Painful lost years for unmarried mothers

06 November 2012

When I was a sweet innocent of 19 I went, with countless others, to see a revival of the film Blossoms in the Dust.

This 1941 work, which starred the famous Greer Garson and Walter Pigeon, was a real weepie. Handkerchiefs became even more sodden when audiences realised that the film was based on solid fact, for Garson and Pigeon played the parts of a Texan couple whose son had been killed when he was just a child.

The bereaved mother, Edna Gladney, spent the rest of her active life in a sustained effort to find good homes for orphaned and foundling children at a time when unwed mothers and their innocent babies were almost equally condemned by polite and conservative members of society.

But Gladney maintained that there were no illegitimate babies, only illegitimate parents, and she fought the Texas legislature until it removed the stigma of illegitimacy from the State records.

In the film, Garson/Gladney maintains that it is the good girls who bear their babies. In my youth, the pre-pill and illegal abortion era, girls lived in dread of enforced marriage, the so-called shotgun wedding. We all knew couples who had to get married because a baby was on the way; often the prospective parents were little more than babies themselves.

But far worse was the plight of the pregnant girl whose lover abandoned her. My mother used to wax indignant on the subject of ‘those poor girls’ and the matter of the double standard. ‘Nobody ever mentions unmarried fathers,’ she would say. And how right she was.

Forty years ago I was close to one of those abandoned girls. Let’s call her Jane. Jane’s parents supported her to a degree, and certainly did not banish her from the family, but there was absolutely no encouragement for her to keep her baby, and certainly no offer to raise him/her as their grandchild.

Jane had to give up a promising career as well as her baby. She was unlucky in that she became pregnant before Gough Whitlam’s Single Parent’s Benefit became law.

I visited Jane occasionally. For the duration of her pregnancy she lived in a gloomy Victorian mansion run by the Presbyterian Church. I used to feel very uncomfortable during these visits, God help me.

I was married but childless, and know now that part of the discomfort was a failure of my imagination. Another factor was my collusion in the secrecy. I knew that I

ARTS AND CULTURE

Painful lost years for unmarried mothers

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