Release Day: Threatening Women

The backstory and an excerpt from my new book Threatening Women: A Cultural History of Why Ireland Shamed and Contained Women

A few months ago (I can’t quite remember which month exactly) I sat down to re-read and re-write some key chapters of THE women of Ireland project book I am writing based on interviews with women, and felt a sudden immediacy. “People need to know the information contained in these chapters now, right now,” and that is how the book I am releasing today, Threatening Women: A cultural history of why Ireland shamed and contained women, came into existence. I pulled those chapters out of the main book and re-wrote them into their own stand-alone piece, and that felt really right.

Just as it feels really right to share with you, here and now, an excerpt of the opening section of Threatening Women.

An excerpt from Threatening Women

There is the Ireland before and the Ireland after Tuam.

In the summer of 2014, the discovery of a mass grave of babies and children on the grounds of the former Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, by local historian Catherine Corless, sent shockwaves around the world. The unimaginable horror of it—little ones who died of malnutrition, disease and illness, buried without care, ceremony or record; some in underground chambers later identified as a structure which may have been “related to the treatment/containment of sewage and/or wastewater,” and all done under the watch of the Bon Secours Sisters appointed to care for them—produced outcry and outrage. It was a rage which demanded something be done…..

…..Tuam gave shape to what had long been forced and shamed into silence. It stood as a physical testament to Ireland’s dark and hidden history, a solid spectre which, now uncovered and unhidden, refused denial or dismissal.

In the wake of it, in the time after Tuam, Ireland has entered a period of reckoning. Alongside the horror, disbelief, outrage and anger, a questioning and an active appraisal of the past has emerged.

Why, people ask, did Ireland do this? Why did this happen? Why did an estimated 192,256 women and children pass through the gates of Irish Mother and Baby Homes and County Homes between 1922 and 1998? Why were they considered so deviant as to be incarcerated in a panoply of institutions, including Mother and Baby Homes, County Homes, Magdalene Laundries, and Industrial Schools, abused and ill-treated, stigmatised and shamed? Why did Ireland contain more women in Mother and Baby Homes in the twentieth century, and for longer, than any other country in the world?

The most common answer is Ireland’s intense religiosity in the twentieth century. That this horror resulted from strict moral codes, the strong influence of the Catholic Church on society, and the extent to which Christian conservativism informed state policy. It’s an explanation with weight, one that makes sense, grounded as it is in first-hand knowledge and lived experience of what Ireland was like during the period in question. But it is an answer that has always left me wanting (more).

Rather than the singular causal explanation for why hundreds of babies and children were deposited in a mass grave on the grounds of a Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Ireland’s strict twentieth century Catholicism is an outcome of something much deeper; a symptom (albeit a symptom that caused further harm) of Ireland’s underlying cultural strata. And if we are ever going to make sense of the ‘society of shame’ we continue to live in the wake of, we must exhume the deepest parts of that cultural bedrock.

The following work, what I present to you here, is not about Mother and Baby Homes, or Magdalene Laundries or any of the other abusive institutions which make up what historian James Smith has called Ireland’s “Architecture of Containment.” Rather, it’s about culture. It’s about the primal, deep-down, underlying cultural layer of Ireland, which has shaped so much, if not everything, about Irish society. It's about the critical, causal relationship between a country’s historical experience of collective threat and cultural tightness—a culture distinguished by strict social norms and the stringent enforcement of those norms by ‘policing’ the behaviours of others and punishing those found to deviate from them—and why that matters for women. Above all, it’s the story of why women, in such a cultural context—and because of how routinely they were labelled a threat (to society, civility, moral and social order)—were intensely monitored, disciplined and punished across the ages in Ireland. And it’s one answer, the best I’ve got, as to why Ireland so inexorably punished those deemed to have transgressed and disobeyed social, moral and sexual mores in the twentieth century….

Table of Contents of Threatening Women

How to Get a Copy:

1. KINDLE E-BOOK WORLDWIDE

   Search “Threatening Women” on your usual Amazon Site.

2. PAPERBACK

   EU, USA, Canada, Australia (and worldwide) Search “Threatening Women” on your usual Amazon Site

   REPUBLIC OF IRELAND:

   Via Amazon - Search “Threatening Women” on one of the Amazon EU sites such as amazon.de (Because of Brexit, amazon.co.uk will not ship paperbacks to the Republic)

   Via buythebook.ie - For those of you that don’t wish to use Amazon and if you don’t mind a bit of a wait (and the bonus option of a signed copy!) buythebook.ie is how you can buy from me directly!

3. Local Bookshops

   Your local bookshop or bookseller should also be able to order it in for you via their usual distributors. (ISBN 978-1-0369-0641-2)

   I am also working towards getting it into local libraries in Ireland (I’ll update as I go)

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P.S. I am really passionate about the knowledge and the history contained in this wee book and I would love for as many people as possible to read it, not because I have written it, but so they have the knowledge it contains. If you are able to purchase a copy for yourself and/or others, and support me in my researching and writing, I would be beyond grateful but if that is not available to you and you would like to read it, please message me.

P.P.S. If you know of a particular person(s) in your life who would also love to read it, please do share this post with them (I am pretty much a one-woman-show and marketing is not my strong point, so I really rely on word-of-mouth and good-will and am immensely grateful for every share).

Grá mór agus go raibh míle míle maith agaibh,

Belinda xx