Read on Twitter
A thread: Happy to see Alice Litster finally get the recognition she deserves both in #motherandbabyhomes report and Breda O’Brien’s @IrishTimes but it raises the need to complicate the notion of ‘society’ - O’Brien concludes her piece “Irish society...
took a long time to listen to those who shouted stop about Mother and Baby Homes.’ There’s truth in that but important qualifiers which go to heart of nuancing the notion of society and agency. First...
Litster’s most damning reports were censored by those with political power. Her searing analysis that the babies born outside marriage were ‘infant martyrs of convenience, respectability and fear’ (Litster 1948) was CENSORED. So who could hear?
Now let’s talk about society...what does it mean if we don’t consider power - who had social, economic and political power? A mother of 14 in 1937 desperately fought to keep her daughter and her daughter’s two children born outside marriage with the family...
she passed the first child as her own, she supported her daughter in taking a case against the father under the affiliation orders act, which was extraordinary at the time. Despite all this her daughter and two grandchildren ended up in institutions. Did she have power?
But if we didn’t have her letter documenting her fight we’d conclude it as another case of rejection. Her words: ‘I am not able to do anything for her as my youngest is only 12 months old. Their seems to be no one who will give her a kind word...
now she has not a friend in the world to give her a cup of Tea only myself’. Key to all this was (is!) class and gender. Those who paid the price - literally with their bodies and lives - of ‘society’s ’ values. For this letter see
