it's just accepted

She gave birth out of wedlock and was made to have the baby adopted-baby was taken away as soon as she was born

She met and married my grandfather (who was just as bad as she was)

They went on to have 4 girls (my mother and then my aunts)

I know all 4 girls had a shocking childhood,but when my mother hit about 10,my grandmother had her put in one of these homes to make room for female 'lodgers'

(It was an open secret that my grandmother shared baths and beds with them)

My mother's crime?

She was in the way and was taking up a bed,so on the say-so of her father,she was admitted until the 'lodger' moved out

She was drugged,abused and refuses to speak of it

There will have been more but its not spoken of

If my grandfather hadn't have been so scared of my grandmother,I think he would have had her committed-he certainly threatened it enough

It's scary to think that I could have been a dolly in 1997-i gave birth as a single mum-my grandmother tried to threaten me with it unless I aborted

So many women lost to history,so many stories covered up

I'm just imagining a society in which it had been the men responsible for these women's situations who had been incarcerated, and thus their behaviour not permitted to continue, and not to enter the gene pool.
In Iceland, women pregnamt with no husband, claiming a landowner or the Lutheran priest, were drowned as witches in a pond at Thingvellir. I thought this was brutal when told, but it was better than the mental hospitals or the laundries for life.

I need to read this book. Thank you WildCherryBlossom

I have just began researching this subject in depth - am delving into the archives and it’s hard to not become affected by the appalling tales of neglect and abandonment. My relative was committed in her early 30s and died, in the institution, in her 70s.

I once read a book (and its killing me that I can't remember the name)

It was a mental home like the ones these woman where shoved into-but for kids (or more importantly,girls)

It could have been because they had lost their parents,unmarried mums,mum had died and dad couldn't manage etc

One little girl was in there because her grandfather was a pedophile

And she was at the 'right' age for him abuse her (and was his 'type')

So they locked her up because she was 'temptation' and 'was leading the poor man on'

They would beat her for being 'flirty',wearing dresses and socks and 'leading him on'

I mean for fuck sake-his own granddaughter and she was to 'blame' for his urges-I think she was about 6