‘She said she was in the family way’ Pregnancy and infancy in modern Ireland Edited by Elaine Farrell ‘She said she was in the family way’ Pregnancy and infancy in modern Ireland ‘She said she was in the family way’ Pregnancy and infancy in modern Ireland Edited by Elaine Farrell LONDON INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH Published by UNIVERSITY OF LONDON SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU First published in print in 2012. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY- NCND 4.0) license. More information regarding CC licenses is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Available to download free at http://www.humanities-digital-library.org ISBN 978 1 909646 47 6 (PDF edition) ISBN 978 1 905165 65 0 (hardback edition) Contents Acknowledgements vii About the contributors ix Abbreviations xiii List of figures xv List of tables xvii Foreword xix Mary O’Dowd Introduction 1 Elaine Farrell I. ‘I would take anything to prevent me having a child’: contraception 1. ‘Veiled obscenity’: contraception and the Dublin Medical Press, 1850–1900 15 Ann Daly 2. ‘Its effect on public morality is vicious in the extreme’: defining birth control as obscene and unethical, 1926–32 35 Sandra McAvoy II. ‘Inexpressible rendings of heart at the prospect of my child’s death’: pregnancy, childbirth and mortality 3. Some sources for the study of infant and maternal mortality in later seventeenth-century Ireland 55 Clodagh Tait 4. ‘A time of trial being near at hand’: pregnancy, childbirth and parenting in the spiritual journal of Elizabeth Bennis, 1749–79 75 Rosemary Raughter v ‘She said she was in the family way’ 5. Birth and death in nineteenth-century Dublin’s lying-in hospitals 91 Julia Anne Bergin III. ‘The natural and proper guardian of the child’: material culture and the care of babies 6. Medicinal care in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century Irish home 115 Emma O’Toole 7. The chrysalis in the cradle 129 Elaine Murray IV. ‘The world acted unjustly to women in this fallen position’: unmarried mothers and ‘illegitimate’ children 8. ‘Found in a “dying” condition’: nurse-children in Ireland, 1872–1952 145 Sarah-Anne Buckley 9. In the family way and away from the family: examining the evidence for Irish unmarried mothers in Britain, 1920s–40s 163 Jennifer Redmond V. ‘I know she never intended to rear it’: infanticide 10. Responding to infanticide in Ireland, 1680–1820 189 James Kelly 11. ‘A very immoral establishment’: the crime of infanticide and class status in Ireland, 1850–1900 205 Elaine Farrell 12. Beyond cradle and grave: Irish folklore about the spirits of unbaptized infants and the spirits of women who murdered babies 223 Anne O’Connor Index 239 vi Acknowledgements This volume originated in the Women’s History Association of Ireland annual conference, ‘“She said she was in the family way”: pregnancy and infancy in the Irish past’, held at Queen’s University Belfast in April 2010. The conference was supported by the School of History and Anthropology, Queen’s University Belfast; the Student-led Initiative, Queen’s University Belfast; and the Women’s History Association of Ireland. I am indebted to Professor Mary O’Dowd for her assistance with this volume. I am extremely grateful for her invaluable advice, guidance and encouragement. I am thankful to those who read previous versions of the chapters or offered advice during the preparation of this volume, including Dr. Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Dr. Daniel Grey, Chelsea Jeffery, Professor Liam Kennedy, Dr. Claudia Kinmonth, Dr. Margaret MacCurtain, Dr. Christopher Marsh, Dr. Leanne McCormick, Dr. Jo Murphy-Lawless, Dr. Lillis Ó Laoire, Professor Niamh O’Sullivan, Dr. Maryann Valiulis and Dr. Bernadette Whelan. I am also grateful to the anonymous reader who provided detailed and helpful comments. For permission to reproduce images, I am thankful to John Horgan of Bunratty Folk Park, County Clare; Tom Hennigan of Hennigan’s Heritage Centre, County Mayo; Glenn Dunne and Colette O’Daly of the National Library of Ireland; Finbarr Connolly and Clodagh Doyle of the National Museum of Ireland; Michelle Ashmore of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Cultra, County Down; and Peadar Morgan of the Wildlife and Heritage Centre, Clontibret, County Monaghan. For the cover image, I am grateful to the owners of Aloysius O’Kelly’s Feeding Hens, West of Ireland, and to David Britton and Ethna O’Brien of Adam’s Auctioneers, Dublin. I would also like to thank the staff of the Institute of Historical Research, and in particular, Dr. Jane Winters, for her guidance and support in bringing this book to completion. vii About the contributors Julia Anne Bergin, who worked as a midwife in Ireland, Zimbabwe and Zambia, researches childbirth and midwifery in Ireland pre- and post- institutionalization, prompted by high maternal mortality in the developing world. She obtained her PhD, entitled ‘Childbirth and midwifery in nineteenth-century Dublin, 1850–1900’, from National University of Ireland, Maynooth in 2009. Her current research interests include puerperal fever and childbirth in the workhouse. Sarah-Anne Buckley lectures in the Department of History, National University of Ireland, Galway. She has recently finished a history of the Haematology Association of Ireland, and is currently preparing her book on the history of child welfare in Ireland for publication with Manchester University Press, entitled Child Welfare, the NSPCC and the State in Ireland: 1889–1956. She has published an article in Saothar on the topic of child neglect and poverty, and a chapter on incest in Ireland in Power in History: from Medieval Ireland to the Post-Modern World, ed. A. McElligott, L. Chambers, C. Breathnach and C. Lawless (Dublin, 2011). Her forthcoming publications include an article on deserted wives and a chapter on the foundation of the NSPCC in pre-independence Ireland. Her next project will be a comparative history of child welfare in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain. Ann Daly is a full-time teacher of history in Ratoath College, County Meath. Her PhD, which she completed at National University of Ireland, Maynooth in 2008, is entitled ‘The Dublin Medical Press and medical authority in Ireland 1850–1890’. Her research interests are Irish medical and sexual history of the nineteenth century. Elaine Farrell is currently an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) postdoctoral research fellow at University College Dublin. Her PhD research focused on the crime of infanticide in nineteenth-century Ireland. She is currently writing the history of infanticide in Ireland from 1850 to 1900, for publication with Manchester University Press. Her research interests include gender, crime and punishment, sexuality, illegitimacy and childhood in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland. From September 2012, Elaine will be taking up a position as lecturer in modern Irish economic and social history at Queen’s University Belfast. ix ‘She said she was in the family way’ James Kelly, MRIA is Cregan professor of history, and head of the History Department at St. Patrick’s College, Dublin City University. His publications include Poynings’ Law and the Making of Law in Ireland, 1660– 1800 (Dublin, 2007); The Proceedings of the Irish House of Lords(3 vols., Dublin, 2008); Sir Richard Musgrave, 1746–1818, Ultra-Protestant Ideologue (Dublin, 2009); Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (edited with Fiona Clark) (Farnham, 2010); Clubs and Societies in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (edited with M. J. Powell) (Dublin, 2010); The Eighteenth-Century Composite State: Representative Institutions in Ireland and Europe, 1689–1800 (edited with D. W. Hayton and J. Bergin) (Basingstoke, 2010). He is currently president of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society. Sandra McAvoy co-ordinates Women’s Studies in University College Cork. Her research interests include the history of sexuality, the history and politics of reproductive rights, and women and politics. Publications include ‘From anti-amendment campaigns to demanding reproductive justice: the changing landscape of abortion rights activism in Ireland 1983–2008’, in The Unborn Child, Article 40.3.3 and Abortion in Ireland: Twenty-Five Years of Protection?, ed. J. Schweppe (Dublin, 2008) and ‘Sexual crime and Irish women’s campaigns for a Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1912–35’, in Towards New Histories in Ireland: Writing Gender History, ed. M. Valiulis (Dublin, 2008). Elaine Murray graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 2007 with a BA in History of Art and Design and Fashion Design, and in 2008 with an MA in Design History and Material Culture. Her MA thesis, entitled ‘The science of sleep: a study of Irish eighteenth- and nineteenth- century cradles’, explored the material culture of sleeping in relation to Irish infants. She currently works as a freelance stylist and illustrator, assisting on photo shoots and film shorts. Anne O’Connor has been involved in Irish and comparative international folklore studies since the late 1970s. Anne’s major research focuses on the representation of women in Irish religious belief and legend, and her book The Blessed and the Damned: Sinful Women and Unbaptised Children in Irish Folklore (Bern, 2005) reassesses the subject of her doctoral thesis (published in 1991 as Child Murderess and Dead-Child Traditions, A Comparative Study (Folklore Fellows Communications, no. ccxlix)) in the light of feminist and postmodern perspectives. Anne is a member of the editorial board of Béaloideas, series editor of the Peter Lang International Studies in Folklore and Ethnology Series, and she currently works with Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ). x About the contributors Emma O’Toole is a graduate of the National College of Art and Design MA course in Design History and Material Culture. Her research interests primarily concern the interaction between people and objects.