The lottery system didn’t last long. Criticized for relegating life-or-death decisions to a game of chance, it was followed by a second system termed the “General Reception.” A woman could drop off a child with no questions asked, or simply leave her infant in a basket hung on the hospital gate, ringing a bell to alert the porter before disappearing into the night. The General Reception had disastrous results. There was massive influx of children, 117 on the first day alone, and the numbers only increased. Soon the hospital was overwhelmed. Nearly 15,000 children were admitted during the four-year-long General Reception period; more than 10,000 of them died.
After much trial and error, the Foundling Hospital created a set of admission procedures that were honed for efficiency and left little to chance. Adopted in the 1800s and implemented well into the following century, the Foundling Hospital’s “Rules for the Admission of Children” included precautions ensuring that children of legitimate birth would not be inadvertently accepted: “The children of Married Women and Widows cannot be received into the Hospital.”2 Couples too poor to care for their children or women who had been widowed or abandoned by their husbands would have to look elsewhere for assistance. Unlike those born out of wedlock, their children had a chance in life—a chance to receive an education, take on a trade, and become productive members of society.
But even the women who met the basic criteria set forth in these rules would not find immediate relief. The admission process was lengthy. It could last weeks, even months, not for any reason related to the child but because it took time to determine whether the mother was worthy of the generosity of the Foundling Hospital.
For Lena Weston, my grandmother, the process lasted eight weeks.
IN 1931 LENA was unmarried, in her thirties, pregnant, and alone.
As a young woman living in the interwar period following World War I, one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, she was part of a lost generation of women consigned to a solitary existence. The war had claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers, leaving behind a grim cohort whose chance to marry would never come. Their husbands-to-be lost to the battlefield, unmarried women frequently wound up living with relatives. If the relatives were male, most typically brothers, the women would serve as housekeepers while their brothers ran the farms or worked outside the home. Entirely dependent upon their living male relatives for support, they developed few skills other than tending house. Those women who lived with their female relatives fared a bit better, such arrangements generally being more egalitarian, with the housework shared and no objections raised to the pursuit of a vocation outside of the home. In either case, however, the women were unlikely to end up with a proposal of marriage.
Lena’s parents were deceased, and her sister, Lily, had immigrated to the United States, where she was living in the renowned Waldorf Astoria while working for the jazz composer Cole Porter. Perhaps following in Lily’s footsteps would have been feasible at some point, but by the time Lena entered her thirties, her only option was to join her brother on a farm in the county of Shropshire, a largely unpeopled land near the Welsh border, with a smattering of farms and the occasional castle. It was a landscape of vast meadows carpeted with dark purple wildflowers, of rolling hills whose wild escarpments were thick with untamed roses and rhododendrons. Most of the local inhabitants were farmers or laborers at a nearby ironworks, although there were a surprising number of landed families with knightly aristocratic roots. There were no cities to speak of, only quiet villages and hamlets. The closest escape from the Weston farm was the market town of Wellington, whose quaint shops lined a narrow lane bordered by brick-terraced houses and an old stone church.
With only the steady rhythm of daily chores and Sunday sermons to fill the solitude of her days, Lena’s chances at finding intimacy, tenderness, and love would have been few to nonexistent. Unlike single men, who were simply “sowing wild oats” when they engaged in sex outside marriage, a woman who dared to seek companionship in the arms of a lover would be labeled promiscuous and shunned from proper society. Then there were the practical considerations—limited access to birth control, at least for women like Lena, and no legal path to abortion. The first birth control clinic in England was established in 1921 by the British women’s rights advocate Marie Stopes. Stopes was a prominent eugenicist, and her repugnant views on race left an irredeemable mark on her legacy. But her advocacy for reproductive rights was considered revolutionary, and she openly defied the church’s disapproval of birth control. Lena would not benefit from these advances, however; the clinic’s contraceptive services were available to married women only.
Lena could have resigned herself to her fate: a life of solitude, endless days on a farm tucked away in the countryside, with only her brother to keep her company.
But that is not what happened.
The files that I brought home from London chronicled the sequence of events that had brought Lena to the Foundling Hospital’s doorstep. Where there were gaps, it was easy enough to imagine the subtext that went unspoken as Lena recounted her circumstances to the strangers who would determine the fate of her child. It was February 1931, and after selling eggs at the market, Lena had settled herself in for her customary cup of tea at a café near the center of Wellington. It was there that she met him. Perhaps she noticed him smiling at her from across the room, or tipping the brim of his hat to her. With only her brother to keep her company, Lena may have been unusually susceptible to the charms of a man. Or maybe that’s a bit of conjecture on my end. Maybe she knew full well what she was doing. Maybe it had happened before.
Either way, that day in February would change the course of Lena’s life, and the lives of generations to come.
The affair was brief, and the repercussions swift. After a bitter quarrel, Lena’s brother kicked her out, forcing her to make her way to London in search of institutional support. Single and with a child on the way, Lena had few options. A woman in her circumstances could petition for child support, but she would have to establish the father’s identity through legal proceedings. The process would take place in open court, exposing her to shame and ridicule. Society was not kind to women like Lena, considering them “fallen” and deserving of punishment, a view held even by those who advocated for women’s rights. Marie Stopes, who had campaigned for a married woman’s right to access birth control, herself condemned illegitimacy, asserting that the illegitimate child is “inherently inferior to the legitimate, through the fact that his mother has failed to maintain her self-respect and the respect of the father.”3 Maude Royden, a well-known feminist and Christian preacher, argued against providing benefits to unmarried women, which might encourage single parenting and promiscuity. Even John Bowlby, a pioneer in child psychology whose theories exalted the role of the mother in child-rearing, considered an unmarried mother to be “emotionally disturbed,” and her “socially unacceptable illegitimate baby” to be a “symptom of her neurosis.”4
These deep-seated prejudices were memorialized in the laws of the time. The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 went so far as to categorize unmarried mothers “in receipt of poor relief” as defective, grouping them in with “idiots,” “imbeciles,” and the “feeble-minded,” thus empowering government officials to institutionalize them and separate them from their children. So-called bastardy bills, designed to improve conditions for illegitimate children or allow for a path to legitimization, were frequently introduced in the House of Lords but consistently rejected. The Legitimacy Act finally passed in 1926 allowing unmarried parents to marry and retroactively claim their child as legitimate, but it did not apply to children who were the result of adultery. Similarly, post-1906 liberal welfare reforms ushered in a wave of progressive policies that provided a range of support services for seemingly everyone else—factory workers, the unemployed, children, the elderly and the infirm—but denied unmarried mothers maternity and unemployment benefits.