‘It is the young unmarried mother who goes into a Mother and Baby Home’: child mothers and institutional cultures of containment

Mother and Baby Homes contained mothers who had deviated from the nuclear family paradigm. Typically managed by faith-based welfare organisations or local authorities, they often housed young and unmarried mothers. Even by 1966, 46.2 percent of all Home residents in England and Wales were under 20-years-old. Pregnant schoolgirls represented a minority within a minority of mothers in these Homes. This paper argues that post-war Mother and Baby Homes systemically addressed young unmarried motherhood through age- coded institutional practices. These practices enforced moralising and pathologizing narratives. Using Home records, government reports and oral testimonies, the paper elucidates how local authorities and welfare organisations constructed the ‘troubled’ young
mother as a distinct category requiring specialised surveillance. Some Homes contained child mothers as young as twelve, but organisational discourse remained largely centred on managing perceived pre-existing psychological problems in the child mother rather than identifying potential abusers. The post war child mother was no longer imagined as the ‘useful future citizen’ (as explored by Laura King), nor could she swiftly marry and legitimise her baby. Welfare organisations and local authorities found this conceptual positionality difficult to reconcile, and began to open Homes specifically for pregnant schoolgirls in the 1960s. Age functioned as a significant determinant of placement and movement between welfare institutions. Building on the work of previous scholars, including Ofra Koffman, Caroline Rusterholz and Hannah Charnock on youth sexuality, as well as Michael Lambert, Adrian Bingham, Lucy Delap, Louise Jackson and Louise Settle's analyses of institutional responses to child abuse, the paper illuminates how welfare systems perpetuated victim-blaming narratives and deprioritised the problem of sexual violence. Mother and Baby


Homes operated as part of a broader interconnected organisational network with child welfare institutions. The same institutions protecting children perpetuated their silencing through administrative categorisation and forced movement between institutions.

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