Single mother is still a scapegoat
They were in agreement that public assistance encouraged women to get pregnant so that they could secure a ‘sort of pension’ to themselves.
And this was the justification for excluding unmarried mothers from public assistance outside of the abysmal conditions of the workhouse.
Of course there was also the option of the Magdalen penitentiary, or the many private rescue homes, but the logic was the same: such women had sinned against society and God and should be punished.
As a conception of justice, this conveniently overlooks the social construction of the crime, the criminal, and the punishment, and how this kernel of arbitrariness articulates relations of power. At the end of the century, as a burgeoning eugenics movement mobilised behind theories of hereditary defect and mental deficiency, a commission on poor law reform in Ireland explained that relief to unmarried mothers, even if confined to the punitive conditions of the workhouse, was causing an increase in ‘this most undesirable special class of women’.
Lest this be explained as a product of British rule, one of the first things the Free State government did was to commission a report on the ‘alien’ poor laws only to reproduce the ‘crime’ of unmarried motherhood intact. The fight for the rights of unmarried mothers and their recognition within the welfare code is a very recent affair.
I suspect that Kevin Myers, like Charles Murray in the US, who also uses specious evidence to resuscitate the notion of bastardy, would like to return to the days when the upper classes could take it upon themselves to control and punish the recalcitrant pauper classes.
Whatever his motives, it would be an error to interpret Myers’s invective as a polemical bid to enhance his reputation or increase the sales of the paper he writes for.
We live in times which are creating levels of inequality unseen since the 19th century. We now have insular forms of nationalism that look outward at an unfounded and politically constructed fear of asylum seekers, and inwards at politically constructed symbols of disorder. It’s no accident that the figure of the unmarried mother is used for the latter purpose: there are good historical reasons why she can be, and doing so serves to displace the more difficult questions that we really should be asking ourselves.
Myers would do well to practice the intelligence he thinks he possesses and engage in some critical thinking before he practices his creative writing.
Kevin Ryan
Department of Political Science and Sociology
NUI Galway
