As a retired social worker and also the original mother of a child whom I felt obliged to give up for adoption in the 1960s, I was interested in your article on the Foundling Museum’s current exhibition, The Fallen Woman (The mothers who had to beg to have their babies taken away, 19 September). Nowadays “bad character”, perhaps reinterpreted as weakness rather than sin, seems to have become a major factor in decisions to take a woman’s child from her, for instance if she is a drug addict, an alcoholic, suffers depression, or is even trapped by domestic violence. The ability of social services to give support in such situations now stands at an all-time low.
But for the women who were branded unmarried mothers in the mid-to-late 20th century, there was still the sense of desperation and extremely limited choices. Most people don’t realise how many women suffer still, from being forced to give up a child simply because they were unmarried. There is now a campaign to get acknowledgment of those practices in this parliament, but politicians seem to prefer to ignore us. Perhaps the clue lies in the fact that, as your writer comments, the “fault” was all female, and there was no parallel narrative of a “fallen man”.
Jean Robertson-Molloy
London
