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

Another excellent novel on this topic is "The Secret Scripture" by Sebastian Barry, published in 2008. It won awards at the time.

He wrote the book after his mother pointed out a hut on a drive through Sligo. She said a woman who was his great uncle's first wife had lived there, before she was put into a mental asylum by the family. His mother didn't know why except she did know she was very beautiful.

Women being highly attractive and desirable to men could also be their downfall it seemed, as per usual women could be blamed for the sexual temptation and competitiveness men experienced because of they were sexually attracted to her.

It's a fantastic novel and I would highly recommend it. A newly arrived doctor at an institution in Ireland finds a female inmate who is 100 years old and tries to understand why she is there. We also hear the story from her point of view from her secret writings but it can be unclear what is accurate as she has been so institutionalized for so long and she is an unreliable narrator.

Thanks Navyblueblazer, sounds interesting. I've downloaded and will read, after I've finished the history of misogyny, another book I've got from this thread.
What a great (interesting) thread.

On a similar topic of woman being imprisoned by a man "for her own good" is "The Yellow Wallpaper". It's a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and was first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.

The first time I read it I found it terrifying, especially I had never heard of it, but it's well known in feminist literature. I just came across it in a book of short stories and was caught off guard at how horrifying it was.

A woman has just had a baby and is suffering from post-natal depression. Her husband takes her to an isolated house "to rest" and locks her in an upper room, separated from her baby. The room is decorated with yellow wallpaper.

I had kids by the time I read it and any woman who has been physically and emotionally exhausted in the weeks and months after a birth would relate. Initially she is grateful for the rest but then is kept in isolation away from her child, family and friends.

Agree - this is a superb novel. They made a film of it, too - also vey good.

In case that tweet ever disappears.

Wow thank you for that.
Sounds like quite a mission to get through the whole book!

@VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia Thank You

I want to be able to step into that photo and give her a cuddle.

When at university in the late 70s I did relief work in "care facility" for people who had been in lengthy psychiatric "care". It was like a half way house for people addicted to the drugs they'd been on for years, and semi-secure. Over half the women had been institutionalised for pregnancy outside marriage. But the array of "non-psychiatric" conditions was scary. One elderly gentleman had been in a mental hospital for over 40 years. Why? He had violent epileptic fits caused by dairy intolerance. When he went in he had a medically treatable condition that could have been managed with ease if people understood it. When he came out he still had the dairy intolerance, which we managed - but the decades in that hospital and the "treatments" had caused irreparable mental illness.

@Varua, that is horrendous. The wasted lives.

The state needs to acknowledge this and do an official apology

Although the Catholic Church has rightly been castigated for its role in treating girls and women this way, there has been a tendency to not acknowledge that many of these attitudes toward women were prevalent across all societies and institutions in the British Isles, Ireland and the UK. Secular authorities were just as responsible for removing children from young mothers and institutionalizing "troublesome" women for a host of reasons.
Demonizing the Catholic Church has been a convenient distraction for the lack of transparency and reckoning generally.

Agree @Navyblueblazer , but I do think that it is more heinous from the Catholic church (and religious associations) because Christians claim to follow the most generous-hearted and loving individual who has ever walked the earth - and yet they behaved appallingly (and continue to behave appallingly sometimes) towards some of the most vulnerable people in society.

Jesus showed nothing but compassion - and strictly speaking was "illegitimate" himself) - and people who claim to love and be guided by him can be brutal.

I would say that it isn't just Catholic Churches which have treated people like this, and not just Christians.

But it's particularly hypocritical from followers of a faith which claims to espouse love and compassion.

It was their families who shunned them, who would not accept them. It was the society they lived on.

It was men making them pregnant but not taking responsibility. No doubt often it was rape and incest too.

I also don't want and never have wanted children.

I was born in the 1960s so girls get the rubella jab at age about 12 and I really didn't want it because I knew then I would never be pregnant.

I understand the principle of it being good for society as a whole, but I was really miffed my brother didn't have it.

The film The Magdalene Sisters is horrific. True to life.

It has made me think that when we hear about a society / culture today having "Mediaeval" attitudes towards women that, at least in some respects, what that actually means is "pre-WW2 middle class" attitudes to women.

The trans thing jolted me out of complacency that hard-won women's "rights" would not, could not, be rolled back, that we were on a track that lumbered progressively away from institutional misogyny. It made me realise that they were not "rights" at all but hard-fought for concessions extracted from begrudging institutions of state, religion and law.

The reminder that there are women (and men) alive today who were incarcerated, lobotomised and put in chemical straight-jackets for all sorts of "moral delinquency" does make it less incomprehensible that polite society now champions the chemical and surgical mutilation of children and young people who do not fit societal norms, or parental aspirations, or who are going through a rebellious, peer-conformist phase. It is understood as "treatment" rather than "punishment" but then those pre-WW2 girls and women were not sent to prison, they were confined in hospitals and medicalised.

The stories in this thread are not ancient history.

Psychiatrists and psychologists still working today will have been involved in the care of those women at a time when the circumstances of their incarceration would not have been defended but would have been "accepted" as routine - I speak from experience of working in long-stay psychiatric hospitals.

We might feel that we have come so far from those days but we have barely escaped them. Our society's attitudes towards those women, still in living memory for some, can be described as what is commonly termed "Mediaeval".

But it is very misleading to put all the blame on the sisters when it was society that put the girls there:
Their parents, their boy friends, their rapists, the people around themwho would have shunned them, the punters who would have given them the way out of prostitution in order to feed themselves and their child.

Nor was it just the Magdalene sisters. There were state institutions too.

I can believe it alright I was born in 1962 in a so called mother and baby home. My mother very nearly bled to death and I had congenital hip dysplasia which was never medically treated becsuse I wasn't considered worth it. I've just had major surgery to correct the lifelong damage that caused.
My mother kept me because her parents allowed it but I certainly remember people in the village calling me "that bastard" and we were largely ostracised.

Its an attitude that persists for some.

I've posted on MN before that, I was an 'unmarried mother'. My son was born in 1999. I was 23.

Not in the same league as any of these stories but my partner cheated when I was pregnant, ended the relationship and I returned to live with my mother.

She was ashamed that I was an unmarried mother and lied to the local authority saying that I was severely mentally ill and believed I was a risk to my baby. All behind my back.

I was discharged from hospital with a newborn and 24 hours later, went to live in a mother and baby home where I stayed for 10 months.

Many of the mothers had their babies removed (some rightly so, tbf) and my mother spent the whole time trying to get social services involved. It was a SS run nursing home but I didn't have a Social Worker and she believed my son needed one.

She believed that the very fact I'd had a child out of wedlock meant I was an unfit mother.

Anyway, in case anyone wonders whether it was necessary, I now have a first class degree, a masters, a clean enhanced DBS and a professional career working with children and families. There has never been any concerns about my MH or my capacity as a mother. We no longer have contact with her because 13 years ago she proved that she was a risk to my children. The police and SS were briefly involved. We've been nc ever since.

I am reading The Undesirables by Sarah Wise atm. Documents how from the late 1800s the state dealt with people who they felt were ‘defective’ for whatever reason.

Having a baby out of wedlock made you morally defective, regardless of the circumstances.

What was shocking was that it was only poor people who were put away.

I remember my late parents visiting an old lady in Cane Hill hospital back in the 70s. They told me years later, she’d had some sort of breakdown when she was a young girl and her parents had shipped her off to an asylum and left her there.

very sad

"What was shocking was that it was only poor people who were put away."

This is interesting because PP have referred to it being mainly a middle-class thing.

Both could have been happening, of course:

• The state deciding to put away poor girls and women deemed "morally defective"
• Families deciding (and paying?) to put away their daughters and wives for similar reasons.

Often they were not given a proper burial. At High Park Magdalene Laundry in Dublin there was a mass grave. It was found to contain the remains of 155 women - 22 more bodies than had originally been reported to have been buried there.

Even more disturbing is the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam in County Galway. It has been known that 800 infants were buried in a disused subterranean septic tank on the grounds. The exhumation has just started and is in the news now. There is a Daily Mail article about it 18 June this year.

Many of them died under suspicious circumstances. The women/girls and their babies were not cared for.