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New Blackmore Vale, 5 August 2022
blackmorevale.net
Letters
Social practices and the ethos of their time When we talk about the slave trade, or burning heretics alive, we cannot get into the minds of those who perpetrated or condoned such acts. But when we talk of unmarried mothers and adoption in the 1950s, there are plenty of us still around who lived in those times and do have some idea of the motives. Until the 1960s there was a presumption that a child would be born to a married couple – a man and a woman. We knew that it sometimes happened otherwise but that was deeply discouraged. To have a child out of wedlock was shameful. Society was structured around this presumption. So a woman would give up paid employment possibly when she married, but certainly when she had a child, to be a full-time mother and home-maker. It followed that wages and salaries would be higher for men than for women, as the man was assumed to have the responsibility of looking after a family. I recall advice from my bank manager, who happened to be a family friend, soon after we were married: “Always budget on one salary, as you never know when you may lose the second one.” Contraception was still not wholly reliable. So if a young woman or even a teenager did have a child when unmarried, society had to deal with that situation. Abortion was in those days unthinkable. The problem might be pre-empted by a quick marriage, often successful though sometimes leading to a strained household. Otherwise it would be a kindness to relieve a young woman of a responsibility for which she was not equipped or resourced and let her enjoy the freedom of youth, hopefully without repeating the mistake. It was a kindness also to the baby to place it in a loving family who wanted a child – IVF was still far in the future – and would
have the resources to give it a good life. We recognise, of course, that sometimes it didn’t work well. One can have no sympathy for parents who might cast off a child for this heinous sin – nor for some unduly harsh ‘mother and baby’ homes. We also hear of adoptions which did not work well, but dysfunctional families arise with natural birth, too. However, in most cases adoption at birth seems to have worked very well. So let us not condemn a past social practice without understanding it. Rather than adopting a rather arrogant attitude that we know better than our forebears, we should perhaps be honest about today’s practice. If we could reverse the pattern of judgement, the people of the 1950s would be horrified at some of the things which go on in the 2020s. We say that the interests of the child must come first – but in practice the mother’s career prospects often trump those of the child. When one thinks of today’s latch-key kids with both parents in demanding jobs, or young mothers going off to war and putting their lives at risk while leaving a couple of children behind, there are undoubted advantages in the full-time mother. The concept of ‘single parent families’ is a biological contradiction – what we mean is ‘absent parent families’. In many of the high-profile child abuse cases one wants to ask: “Where was the father? He has both rights and responsibilities which are too often ignored. Is it really in the best interests of the child that we encourage, by means of housing and other subsidies, a situation where the father bears no responsibility for the upbringing of his child and leaves the mother to cope on her own? So let us try to judge social
Cartoon by Lyndon Wall – justsocaricatures.co.uk
practices on the ethos of the time, rather than making a retrospective judgement without understanding the context. Mike Keatinge Via email n Do you have a view on Mike Keatinge’s letter or anything else in the New Blackmore Vale – if so, email newsdesk@ blackmorevale.net I was chuffed the New Blackmore Vale printed my letter about Wellington the Goat in edition 46 and this is my second submission. It was sports day for all the families at the Royal Naval Air Station, Portland, Dorset. We had entered Wellington the goat for the Dogs’ Race. Driving in from our married quarter, passengers were ID-checked at the main gate as usual, and the MoD policeman was more than surprised to see a goat reclining in the back seat. Unfortunately, Wellington ran off in the wrong direction when
the starter’s gun went off! We came back from a holiday to find our neighbour had failed in her task of checking his peg had not worked loose. Wellington was very ill having eaten some laurel leaves – the vet saved his life and we bedded him down in the tool shed to recuperate. On about day five my wife went to give him the usual TLC and he butted her out of the door. She said ‘you devil’ – or something like that – ‘you’re better’ and he was. When I was re-appointed to London, I presented Wellington to the officers’ mess. He was taken onto the ship’s books as Ordinary Goat Wellington – later I read in Navy News he had been promoted to Able Goat, in the same way sailors climb the promotion ladder. On one occasion, during a security exercise, the Royal Marine ‘attackers’ came over a fence and were met by an indignant goat causing them to retreat.
