I just finished Caelainn Hogan’s Republic of Shame: How Ireland Punished ‘Fallen Women’ and Their Children. I picked up the book because of my interest in women, pregnancy, and shame, and because I’ve been thinking a lot about how institutions and societies reckon—or avoid reckoning—with serious wrongs.
Republic of Shame is a thorough excavation of how girls and women became ‘penitents’ and ‘offenders,’ how babies became commodities on an unregulated adoption market, and how the unholy marriage of moral authority and state power turned Ireland into the “shame-industrial complex.” Without the power of the state, the shame-industrial complex could never have ranged so widely across Irish society. Without the moral authority of the Church, the shame-industrial complex could never have justified itself. (“It was all right to beat the Devil out of us. That justified some cruelty.”)
That brutal disregard reverberates across lifetimes and down through generations of Irish families. One interviewee describes the institutions as “unnatural, a place where children didn’t even speak normally, with no one there to talk to them or to care what they said.” Hogan writes: “I tried to imagine the rows of cots in the dormitories of the home, the babies raised in an institution, without a loved one there tending to them every moment. Children were sponges, soaking up every subtle change, learning and adapting with a fierce speed, consumed by a rabid hunger to take everything in, grab it with chubby little fists, mouth it and taste it and throw it away in order to pick up the next new thing. Every experience was momentous.”
Reluctant young mothers were told there was “no future for their children, if they didn’t sign the adoption papers. No future: what threat could loom larger? “Everybody thought it was best for the baby. At times I thought it was best for the baby. I couldn’t offer him anything,” one mother remembered, forty years later. “The decision was hers, but everything pointed in the same direction. ‘I can’t say I was forced,’ she told me. ‘I was conditioned.’”
The Ireland Hogan conjures for readers is marked by a kind of terrible ignorance, an enforced innocence of the basic facts of life, such that even farm boys believed babies were found under cabbages and where girls in Catholic school learned about the Virgin Birth “but not sex or pregnancy.” As the story unfolds, we move from ignorance and innocence to concerted efforts to avoid knowledge. Hogan writes that the orders “understood that wrongs had been committed in the guise of doing good, but when they spoke of the good their orders did it was to distract from properly discussing the injustices”:
“It was terrible, looking back now. There were abuses, we did make mistakes. You did what you were told. Don’t speak out.” It sounded as though she was trying to make sense of the past, trying to justify it in her mind but realizing that she might be unable to. There was pain in her face. I had, meanwhile, said almost nothing. “You don’t see it until afterwards,” she said.
“I suppose I didn’t want to see it… I only wanted to know from people what they wanted to tell me themselves.”
“I wouldn’t say I slept last night, going over it and thinking about it… I hope that there will be some explanation when it does happen to come out, that it won’t be as it is, and if it is, well, I wasn’t involved with it.”
One of the fault lines that runs through the book is the divide between those who want to know—where your baby was buried, whether you will ever know your mother’s name—and those who don’t want to know, who want to leave the past in the past, even as people live out their whole lives in its wake. Whatever you do, don't tell me I was part of something that caused so much pain.
My paternal grandmother was a “bastard”. It was a terrible, shameful secret. My grandfather married her and was virtually blacklisted by his family (with the exception of an “eccentric” aunt and her husband.
This bulls!t reached across generations and ruined many lives.
Naturally the sperm contributors of these children were never named and shamed. Only the mothers and children (if they managed to survive long enough to become children) suffered.
Sounds like what the majority on the Supreme Court wants for the US now.