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 am forever thankful that my rural working class family were able to just absorb illegitimate children.
My family historical records are full of children raised by grandparents - one of my Nan’s 7 ‘sisters’ was only 4 months younger than the sister above her but the village just pretended not to notice (the sister was really a niece, the illegitimate child of the eldest daughter and the eldest daughter herself was born before her parents married).

I suppose no one paid much attention to what ostensibly Protestant-but-not-really-religious peasants were up to as long at the fields were ploughed?

Poor Dolly. A different time or place and she could’ve been a ‘sister’ to her little boy, or indeed a single mum, or married to a spouse happy to stepparent her son.

History is full of cruelty and we have to resist any attempt to roll back the human rights of women, those who choose motherhood, those who are childfree by choice and those whose have no children due to factors beyond their control.

But shows that it wasn’t just a Catholic thing. My mother knew a girl who was sent to an asylum as her parents preferred for her to be considered “insane” than “promiscuous “

I can’t understand why she was still there!!! I suppose she would have become institutionalised and could cope nowhere else :( I hope they gave her a doll!

I assume most of the women were functional when they were admitted. I hate to think how they were treated, what broke them down, to institutionalise them. Abuse, despair, boredom?

I just hope that somewhere Dolly’s soul has found peace. I’m so so so angry on behalf of her and the thousands of other women whose lives were destroyed from such a young age because of these evil people.

Engels wrote a book about it: The Origin Of Private Property, The Family, And The State.

tl;dr:

• the rise of arable farming required the ability to control a piece of land and keep others out, aka "private property", whilst still cooperating with other people who have skills that you lack and vice-versa.
• The need for multiple people to hold land and keep others out and have mechanisms of resolving disputes that don't involve killing the other person, plus being stronger if you hold an area in common that you subdivide amongst yourselves and work together to defend, led to "the state" and its laws and justice systems.

-The desire to know that your sons would inherit your land and not someone else's sons led to "marriage" to control access to women's uteruses.

A.k.a. Marxist feminism 101.

Shocking and very sad.

The way people were treated for being unmarried mothers, being disabled, learning disabilities. Dreadful.

The Marriage Act is the thing that made the difference. Also to do with at the same time, the development from villages being on the land of the majority landowner to being separated off and thus the concept of 'common' land, where the villagers were allowed to keep sheep and chickens that were not owned by the majority landowner.

It was about rich people passing their inheritances down the line from male to male, and as such if a wife was found to have birthed a child that wasn't the father's she could be removed, whereas if a woman wanted to divorce her husband she got the clothes on her back and a set of crockery. The kids stayed with him, unless he thought they weren't his. He could divorce if just one man said he had slept with her, even if it was a lie.

That's where the theory of noses, of chaperones, of chastity, comes into it. There was virtually no way of knowing who the father was unless things were put into place to make sure the wives were not shagging someone else. It is also why we have odd roads around centuries old land allocations, and had ancient hedgerows.

Theory of noses? Is that a typo? I've never heard of it.

Thank you

Something like that happened to my great-grandmother (not from the UK btw). The extremely unusual “twist” to this story was however that he actually proposed!

back then there was apparently such a thing as a (legally institutionalised) proposal that gave certain rights to the soon to be spouse, a document he and my great-grandmother both signed.

The (elderly) man unfortunately died before they could actually get married….

But due to the nature of the “official” proposal my great-grandmother received a small stipend from his estate and her parents allowed her to come home with her daughter.

It definitely wasn’t a good situation but she got to raise her daughter and wasn’t completely destitute… but the social stigma must have been immense.

my grandmother was so ashamed of being a “bastard” that she kept it a secret until her early 80ies!! I grew up believing that my great grandfather had died in the USA before his family could join him.

(That was actually the story of my great-great-grandfather, which my grandmother repurposed to explain the absence of her father)

It’s also important to consider that marriage didn’t even use to be a sacrament until the Middle Ages! (In European Christian tradition)

until the 13th century so called “clandestine marriages” (just the couple. No priest, no witnesses) were quite common, which lead to the issue of people marrying others despite being already married, questions which marriage should be considered legal etc.

It also meant that the church and the parents of the spouses had very little control about who would get married to whom… no escaping to gretna green (or similar) required!

the importance placed on (religious) marriage by the later church(es) is especially interesting when one consider that a canonical form of marriage was established in the 16th century.

No it is a thing!

What is it?

For sex with women, probably not many. (The exception I can think of is men who are murdered by rivals for a particular woman’s affection.) But let’s not forget all the gay and bi men, worldwide, who have been imprisoned or executed for having sex with men.

And yet men get nowhere near as actual full life sentences for murder and rape. Tells you all you need to know really doesn’t it.

In the 90s, as a teenager, I worked in the bakery section of a big supermarket. The city’s mental hospital was just across the road.

An older lady used to come in every day, both mid morning and mid afternoon. Everyone in the store knew her.

She’d been institutionalised in her teens for being at risk of a teenage pregnancy, her dad had her committed. She was now so institutionalised there was no way she could live on her own, so she was still living in the hospital, 50+ years later.

She was obviously never going to be any harm to anyone, so she was allowed to pretty much come and go as she pleased during the day. So every morning and afternoon she went for a walk, came to visit the store and wander round. She also used to visit the swings in the little children’s park just along the road.

She really took a shine to one of my bakery colleagues who started about the same time as me, and used to follow her round a little bit, surreptitiously when my colleague was out stacking the bakery shelves. My colleague would try to talk to her when she did that but she was too shy and she would run and hide behind a set of shelves. So eventually it just became an exchange of smiles and she was comfortable with that.

She’d get a roll every morning and a cake every afternoon. She never said anything, she would just point through the display case at what she wanted.

Whenever she came up we would just serve her first, no matter how long the queue was. We always used to price them as a penny and the people on the checkout always used to pretend the label wouldn’t’t scan when she went through the tills and just let her have it.

it was heartbreaking, she’d been in that hospital for so long.

From determining paternity using the shape and size of the father's and child's nose, through to a hefty nose being a signifier of the size of a man's penis, to an intact nose being a sign of a lack of venereal disease, to signification of class, and race, and religion - the nose has been the subject of centuries of writings and discussions.

I had to read Tristram Shandy when I was doing my English Degree. And I ended up down a plethora of nose rabbitholes.

I read Tristram Shandy throughout the month of January, and had to read around 28 pages every day to get through it. I finally did, it took the whole month, I turned up at the seminar on it to find out that I was the only one who HAD read the bloody thing, including my lecturer.

When my brother was in a young people’s unit at our local psychiatric hospital, he took me on a tour and pointed out these poor old ladies who had been in the institution since their teens for what was then called ‘moral delinquency’. It was both shocking and tragic to the 13 year old me that our society did this to these innocent people.

Thus, any teenager who was seen as overly sexual or amoral and in practise this meant that girls who were raped and became pregnant were given this label of ‘moral delinquency’ and placed in these institutions. Though the male rapists, groomers and abusers went unpunished. I believe that Rosemary Kennedy was suspected of moral delinquency by her father, hence her lobotomy.

I think that the field of Psychiatry has one hell of a lot to answer for when it comes to its historical abuses of innocent people, mostly women, girls, rape victims and Gay men and Lesbians. In the name of this science, many dubious, not to say outright harmful treatments have been inflicted on vulnerable individuals.

Yes, very important. British people often sneer at the Irish but it happened here too. And will again if the current lurch to the far right goes unchecked. The extremists hate women.

This is so devastating. That poor woman.

I remember seeing a TV programme about magdalen laundries or similar several years ago and being shocked at how recent these things were happening, but also felt the same that even if women were sane and mentally strong when they went in, years of abuse and incarceration, would effectively be a self fulfilling prophesy and made them "mad" or mentally unwell.
It's heartbreaking.

I definitely want to read a couple of books mentioned on the previous page.
@Maerchentante as a complete aside I am interested in Brenda Davies book as I was a patient under her in a a psychiatric hospital in the late 1990s. She probably saved my life.

Homosexual men. I don't want to do a 'what about the men' post because this thread is rightly about what women endure, but your question reminded me of a relative of mine, he also endured horrific things and was killed when I was a child. Sorry for the derail, but he deserves to be remembered too. Fucking religion.

I used to work with disabled adults in a care home. One had been institutionalised for being blind at the age of 5. He'sd received electric shock therapy and that had made him deaf. He'd had all his teeth removed in the hospital because he was a "biter".

By the time I started working in the home he'd been there for 3 years. Such a sweet soul. No violent issues anymore because he felt safe. He was about 60 at the time. Would be in his 80s now if still alive.

I ofter wonder if he's still going. Still giving out the best hugs. I really hope he is.

Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox tells a story like this, and is absolutely infuriating.
The whole thing reminds me of the “women don’t know how much men really hate them” saying. Who was that, Germaine Greer or someone else? And also of the internalised misogyny that enabled other women to also be enthusiastic oppressors. It’s awful.