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THE COUNTRY THAT TRIED TO CONTROL SEX  
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Maggie Doherty
April 12, 2024
The Atlantic
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_ Clair Wills’s memoir is a timely warning that sexual morality can
be enforced only with violence. _

, Martin Parr / Magnum

 

When the cultural historian Clair Wills was in graduate school at
Oxford in the late 1980s, she became pregnant by accident. She was 25
and single, with little money and no job. Still, she decided to keep
the baby. “By then, getting pregnant and keeping the baby was almost
a tradition in our family,” she writes in her memoir, _Missing
Persons_ [[link removed]]. “My eldest
sister had done it; so had one of my cousins. In fact, throughout the
1980s, these were the only kind of babies born in our
family—‘illegitimate’ ones.”

What Wills didn’t know at the time, and what she would come to
discover over the course of the next several decades, was just how
vexed and long-standing this tradition was. Around the same time she
fell pregnant, Wills learned that her maternal uncle Jackie had gotten
a neighboring girl pregnant in the mid-1950s, when he was living on
the family farm in West Ireland. Caving to social custom and familial
pressure, Jackie abandoned his lover, Lily, and their unborn child and
immigrated to England, losing his job, his country, and his family of
origin in one fell swoop. Lily, meanwhile, was forced to enter the
state’s network of mother-and-baby homes, where unmarried pregnant
women lived and labored. Though some women resided at these
institutions for several years, most stayed only until they gave
birth, at which point many of their babies were put up for
adoption—if they survived infancy. (Along with the
infamous Magdalene Laundries
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similar establishments in which women and girls, some of whom were
pregnant, were consigned to unpaid labor, the mother-and-baby homes
helped “render illegitimacy invisible.”)

At Bessborough, one of the largest homes, Lily gave birth to a
daughter, Mary, the cousin Wills never knew. (Mary died by suicide in
1980 shortly after getting pregnant out of wedlock herself.) The
irony, Wills eventually discovered, is that Jackie himself was the
product of premarital sex: Her maternal grandmother, Molly, became
pregnant with him in 1920 and only barely managed to render the child
“legitimate” by marrying three months before giving birth. Proud
of her hard-won “respectability,” Molly was horrified by the news
of Lily’s pregnancy and did everything she could to cover it up,
including by insisting that her eldest son leave the country forever.
These scandals are among the family’s many secrets, known but never
directly discussed.

In this brilliant and moving memoir, Wills works to expose such
secrets. She does so by decoding the cryptic stories of violence and
shame handed down from one generation to the next like an heirloom
gun. She learns about Jackie, Lily, and Mary, but also about other
missing or ill-fated relatives: a maternal aunt who died in early
childhood; a maternal uncle who took over the farm after Jackie left
and, according to Wills, was “buried alive” by it; and an
illegitimate baby who might have been born to Molly or who might never
have existed at all. Through archival research, conversations with
family members, and reflections on her own childhood, Wills pieces
together a more complete family portrait, one that includes “all
those who were lost or discarded along the way.” The result is a
riveting study of a “typical” 20th-century Irish family, one both
destroyed and bound together by its secrets. And, in revealing the
suffering that accompanies any effort to enforce sexual morality, it
serves as a cautionary tale to those who want to uphold chastity and
the nuclear family at all costs.

Wills has written several books about 20th-century Ireland, including
one about sexual propriety in Irish poetry, but this is the first book
to blend her personal experience and her scholarly expertise. Aware
that “pregnancy and childbirth don’t happen outside history,”
she shows how her pregnant relatives’ options were shaped by
historical circumstances—and not always in the ways one might
expect. In some respects, Molly, pregnant during the Irish War of
Independence, actually had more options than Lily did, more than 30
years later: The mother-and-baby homes were not yet functioning, and
it was more common then for a marriage to take place mere weeks before
a child’s birth. By the time Lily became pregnant, the
mother-and-baby homes, which offered only meager support for the women
and children who lived there, and which seemed not to care if babies
lived or died, had come to seem like the best option: a way for
families to hide away pregnant daughters and hopefully get ahead of
gossip.

Throughout the book, Wills demonstrates that supposedly traditional
practices—forgoing sex until marriage, for instance—are usually
historically contingent and far from universal. As she writes, it was
only by the early 20th century that the Catholic Church had
“consolidated its campaign to control sexual habits, in the name of
Irish purity.” (Prior to the 1890s, there simply weren’t enough
priests or churches to serve the country’s population.) Priests
started to sermonize against sex outside of marriage or for pleasure,
and 90 percent of Irish citizens were in the pews listening. The
result was a shift in the cultural understanding of sexual morality:
Wills writes that by 1920, when Molly was pregnant, “sexual lapses
were not accepted or understood with anything like the same spirit as
fifty years ago.” Questions of sexual legitimacy that had once been
more private became a matter of public and moral concern.

But even as Wills understands how Lily and others like her—some
56,000 women in all from 1922 to 1998—were sent to live in the
homes, she can’t quite accept it. “Why did people—why did
we—countenance all these missing persons?” she asks. How could
families and communities enact such violence on people they knew and
loved? How could a woman like Molly, who would have known in her bones
the fear that comes with being pregnant and unmarried in a small,
socially repressive country, reject her son’s lover and unborn
child, and thereby inflict that terror on someone else?

This is a moral question, but it’s also a methodological one.
Archival records can’t fully account for human motivation; a death
certificate doesn’t tell you why a vulnerable child was allowed to
die. (From the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, Wills reports, 25 percent
of babies born at Bessborough died, many from malnutrition.) Like
scholars and writers before her, Wills finds that she must abandon the
official record and consult less reliable but perhaps more revealing
sources: her family members and her own memories. Her conversations
with her mother are fascinating, both for what they disclose and for
what they refuse to name. Wills doesn’t tell her much about the book
she’s writing; in return, her mother offers tantalizing tidbits of
family lore, “gingerbread crumbs” for Wills to follow. Wills
senses that her mother wants the family’s story told but doesn’t
want to take responsibility for the telling. “It’s as though
I’ve been employed as a ghostwriter,” she writes. “I’m
compelled to tell a story on behalf of ghosts, that even the ghosts
don’t understand.”

Despite Wills’s strenuous efforts, her absent family members remain
mysterious and unknowable. As it progresses, _Missing
Persons_ becomes less an effort to recover those missing relatives
and more an inquiry into the mechanisms of disappearance, the ways
that communities conspire to erase certain people from public life and
collective memory. At mid-century, the Irish were not just “the best
Catholics in the world” but also the best secret keepers: They knew
how to lie, how to say nothing, and how to say something while seeming
to say nothing at all. “A whole society learnt not to look, or not
to look too closely,” Wills writes. She also insists upon the agency
of those who “dismembered” the past, blaming everyone from the
nuns who ran the mother-and-baby homes to the family members who
refused to acknowledge Lily and Mary: “There is an active element to
the refusal, or inability, to remember or to know.”

Ultimately, Wills finds that although she can understand why her
relatives acted as they did, she can’t quite forgive them. Perhaps
this is fine: Historians, she writes, are not “in the business of
dispensing forgiveness.” But what makes this book so compelling is
Wills’s ability to be at once a historian and a human, to provide a
valuable record of common social practices in 20th-century Ireland
without ever becoming inured to the pain they caused. Each time Wills
asks, with seemingly undimmed outrage, how people she loves, and who
loved her in turn, could have acted so callously, she reminds us about
the many ways that state and social repression can warp family life.

It’s a timely warning. Early in the book, Wills muses about the
“chasm” between her own generation, with its happily unwed
mothers, and the generations that preceded her. “Only a few decades
ago it apparently made sense—as a parent, or a sibling, or a
lover—to allow your daughter, or your sister, or the mother of your
child to be effectively incarcerated,” she writes. “To us, now, it
seems pretty much unthinkable.” Perhaps it does to those living in
contemporary Ireland or in the U.K., where Wills lives. But for those
of us living in the post-_Dobbs_ U.S., such practices might seem less
far-fetched. The ways that states across the country are denying
bodily autonomy differ from the ways 20th-century Ireland did, and
yet, all too frequently here, someone’s parent, sibling, or lover
is deprived of life-saving or life-sustaining medical care
[[link removed]],
or forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term
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There are news stories about women who have faced criminal charges
for miscarrying
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or have been blocked from terminating a dangerous pregnancy
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Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about
the accessibility of mifepristone
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a drug used to induce abortion that has been deemed safe by the FDA
for more than 20 years. This week in Arizona
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the state supreme court granted permission to move forward with the
implementation of a law from 1864 that bans nearly all abortions.

Some on the political right might believe that with more state
oversight of sexual practices and without access to abortion care,
people will become more chaste and family-minded. But Wills’s book
gives the lie to this idea. She shows that sexual morality can be
enforced only through appalling acts of violence, which harm the
perpetrators as well as the victims. “Irish people were not more
sexually continent than any other people,” she writes; they were
just “better at covering it up.” In trying to deny sex, Wills’s
relatives merely compounded their own suffering. The pain they
experienced was so deep, and so damaging, that the only thing they
could do was look away.

_When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a
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_MAGGIE DOHERTY
[[link removed]] is the author
of The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation
in the 1960s [[link removed]]._

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* sex
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* morality
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* marriage
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* Violence
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* ireland
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* abortion
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* Book Review
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