Mother and Baby Homes

A Survey of Homes for Unmarried Mothers

Jill Nicholson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000438192
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Social Work

During the 1960s there had been much discussion about the plight of the unmarried mother and her child; but very little of it had been based on fact. At the time Mother and Baby Homes catered for between 11,000 and 12,000 unmarried mothers each year, out of a total of 70,000; but there was hardly one generalisation that would be applicable to all the Homes. Some were run by voluntary organisations, some by local authorities and some by religious groups. While some still retained the punitive attitude, others set themselves with much kindness to help the women – some of them mere schoolgirls, to face the difficulties of their position and to plan constructively for their own future and that of their babies. Originally published in 1968, this book gives the facts but, even more, it gives the feelings and ideas of those most concerned – the mothers-to-be and those who care for them.

This is a careful and sensitive study. It was unique in putting on record for the first time the views of unmarried mothers themselves about the care they received. Everybody who is interested in the history of the health and welfare of the unmarried mother in residential care should read this book.

1 Introduction

The subject of this book, residential Homes for unmarried mothers, straddles a number of controversial frontiers. Illegitimate maternity raises questions of sex, morality, religion and authority, parental as as well as communal. The decision each unmarried mother has to face over the future of her baby rouses deep feelings concerning the acceptance or rejection of a continuing mother-child relationship. Because of these issues any service our society provides for unmarried mothers is likely to encounter strong opinion and prejudice. When the service considered is a residential one, further disputed questions are involved. Historically, the provision of residential accommodation for unmarried mothers has been undertaken largely by religious bodies, and even today 138 out of the total of 172 known Homes are provided by church organizations. The religious setting for residential care has been a contentious issue for many years. More recently, the residential method of care itself has been questioned in many fields of social provision.¹ All this makes for a controversial subject of enquiry. Feelings about Mother and Baby Homes run high, convictions, firmly held and fervently asserted, are often based on little evidence or none at all.

We know very little about residential care for unmarried mothers. It was largely to remedy this ignorance and to enable current beliefs and assumptions to be examined that a research project was launched ‘to make a critical study of present policies and practices of institutions for the residential care of the unmarried mother and her child in the light of present day needs.’² It was intended primarily as a fact finding study to discover what Mother and Baby Homes are like, what they do, and whether the care they offer is appropriate to the needs of those they are trying to help. Part of this information was to come from the residents themselves, who for the first time were to be asked for their views on the care they received. Such a study, it was hoped, would provide the basis for a reassessment of the service in accordance with contemporary needs and modern methods of care.

¹ Jones 1966, Townsend 1962. ² National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child, Memorandum 1963.

Development of Residential Care

The forerunners of Mother and Baby Homes appeared around the middle of the eighteenth, and at the beginning of the nineteenth, century. These first residential institutions, known as Penitentiaries or Reformatories, were for the reception of Penitent Prostitutes and their titles mirror the spirit in which they were founded. Though the selective narratives of historians of rescue work may suggest a unity of view which did not in fact exist, looking back to the origins of the work, society was then apparently of one mind towards the unmarried mother. Illegitimacy was a religious and moral problem. Individual sin was the only explanation admitted¹ and personal penitence the only form of atonement. Within such a context the purpose of residential institutions was clear; to reform. Penitents were admitted to these early Homes for periods varying from one to three years. As a condition of entry mothers had to part with their baby,² and during their stay, separation from the outside world was absolute, barred windows and locked doors emphasizing the completeness of their isolation. Rigorous religious training and hard work constituted the process of reformation;³ with intervals for prayer and penitence, inmates spent their days from dawn till dusk in laundry and domestic work, which it was considered would fit them for suitable employment when their atonement was complete.

To modern eyes even the most humane of these reformatories and penitentiaries would seem grim. The image of these early Homes still lingers, and modern Mother and Baby Homes suffer from their past. Yet as institutions they are fundamentally different in character from their predecessors. The long-term training of the old Homes has disappeared, and been replaced by short-term care during the weeks around the confinement. The attitude to the baby has been reversed. Far from requiring a mother to abandon her child, the present Homes almost universally insist that a mother and her baby should spend at least a short time together in the Home. Nor are the Homes as isolated as they were. Some still deliberately restrict the residents’ opportunities for contact with the neighbourhood, but the complete severance of all links between the Homes and the surrounding communities is now unthinkable.

¹ Yelloly 1965. ² Ferguson and Fitzgerald 1954. ³ Hall and Howes 1965, Tilley 1966.

Not only have the Homes themselves changed since the early days of residential care, but the social context in which they operate has altered radically. Much of the confusion and uncertainty surrounding the present service which emerged from the research stems from this fact.

The Present-Day Context

The current attitude to illegitimacy is hard to describe, but certainly it recognizes more than one explanation of the problem. Theories of causation vary from the view that it is no more than an unfortunate consequence of normal behaviour¹ to the psycho-pathological theories advanced by Leontine Young,² but whatever view is taken, it is generally admitted now that there is at least some social or emotional content to the problem. The idea of individual sin is no longer dominant.

Along with the lack of certainty as to the basic causes of illegitimacy goes a deep rooted ambivalence in attitudes towards the unmarried mother and the response appropriate to her predicament. On the one hand, unmarried mothers are considered as a group in need of social work support and services designed to help them with the practical and emotional problems of their situation. On the other hand, is an attitude more nearly related to the old idea of sin. This maintains that little should be done to help the unmarried mother; she has brought her difficulties on herself, and some degree of suffering is both appropriate in view of her own conduct, and a deterrent to others. Within this division of opinion, Mother and Baby Homes find themselves criticized for doing both too much and too little.

The clarity of purpose of the early Homes did not survive the abandonment of the sin theory. Religious training ceased to be an acceptable remedy when the social and emotional aspects of the problem were recognized. The irony of this lies in the fact that despite the strong religious emphasis of the early institutions, church organizations seemed to have played no part in their provision;³ their founders were independent groups of laymen. Yet today when religious training is considered inappropriate, 80 per cent of the Homes are run by official church bodies. This causes concern, for inevitably a religious aura persists in the Church Homes, and fears are sometimes expressed that unmarried mothers are asked ‘to pay the price of a pseudo-conversion for the help they receive’.¹

¹ Anderson et al 1960 cf. also Greenland 1957. ² Young 1954. ³ Hall and Howes 1965.

Although the original purpose of the Homes has gone, no single substitute has taken its place. Nor is there any general agreement outside the Homes on what the functions of a Mother and Baby Home are or should be. During the course of the research we heard them described as shelters, hospitals, boarding houses, reformatories and missionary centres, to list only a few of their ascribed functions. Inevitably this leads to conflicting expectations of the Homes on the part of staff, unmarried mothers, social workers and the general public. Inevitably too, such conflicting expectations give rise to criticism of Mother and Baby Homes. No institution can be expected to fulfil all these functions simultaneously.

In view of this general uncertainty, it is clearly important to identify the actual task of Mother and Baby Homes, and try to see what distinguishes them as a separate class of institution. Their first function, the provision of accommodation for women and girls having an extramarital pregnancy, is so obvious that it hardly requires a mention. Arising from this, and equally obvious, is the need to provide residents with adequate physical and medical care. There is also a third function, and this deserves more attention. The Homes are expected to provide a service for girls and women whose role as the mother of their child is in doubt. The very great majority of the residents in Mother and Baby Homes are either unsure how long their practical motherhood will last, or else they know definitely that it will be over very shortly. Their situation can be described as one of ambiguous maternity; it is unique and no one knows how to deal with it adequately.

This brings us bluntly to recognize another factor of crucial importance not only for the service of residential care, but for all the other services which may be relevant to the needs of unmarried mothers, including casework, medical services, adoption, fostering, and the daily care of children away from their mothers. We are extremely ignorant about the whole problem of illegitimate maternity. Neither the ultimate causes nor the effects on mother or on child (or we might add, on father who is usually ignored) are well understood. In designing services for unmarried parents and illegitimate children this is a grave handicap. This report is concerned with only one of the available services, and it is one of the smallest. Mother and Baby Homes cater each year for somewhere between 11,000 and 12,000 of the 70,000 women having an extra-marital pregnancy, and they serve them for only three short months out of a pregnancy of nine months and a lifetime of being at least the biological parent of an illegitimate child. The limitations of this study should be recognized if only to focus attention on the wider problems needing investigation.

¹ P.E.P. 1946.

The context in which present-day Mother and Baby Homes have to work can be summarized in terms of five inter-related themes (i) ignorance of the causes and effects of illegitimate maternity (ii) conflicting social attitudes towards unmarried mothers (iii) confused expectations of Mother and Baby Homes amongst those using them and the general public (iv) the problem of ambiguous maternity and (v) the uncertainty of purpose on the part of those running and staffing the Homes. These five themes are basic to an understanding of the existing situation and they will recur repeatedly throughout the report.

The Presentation of the Report

In writing the report we were faced with the problem of what to call the unmarried mothers living in the Homes. It is usual for social workers and residential staff to refer to them as ‘girls’. Though we have used this term, it seemed inappropriate for the older women, and in general we have preferred to follow the lead of the Committee of Enquiry into the Staffing of Residential Homes¹ (the Williams Committee) and refer to those being cared for as ‘residents’. It will be seen, however, that even this term is not entirely appropriate.

The next two chapters establish the framework for the rest of the report. The first sets out the total provision of residential accommodation for unmarried mothers in England and Wales. The second describes the sample of Homes visited and the methods used in the survey. Then follows the main section of the report presenting the material collected during the survey. This is based on the evidence of those interviewed supplemented by our own observations during the interviews and the visits to the Homes. To let the reader share the impressions we ourselves received, we have in many cases allowed those interviewed to speak for themselves, quoting their own words wherever possible. This part of the report opens with a discussion of the use made of residential accommodation and a description of the residents interviewed. Following these are five chapters concerned with the subjects common to any residential institution; the material standards, the pattern of daily life, the rules, the relationships in the Home and the staffing situation. Then four chapters deal with aspects of care particular to Mother and Baby Homes; medical care, the care of the babies, religion and social work. It is in these four chapters that the relevance of the five themes mentioned is most obvious. In a final chapter, the Homes visited are assessed and from the evidence produced by the survey some general conclusions regarding the developments of the service are considered.

¹ Caring for People, Williams Report, 1967.

2 Residential Accommodation in England and Wales

This enquiry, like other recent studies of residential care¹ faced two initial problems. The first was to choose an appropriate definition of the accommodation to be studied. Mother and Baby Homes are provided especially for women and girls who need accommodation by reason of an extra-marital pregnancy. There are Homes which do just this, but others merge imperceptibly into ‘shelters’ or ‘host...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Advisory Committee
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Residential Accommodation in England and Wales
• 3 The Survey
• 4 The Use and Scope of Mother and Baby Homes
• 5 The Residents in the Homes
• 6 The Material Standards
• 7 The Pattern of Daily Life
• 8 Rules
• 9 Relationships in the Homes
• 10 Staffing
• 11 Medical Care
• 12 The Care of the Babies
• 13 Religion in the Homes
• 14 Social Work in the Homes
• 15 Assessment and Conclusions
• Research Material
• Bibliography and List of References