'She said she was in the family way'

Pregnancy and infancy in modern Ireland

Elaine Farrell (ed.)

'She said she was in the family way' examines the subject of pregnancy and infancy in Ireland from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It draws on exciting and innovative research by early-career and established academics, and consider topics that have been largely ignored by historians in Ireland. The book will make an important contribution to Irish women’s history, family history, childhood history, social history, crime history and medical history, and will provide a reference point for academics interested in themes of sexuality, childbirth, infanthood and parenthood.

Price: c.£40.00 (tbc), hbk.
ISBN: 978-1-905165-65-0
Published: June 2012

Foreword – Mary O’Dowd

Introduction – Elaine Farrell

I. ‘I would take anything to prevent me having a child’: contraception

Ann Daly –‘Veiled obscenity’: contraception and the Dublin Medical Press, 1850-1900

Sandra McAvoy – ‘It’s effect on public morality is vicious in the extreme’: defining birth control as obscene and unethical: Ireland 1926-1932

II. ‘Looking liker and liker in the family way’: pregnancy and childbirth

Clodagh Tait –  Some sources for the study of infant and maternal mortality in later seventeenth-century Ireland

Rosemary Raughter – ‘A time of trial being near at hand’: pregnancy, childbirth and parenting in the spiritual journal of Elizabeth Bennis (1749-79)

Julia Anne Bergin – Labour, childbirth and the post natal experience in Dublin’s lying-in hospitals, c.1750-c.1900

III. ‘The world acted unjustly to women in this fallen position’: unmarried mothers and ‘illegitimate’ babies

Ann-Marie Graham – Legal illegitimacy: the enshrinement of the Irish State and the Catholic Church’s attitudes towards illegitimacy, 1921-31

Jennifer Redmond – In the family way and away from the family: examining the evidence in Irish unmarried mothers in Britain, 1920s-1940s

IV. ‘The natural protector and guardian of the child’: care of babies

Emma O’Toole – Material culture and motherhood: a mother’s role in maintaining the health of her young children in the Irish home during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century

Elaine Murray – The chrysalis in the cradle: the curiosities of childhood care in relation to infant sleep practices in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Ireland

Sarah-Anne Buckley – ‘Found in a ‘dying’ condition’: nurse-children in Ireland, 1872-1952 

V. ‘I know she never intended to rear it’: infanticide

James Kelly – Responding to infanticide in eighteenth-century Ireland

Elaine Farrell – ‘A very immoral establishment’: the crime of infanticide and class status in Ireland, 1850-1900 

Anne O’Connor – Beyond cradle and grave: Irish folk belief and legend about unbaptised infants, and the return from the dead of their spirits and the spirits of women who are believed to have murdered children