QUEST FOR JUSTICE AND EQUALITY CONTINUES TO BE ONGOING BATTLE FOR IRISH WOMEN
Nancy Rochford Flynn from New Ross organises an annual ceremony called Flowers For Magdalene in the local cemetery and has been an advocate for women’s rights.
She said: ‘Mother and Baby Homes were not the same as Magdalene Laundries. Women did not give birth in the Laundries but more often than not, ended up there once their babies were adopted out. It is also worth noting that the majority of women who found themselves incarcerated in the laundries were not admitted as a result of motherhood outside of marriage.’
The following is an excerpt from an academic journal which she wrote in 2018 that was which subsequently published by Sibéal Feminist and Gender Studies Network. Nancy travelled to Norfolk Virginia the same year to present this work at the The Global Conference on Women and Gender Conference at Christopher Newport University.
Mother and Baby Homes were one of an assortment of interconnected institutions in Ireland which formed ‘Ireland’s architecture of containment’, a term coined by Professor James Smith.
The Good Shepherd’s Convent in New Ross was as we now know one of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. It was not a Mother and Baby Home and it is important to note that no babies were born here.
The campus consisted of a Laundry, living quarters for the penitents, a Convent and St. Aidan’s Industrial School. At the time of its erection in 1860 its location was situated at the edge of the town and therefore out of view. Those incarcerated there included unmarried mothers, women who were shunned from society and that had no place else to go upon their release from a Mother and Baby home. Others incarcerated in these types of institutions included orphans, illegitimate children, those deemed socially transgressive or sexually promiscuous and, or, any person regarded as ‘being in the way’. Anyone who did not ‘fit the model’ of the expected Irish family structure was excluded, silenced, and punished. The heteronormative family became the model necessary for ensuring a stable social order, placing the Irish man as the kernel of the family.
Women were to be firmly entrenched in the home as wives, mothers and carers. Young women who were single mothers, jeopardised this notion and were therefore exploited and manipulated to serve the ends of those who sought to maintain the concept of ‘purity’ within the family cell.
Mother and baby homes facilitated alleged illegal forced adoptions of children born out of wedlock and without the permission of the mothers’.
Many of these children were adopted by wealthy Catholic families in the United States, allegedly feeding an organised system which resulted in the trafficking of children for profit by nuns who facilitated this service. A conservative estimate is that over 2,000 Irish children were illegally adopted to the United States.
The quest for justice and equality continues to be an ongoing battle for Irish women.