early twentieth century, single mothers were regarded as sinners, fallen women, strumpets, prostitutes, brazen hussies, Jezebels riddled with venereal diseases, tramps and sluts, while illegitimate babies were simiarly vilified as bastards, weaklings, runts of the litter and the spawn of Satan.
By 1900, public policy was to dispatch single pregnant girls to public workhouses where they were separated from the ‘respectable poor’ and treated appallingly. It is imperative to understand the attitude that developed over the years of Queen Victoria’s reign in both Britain and Ireland. The stigmatisation of single mothers by Irish society had a detrimental effect on their physical, mental and emotional well-being, and consequently a harmful effect on their babies. This may partly explain the high mortality rates among illegitimate babies. Treat a pregnant woman badly and her baby will be equally affected. Canon Law bars illegitimate adults from joining the Catholic priesthood and that injunction remains in place today, unless one receives ‘special dispensation’ from the Pope. The traditional prejudice of the Catholic Church towards illegitimacy contributed to poisoning Irish society’s attitudes and was reinforced by the new Victorian morality, which was becoming ever more prevalent in civil society across Britain and Ireland.
From 1890 onwards, however, there was a small backlash in Britain against the treatment of single mothers. Several groups were founded to support them and absolve their illegitimate babies of their sinful stain. The Protestant Salvation Army was the first group to open a dedicated home for single mothers and their babies in Hackney in 1887. This home supported new mothers in their decisions, whether their choice was to hand their babies over to the ‘system’ to be initially placed with families and later end up in the industrial schools, or to keep their babies and raise them alone. This small resistance movement in Britain had a long way to go in its battle against what were now mainstream attitudes.
In 1890, relatively rapid social and economic changes created yet another new type of Catholic institution that exhibited all the arrogance and harsh discipline associated with an increasingly confident Catholic Church. St. Pelagia’s Home, the first ‘Mother and Baby Home’ as we understand the designation today, was founded in 1890 when the Diocese of Westminster in London purchased two adjoining houses at 27 Bickerton Road, Highgate’.5
St. Pelagia’s also firmly believed that the permanent separation of single mothers and their babies was a vital punishment for being single but it is again important to note the fundamental difference between the Catholic and Protestant versions of Mother and Baby Homes. Although, in time, most of the Protestant homes would regress to systematically separating single mothers and their babies, the Catholic homes were founded on the principles of punishment and attempted to ‘reform’ or ‘save’ the residents, and this included severely limiting the time they spent with their babies and then forcibly separating them for life. In London, a Miss Gee ran the new Catholic Mother and Baby Home when it opened but, within a year, the Westminster Diocese had invited a small French order with a presence in Britain to take over.
The Rise of the Sacred Heart Nuns
Of all the religious orders that ran Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland, the Sacred Hearts are by far the most important. Their three homes were the second-, third- and fourth-largest of the nine that existed. Around half the women and girls who went to a Mother and Baby Home in Ireland went to a Sacred Heart home.
The order that became the Congregation of the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary was founded in 1866 by a French priest, Father Peter Victor Braun, while he was on assignment to Paris, and the original order was named the ‘Servants of the Sacred Heart’. They spread rapidly across Europe, being part of the reaction by the Catholic Church to the revisionism of the reformed Protestant Churches sweeping the continent and Britain in the second part of the nineteenth century. The English Province of the order was founded accidentally when the nuns fled France after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, initiating their later breaking away from their original Mother House. The order rapidly grew in size, power and influence and by the 1890s Irish nuns dominated the English branch, notably Sisters Winefride (originally Bridget) Tyrrell from Monasterevin, Co. Kildare, and Sylvester Halpin (originally Mary Jane Halfpenny) from Lobinstown, Co. Meath. Another young Irish girl, Mary Daly from Skeyne, Co. Westmeath, joined the original order in France aged just 15. She was later transferred to England and rose to become head of the new order in 1927.
The Servants of the Sacred Heart accepted the invitation of the Diocese of Westminster to take over their new Mother and Baby Home, and they re-named it St. Pelagia’s. It is interesting to note that, although there is some confusion historically, there were essentially two Pelagias; one was a young maiden (virgin) who committed suicide rather than agree to a forced marriage, and the other was a reformed prostitute and actress who converted to Christianity.
The single mothers in the new home remained there for a year after their babies were born and were taught domestic skills such as dressmaking and cooking until they were discharged. ‘Domestic skills’ was a euphemism for hard work around the home or some enterprise such as making religious regalia for commercial sale. Aged one year old, when their mothers were discharged, the children were sent to a Sacred Hearts’ nursery in Chadwell in east London. The children were then placed with local Catholic families for periods of anything from several weeks to several years. These families were paid for their care. From there the children were sent to so-called orphanages, which usually meant a Catholic industrial school or similar institution. The mothers who had been discharged were expected to pay for their baby’s nursing out. This payment came to be known as ‘parental monies’.
In 1897, the Sacred Hearts opened a second Mother and Baby Home in Kelton, Liverpool, when Monsignor James Nugent invited them to run a large manor house he had rented for the purpose. Following the example of the Magdalene Laundries dotted around Britain, this home took in commercial laundry from the ships in Liverpool’s busy port to be hand-washed by the residents, thus ensuring the nuns a steady income from an unpaid and captive workforce of pregnant girls and single mothers.
Because of their rapid growth and success during the 1890s, the English Sacred Hearts were restless and eager to be freed from their Mother House in France and they finally broke away in 1902. Three years later, on 5 March 1905, the new order was formally recognised by the Holy See in Rome as ‘The Congregation of the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.’ It is important to note that a ‘congregation’ is a second-class designation and considered inferior to an ‘order’. Winifride Tyrrell became the first Mother Superior General and was succeeded by Sylvester Halpin in 1908. The Sacred Heart nuns later opened two other Mother and Baby Homes in Britain, one in Scotland and their last in 1944 in Brettargholt, Kendal, in the Lake District. They arrived in Ireland in 1922.
There is one last piece of important legislation to consider before the previous century ended – the 1899 Poor Law Act. Although it is widely believed in the adoption community that the Adoption Act 1952 was the first piece of adoption legislation in Ireland, it was, in fact, the first piece of standalone adoption legislation. A section of the 1899 Poor Law Act legalised adoption by resolution. Generally, it was used in two ways; firstly, to adopt newborn babies and very young children and secondly, to adopt former foster children into the family once they had turned 16 years old. Weekly payments for fostering a child ceased on that date.
By 1900, industrial and reformatory schools had developed a negative reputation because the former inmates had none of the social skills necessary to function in civil society. Their health was destroyed by their regimented existence and poor diet. Britain reluctantly accepted that caring for children in large institutions was a failed social experiment and began to phase out the institutions that had shattered tens of thousands of lives.
In the early twentieth century, the rest of the English-speaking world, particularly in the United States, followed the British lead and began to phase out large-scale institutional care. Ireland was the exception. The Irish Catholic Church had fought long and hard to own and/or control all the different types of institutions
