I'm changing the discourse of the 60's

I live in an area of Leeds where one of the mother and baby homes which facilitated this is located. Everyone in the area seemed to know this happened but no one was talking about it. The idea that being an unmarried mother in the 1960s was so stigmatised was surprising to me as the popular discourse of this decade was fun and free love.

I did some research and found that academic books and journals focussed mainly on the idea of having a shotgun wedding or an illegal abortion if a woman became pregnant outside of wedlock in the sixties. There seemed to be little information on the mother and baby homes and the pressure put on these women to have their babies adopted.

I wanted to uncover their history and tell their stories.

I interviewed women across Leeds which included women who were unmarried and were in a mother and baby home and had their baby adopted, and women who were in the homes but kept their baby, usually because of marrying the father and workers from the homes.

I uncovered some of the most heartbreaking stories and a shame that seemed to persist into 2022. 

To create a new collective memory of the sixties that included the horrors of forced adoptions I wanted my major project to be an accessible form of public history. I decided to create an audio documentary so the topic would reach a wider audience that wouldn't necessarily read an academic book.

During a careers fair at Leeds Beckett University, I met with the publisher of the Yorkshire Times. I explained my project and asked if I could write an article for the newspaper about it. The article was well received and became the headline news of the paper for two days.

My hope for this project is that it will change the discourse on the sixties and allow a platform for these histories to be finally told.