Journal of Social History

Delay,, Cara;Liger,, Annika

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shz065pmid: N/A

Abstract This article investigates how the criminal courts and popular press depicted abortionists across key decades of political, economic, and cultural transformations in postindependence Ireland (1922–1950). It demonstrates how and why the legal system and the media highlighted those abortion-related crimes in which bad mothers, ambitious parvenus, and ethnic “others” subverted society, religion, motherhood, and, in Ireland’s case, national values. At stake in depictions of abortionists was not only morality and criminality but also Irishness itself. Courts and newspapers presented abortion defendants as “others” in terms of gender, sexuality, class, race, and religion. Doing so branded abortionists as dangerous outsiders in, and even traitors to, a fragile Irish nation still working to define itself. Mary Anne “Mamie” Cadden completed her midwifery training at the Holles Street National Maternity Hospital in Dublin in 1925. By the 1940s, she had faced several prosecutions for infant abandonment and illegal abortion, and, in 1956, the Irish courts sentenced Cadden to death after one of her abortion clients died in her care. Cadden would be the face of “backstreet” abortion for decades to come, earning her a place as one of Ireland’s most notorious female criminals.1 Mamie Cadden—a middle-aged, irreverent, independent, and well-off woman—represents the stereotypical abortionist in Irish history and popular culture. In reality, however, Irish “backstreet” abortionists in the twentieth century came from diverse backgrounds and were not exclusively female; men, too, some of whom were immigrants, faced prosecutions. The trials of both male and female abortionists reveal a complex intertwining of contemporary concerns, including not only gender but also class, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and religion. These categories and the discourse about them in abortion criminal cases proved integral to the process of postcolonial nation-building in Ireland. Focusing on postindependence Ireland (1922–1950), this article investigates how the criminal courts and popular press depicted abortionists across key decades of political, economic, and cultural transformations.2 It demonstrates that, beyond the seriousness of the crime of which they were accused, abortionists came under fire for other reasons. Particularly important to courts when assessing culpability and responsibility were a defendant’s gender, class, and ethnicity. Similarly, newspapers underscored accused abortionists’ character and characteristics, highlighting those cases in which bad mothers, ambitious parvenus, and ethnic “others” allegedly used abortion to subvert society, religion, motherhood, and in Ireland’s case, national values. As Ruth Fletcher argues, nationalism is “a process that works through gendered and racialized practices,” while the value of reproduction often is “constituted through the interaction of gender and ethnicity.”3 Criminal abortion trials demonstrate that these intersecting concerns lay at the heart of early twentieth-century Irish society. Women defendants faced scrutiny about their sexual experiences, motherhood, and commitment to national gender norms. Men who were accused, however, confronted different prejudices; here, class and ethnicity mattered most. Courts and newspapers constructed abortion defendants as “others” in terms of gender, sexuality, class, race, and religion. Doing so branded abortionists as dangerous outsiders in, and even traitors to, a fragile Irish nation. These early twentieth-century fears of difference and national betrayal in Ireland reflected broader transnational attitudes in an age when trepidations over “racial decline” and concern about falling fertility rates pervaded Europe and the United States.4 The notion of otherness, however, was particularly meaningful in postcolonial and postindependence Ireland. In the aftermath of years of rebellion and civil war, an independent Irish state set itself on a path of identity construction, centered around enshrining a centuries-old and thus more nationally authentic Catholic worldview in law and society. “From its early days,” according to Chrystel Hug, “the government of the Irish Free State showed a willingness to use the powers of the state to protect Catholic moral values.”5 Anxieties about women who rejected motherhood became particularly acute in an age of religious renewal and national regeneration. Similarly, as Diarmaid Ferriter writes, a “notion of foreign contamination” strongly resonated in the decades after most of the island gained independence yet struggled to assert a separate social and cultural identity amidst continued emigration and persistent economic ties with Britain, the United States, and Europe.6 Ireland, then, while shaped by developments beyond the island, faced anxieties that gave abortion particular national meaning. Within this context, women abortionists betrayed the nation through their disruptive sexuality and rejection of Catholic motherhood, while men did so through their social climbing and their national, racial, and religious affiliations. I. Sources and Methodology We do not have reliable statistics about the numbers of Irish women who attempted backstreet abortions. Abortion in early to mid-twentieth-century Ireland, and indeed elsewhere, almost always went unnoticed except when the woman seeking abortion died or became gravely ill or in cases featuring accused abortionists who exposed the actions of their colleagues.7 Criminal court cases, then, provide evidence only of a tiny percentage of those pregnancy terminations that likely took place. While we can assume that the abortion rate may have been relatively high—and this is supported by the fact that several women who ended up in court accused of procuring an abortion admitted to several previous abortions before they actually were caught8—we have no way to gain access to almost all of the women who sought to end pregnancies.9 Additionally, some women died after abortions; their stories, of course, are forever lost. Because, in part, of the difficulty accessing sources, the historiography of reproduction, fertility control, and abortion in Ireland is still relatively scarce. Articles by Leanne McCormick, Sandra McAvoy, Cliona Rattigan, and Cara Delay have shed light on the ubiquity of abortion in Ireland, north and south, in the twentieth century.10 McCormick’s analysis examines experiences of abortion in Belfast, describing the women’s neighborhoods and networks that lay at the center of the practice and affirming that few people viewed abortion as a moral wrong.11 Although it covers a similar time period as our analysis, McAvoy’s research focuses on the circumstances of those women seeking abortion, the details of abortion attempts, and the abortion methods employed. Rattigan, meanwhile, exposes the experiences of unmarried women only. Delay’s recent articles analyze the material culture of abortion primarily in the Free State and Republic, positing that abortion demonstrates how everyday women’s health cultures persisted in the twentieth century.12 Explorations of those accused of being abortionists, as opposed to those seeking abortion, remain rare. According to Emma L. Jones, working on Britain, “the abortionist is a shadowy figure” in history.13 This is even more true in Ireland, where abortion remained a criminal offense until 201914 and where the history of abortion has been overlooked until recently.15 In this article, we focus on the figure of the abortionist in Irish courts and newspapers from the late 1920s to 1950, assessing how gender, class, and ethnicity affected perceptions of the accused and analyzing how and why abortionists were depicted as “others” or outsiders who posed a threat to the new nation. We examine both newspapers and court records to ascertain how Irish people socially constructed and circulated the image of the abortionist as a dangerous “other.” Newspapers in twentieth-century Ireland were a powerful source for the dissemination of information. Ireland’s high literacy rates meant that most people could read them, and, as Louise Ryan summarizes, “newspapers . . . played a key role in supporting, defining, and explaining the newly created Irish Free State to their readers.”16 In fact, Ryan asserts, “the press was probably the second most significant influence on public opinion after the Catholic Church.”17 Interrogating the media-constructed image of Irish abortionists gives us access to the attitudes and representations that Irish people confronted at the time. Moreover, court cases and judges’ rulings, which were reported in local and national newspapers, both reflected and informed the national discourse surrounding abortion, further highlighting the ways in which Irish society perceived abortionists and the reasons why their activities were construed as not only criminal but also traitorous. For this essay, we examined fifteen criminal court cases in the Irish Free State, Éire, and the Republic from the years 1928 to 1950.18 Seven of the cases originated in Dublin. There were also three examples from County Laois, as well as one case each from counties Tipperary, Cork, Donegal, Galway, and Monaghan.19 In the majority of the cases, the court charged the defendant[s] with intent to procure a miscarriage or abortion. Other charges included conspiracy to procure an abortion, murder, or manslaughter. Irish courts preserved a variety of evidence in abortion trials, including flyers, maps, letters, and photographs. The most common materials in case files are depositions, either handwritten or typed. These feature statements from the woman or women who sought abortions, the defendant[s], and others connected to the case, such as police, state medical professionals, family members, and witnesses or neighbors. Some trial records also include direct questioning of the defendant[s] and alleged recipient of the abortion. Other files contain written statements from the accused abortionists. A statement from the presiding judge or the judge’s verdict concludes most of the case files. However, some of the convicted later appealed, and those appeals often are appended at the end of the original trial files. In our sample, the courts charged seven women and fourteen men with offenses related to criminal abortions from 1922 to 1950.20 The women defendants tended to be older. The youngest was thirty-eight-year-old Ellen Anthony, and the oldest was Mary Roseburg at age sixty-three.21 The men, in comparison, ranged in age from twenty-eight to fifty-two. All of the women defendants, except for two who allegedly performed abortions on themselves, were either married or widowed. While eight of the male accused were married, only one case involved a husband seeking an abortion for his wife. Five men were married, but were charged with helping their lovers, not their wives, procure abortions. Two married men were medical professionals. The remaining seven men were either unmarried men assisting their lovers or men of unknown marital status. The race and/or ethnicity of the accused abortionists became a factor in only certain trials; when it did, the defendants were men. Several cases in the 1930s and 40s featured male defendants described as ethnically other—Jewish, Indian, or Nigerian. No ethnicities were mentioned in cases against women. The religion of the abortionists was scarcely mentioned in the trials except when it related to the prosecutions of non-Irish Catholic individuals, notably Jewish defendants. II. Class and Gender Writing of mid twentieth-century Britain, Emma Jones and Neil Pemberton maintain that, because abortion was assumed to be a “female crime,” courts frequently overlooked male abortionists. Throughout certain decades in Ireland, however, “professional” abortionists prosecuted by the state tended to be male.22 Their depiction in both court files and newspaper articles differed from those of women abortionists; women, as we discuss later, often appeared as sexual deviants or perverters of family ideals. Men charged with abortion-related crimes, however, more commonly were characterized as quacks or social parvenus who sought to make money from their nefarious work. Beyond the moral grievance that abortion presented in postindependence Ireland, it also exposed financial networks involving untrained or quasi-trained criminals, who profited off of desperate women in unfortunate circumstances. Indeed, incidents involving abortionists-for-profit who posed as professionals were the cases that the police and court authorities proved most invested in prosecuting.23 In 1929, the police set a trap for Rasfara Mahara, fortune-teller, “Indian Phrenologist,” and “Medical Specialist,” who advertised in the Dublin Evening Mail: Advises on Business, Matrimony, Health, Medical advice free; moderate charges for treatment if any. Rheumatism, Bronchitis, Neuritis, Nerves, Asthma, Catarrh, Eyes, Throat, Stomach complaints, Skin Diseases, etc. Cured—79 Pearse Street.24 Despite his claims that his fees were “moderate,” Mahara demanded a deposit for abortion services up front and ensured that his clients understood their financial commitments. His communications with his clients underscored the bottom line. He allegedly told one woman: “it will cost you £3.3. You must pay a deposit as I cannot waste my drugs. £1 will do.”25 During the 1949 prosecution of Italian immigrant Sabatino Capaldi in Dublin, the Garda reported: Capaldi employs large staffs at the premises mentioned. As far as can be ascertained he bears a sound financial reputation. His Bankers are the Provincial Bank of Ireland Ltd., College Street, Dublin, where he is believed to have a substantial account. He is, however, an inveterate gambler and is known to have waged as much as £700 on a horse. He is also a heavy drinker. He is reputed to be a shrewd business man.26 In this example, the police and courts used Capaldi’s business acumen and wealth to underscore his questionable morality and his desire to profit from abortion. Descriptions of abortionists’ financial transactions reveal a suspicion of urban social climbers who seemingly rejected national ideals at the time. Building on the construction of a mythical Gaelic Ireland during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalist movement, the Ireland celebrated and promoted in the postindependence era was a rural nation of humble farmers. Cities, in contrast, appeared as “disorderly, uncontrollably complex and chaotic,” as inherently English and therefore un-Irish, and as spaces of crime and sexual vice.27 Mervyn Horgan explains Ireland’s “anti-urban” worldview, positing that “this form of anti-urbanism was primarily an anti-colonial strategy and so was reinforced in the lead up to Independence and its aftermath.”28 Within this culture, urban professionals who mimicked an English model of capitalist self-promotion and profit, who seemingly rejected the rural and communal ideal, were demonized in court. Capaldi’s status as an immigrant and reportedly a drunkard, combined with his fondness for social-climbing, heightened his “otherness.” Women, too, confronted criticism as a result of profiting from abortion services. In the 1948 case against Kathleen Gilbourne, most of the client depositions ended with a mention of payment or fees. One woman concluded her statement by saying “I was to pay Miss Gilbourne two pounds . . . I paid about twenty four shillings in all.”29 In one of the trials featuring Dublin’s Mary Moloney, who was accused in several cases in the 1940s, the exchange of money was a prominent topic in court, with particular emphasis from the judge on what Moloney and her male partner, Christopher Williams, charged—in most cases, fifteen pounds.30 MD, one of the women Moloney operated on, told the court that Moloney said “it would cost £4-0-0 and [Moloney] wanted to know why I could not pay her altogether.”31 The average weekly earnings for an industrial worker in the 1940s were between two and four pounds, with wages generally lower for women than men. Thus, Moloney and Williams allegedly charged between 100% and 750% of the average weekly wage.32 Most of the women involved in seeking abortions came from lower class backgrounds and likely earned less per week, increasing the relative expense of assisted abortions and suggesting that such procedures were off-limits to the very poor. While Jones and Pemberton, working on mid-century Britain, argue that the male abortionist was viewed with more suspicion and less sympathy than the “naturally sympathetic and mothering” middle-aged women abortionists illustrated in popular culture,33 the Irish situation was different. In postindependence Ireland, where women’s bodies and behavior were linked closely to national values, accused women abortionists faced a distinct courtroom scrutiny based not only on their financial gain but also on their appearance, sexual experiences, and mothering abilities. Newspapers and court transcripts described women defendants’ looks, focusing on vanity and the overt display of feminine bodies. Ireland’s most famous abortionist, Mamie Cadden, for example, who featured in dozens of newspaper articles from the 1930s through the 1950s, was scrutinized for what she wore and how she comported herself. During one of Cadden’s trials in 1938, the Leinster Leader noted that “Miss Cadden wore a fur coat and a close-fitting hat, and her cousin . . . was in a fawn coat with a brown hat.”34 Similarly, Mary Moloney’s appearance in court in 1945 in “a red coat” was noteworthy.35 Courts actively presented these female abortionists as disturbingly middle-class and feminine, as women who rejected the ideal of the modest rural Irishwoman and instead wore their wealth and femininity in an obvious way. The suspicion of women’s modern fashions was deeply rooted in Irish culture. Since the late nineteenth century, prescriptive literature had denounced what the Nun of Kenmare, Margaret Cusack, called women’s concern with the “fashionable life” and the tendency for Irish Catholic girls to be “frivolous.”36 This was an age in which state and church leaders defined modernity, self-centered consumerism, and women’s changing roles as English, Protestant, and dangerous. New, modern fashions were also associated with foreignness and thus were anathema to native Irish womanhood. Particularly in postindependence Ireland, the fashionable clothing and dress styles that women return emigrants brought back to Ireland after spending time in the cities of the UK or the United States were seen not only as symbols of women’s disturbing independence but also as “materialism and apostasy.”37 In order to be sufficiently Irish, women had to reject modern foreign fashions and middle-class urban consumerism in favor of traditional modest clothing that covered the body and avoided flashy colors. The “real” Irish woman knew her place and embraced her “traditional” role, including traditional dress. Contemporary culture thus reinforced the regulation of the female body, affirming that women’s bodies—the way that they were displayed and contained and the way that women managed them—were integral to a modern Irish Catholic respectability.38 As Maria Luddy has shown, a public obsession with sexual immorality in the 1920s and 30s, placing modern fashions alongside venereal disease, prostitution, unmarried mothers, and the dangers of dance halls, articulated that “the real threat to chastity and sexual morality resided in the bodies of women.”39 How women used or moved their bodies mattered as well. The fascination with Mamie Cadden’s red sports car,40 for example, mentioned in newspaper accounts of her 1938 trial, signified concerns not only with her wealth, consumerism, or social climbing but also with her mobility in an age that defined the ideal woman as contained in the domestic sphere. The middle-aged, never-married Cadden, with her glamor and her ostentatious car, overtly challenged gender ideals by rejecting sedentary domesticity. When women abortionists engaged in such unwomanly behaviors, these offenses featured in court or in the media. As Clara Fischer argues, “nonadherence to national (read: Catholic) moral norms, women’s sexuality and social behavior were subjected to intense scrutiny, as visible transgressions of purity,” in the early twentieth century.41 Of course, Ireland was not the only place where newspaper reports on court trials engaged in a dialogue about deviant womanhood, particularly in the aftermath of the Great War. As Lucy Bland has demonstrated, newspapers in interwar Britain demonstrated a fascination with “sensational” cases involving sexually transgressive women.42 Indeed, coverage of criminal cases in the post-WWI British and American press commonly played up fears over the “modern” woman who eschewed traditional values.43 In the Irish national context, purity, and specifically sexual purity, became a central focus in criminal prosecutions of female abortionists. Here, significantly, it was not only the woman with an unwanted pregnancy who faced accusations of illicit sexual activities. The 1945 prosecution of Mary Moloney, for example, underscored her sexual history. Moloney, who was living out of wedlock with chemist and codefendant Christopher Williams at the time of her arrest, reportedly had “become acquainted with” two men, one married to someone else, since the death of her late husband.44 In Moloney’s trial, the judge outwardly referred to her as a “mistress to at least two men.”45 Irish society demonized women’s sexuality, especially extramarital relationships; the judge’s statement regarding Moloney’s relationships, then, testified to her depravity, helping explain to observers how she could commit such horrible offenses.46 Moloney’s abortion-related crimes were damaging, but her reported sexual deviance may have helped to convict her in the court of public opinion. These condemnations of female abortionists are especially noteworthy when contrasted to the more compassionate views that the courts expressed concerning the women who actually sought out abortions. Working on a series of abortion cases in twentieth-century Belfast, McCormick demonstrates that court officials, as well as neighbors, viewed women seeking abortion with some sympathy and treated them compassionately.47 When a defendant in an abortion case in our sample was both the woman seeking abortion and the one to attempt to carry out the procedure, similar attitudes prevailed. The accused in a 1935 Monaghan case, for example, was a young unmarried servant who tried to “procure her own miscarriage” by consuming “noxious things.” Witnesses in this case told the court that the young woman, MT, was distraught over her condition. “She appeared to be crying,” said one neighbor, who then remarked: “She told me she had been talking to the priest and that a boy named T [her lover] had also been talking to the priest. She said that she was in a bad way and that she might end herself.”48 MT fit the stereotypical profile of a sympathetic abortion seeker—she was young, unmarried, working away from home in service, apparently abandoned by her lover (possibly even seduced or coerced), and deeply remorseful about her actions, even pursuing the advice of her priest. Significantly, MT also did not seek to profit financially from her abortion attempt. Another key factor in MT’s more sympathetic reception lies in her remorse. In a different case, the judge told the jury “there is always this redeeming feature that one sees in case of this kind of girls who have fallen by the way . . . they make an attempt to undo the result of their misconduct and point out to others who may be tempted to do likewise the evil of their own ways.”49 Here, contrite women who received abortions warned others against a similar course of action and, thus, actually may have helped preserve morality in Irish society. In contrast, few alleged abortionists in our cases, men or women, expressed regret.50 III. Motherhood, Irishness, and Abortion During criminal abortion trials, the Irish court system used the notion of the “good” mother and its connection to nationhood to demonize women abortionists. In 1943, when a Dublin court convicted Mary Moloney of performing an abortion, a key factor in the case against her was her supposedly dismal maternal skills. Moloney was a mother of four, but only two of her children still lived with her. One son resided with family members, another had been “committed to Artane Industrial School,” and Moloney’s two daughters had been taken away at the time of her arrest and placed into the care of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC).51 Like many nations in the twentieth century, Ireland enforced an idealized notion of “proper” motherhood by policing women’s behavior and criminalizing birth control and abortion.52 Several historians have explored the ways the Irish state and Catholic Church combined to manage women’s sexuality and control the female body in the early twentieth century. Maryann Valiulis demonstrates that the postindependence Irish government enacted restrictions against women in order to “asser[t] its power” in an age in which it was unable “to control much of what was happening around it.”53 Lindsey Earner-Byrne similarly writes that when the Irish state formed and linked with the Catholic Church, it heightened efforts to regulate the family and police women’s sexuality.54 Thus, any perceived attack on the family unit was also an assault on the church and on Ireland itself. This connection between women and the Irish state explains why maternal bodies held particular meaning in modern Ireland, but earlier developments mattered as well. In particular, an idealized notion of motherhood emerged in the aftermath of Ireland’s Great Famine (1845–52). The modern Irish mother was to be pure but fecund, martyr-like yet domineering. The Irish Church hierarchy viewed the Blessed Virgin Mary in particular as a model for women. From the 1850s on, bishops and priests glorified the Virgin to encourage women to embody proper roles as wives and particularly as sacrificial mothers. Clerics asserted that women who looked to Mary as a model were the only Irish women who could achieve true grace and purity. Catherine Innes has described the veneration of the Virgin in connection with nationalist causes, writing: “By the late nineteenth century, two female images had become potent social, political, and moral forces in Catholic Ireland—the images of Mother Ireland or Erin, and the Mother of God, often linked through iconography to Mother Church.”55 Mary presented a model of Irish womanhood markedly different from the modern, independent English woman. And she symbolized sacrificial, selfless motherhood, which the emerging Irish nation promoted as women’s singularly valuable role. In their denunciations of women abortionists, Irish criminal courts did not hesitate to target women based on their adherence, or lack thereof, to the church-informed ideal of Irish motherhood. Descriptions of the children of women abortionists underscored their supposedly inadequate mothering skills and, in some cases, overt rejection of Irish motherhood. While Mary Moloney had children, her young sons did not live with her, and her daughters were in state custody. Most damning against Moloney in terms of motherhood, however, was the alleged inclusion of her child in the abortion practice. KO, one of Moloney’s alleged abortion clients, stated in court that when she arrived at Moloney’s residence, “a girl opened the door for us. She would be aged about 12 . . . the girl was asked by Mrs. Moloney to bring some hot water . . . the child brought the water to the room.”56 This was Moloney’s daughter, and her presence at the crime scene was particularly troubling. Inspector Martin O’Neill declared that the fact that Moloney “was being assisted by her little girl” compounded “the seriousness of her crimes.”57 Moloney’s daughter came up again during sentencing when the judge in the case told Moloney: “you had the appalling depravity to ask your young daughter to assist you in these operations.”58 These admonitions testify that Moloney’s poor mothering was a critical factor in perceptions of her character and, thus, in attitudes toward her crime. Not only was she helping other women eschew motherhood through immoral and illegal acts, but she also exposed her young daughter to such things. In contrast, the 1929 case of a male abortion provider, Rasfara Mahara, also featured a “young girl” present with Mahara when he entertained abortion clients. In his case, however, the child warranted only a brief mention in the court transcript and was ignored completely in newspaper summaries.59 Moloney was not the only woman subjected to the state’s scrutiny and judged for her maternal failings. In 1948, a witness in the case against Kathleen Gilbourne stated that when she went to Gilbourne’s house for her abortion, she encountered both of Gilbourne’s daughters.60 Furthermore, according to another witness, when Gilbourne advised her to take abortifacients to induce a miscarriage, she remarked that one of her daughters was returning from England soon and that she “would have some pills.”61 As it did in the case of Moloney, the court brought Gilbourne’s daughters into the conversation to highlight her maternal failings. The court painted her as a bad mother who lured her own daughter into illicit acts, endangering the daughter’s virtue and potentially polluting the future of Irish womanhood.62 Even when female abortionists who did not have children came before the court, the Irish court used notions of motherhood against them, identifying their lack of maternity as a character flaw. In a 1942 case, Mary Lonergan was convicted after the death of BC.63 Lonergan reportedly suggested to BC that she induce miscarriage by trying spirits of nitre and some salt, as Lonergan herself allegedly “often took spirits of nitre and salts and [she] had the abortion about five different times.”64 While Lonergan suggested the solution, she did not provide the actual fatal dose: BC’s husband actually procured and administered the substance. In the end, however, it was not the husband who earned censure and a prison sentence but Mary Lonergan. Lonergan actively rejected motherhood; her abortion-caused childlessness subverted Irish norms. In this case, the court employed Lonergan’s own multiple abortions as a way to call into question her womanhood and her character. Strikingly, some of the women accused of abortion offences from the 1920s to 1950 in Ireland were older, possibly menopausal or postmenopausal, and thus perhaps were viewed as no longer being able to represent the maternal ideal or contribute to the future of the nation. Moloney was forty-two, Cadden fifty-seven, Mary Roseburg sixty-three, and Kathleen Gilbourne old enough to have two grandchildren.65 Also, Gilbourne, a widow, claimed that she only began practicing abortions three years prior to her trial, implying that she initiated this practice during her older years.66 According to Mary Daly, during the 1930s, both the Irish state and the Catholic Church believed “that large families were . . . a key feature of Irish society . . . and that any decline in family size was a cause for concern.”67 As a result, aging women abortionists failed to achieve the Irish ideal on two fronts. As older women, they no longer could produce children for the nation, and, moreover, their work as abortionists was seen as destroying other women’s reproductive potential and thus the national future. Most of the women abortionists in these cases also rejected norms of domesticity. As Clara Fischer notes, notions of proper motherhood in postindependence Ireland intertwined with not only national identity but also space and place: containment, and particularly domesticity, marked Irish mothers as respectable. Women’s presence outside of the home was transgressive and betrayed the notion of domestic maternity.68 Maria Luddy argues that the ideal Irish woman was expected to be in the home, not out working.69 In our sample, however, Ellen Anthony was a midwife and Mary Roseburg a maternity nurse. Kathleen Gilbourne also noted that she was “a nurse for two years in Belfast.” For the court, these educated and working women represented an antithesis to the domestic wife and mother. Additionally, while these nurses and midwives often did paid work outside of the home, in most cases the women consulted on and practiced abortions within their homes. By practicing within the home, in fact, these women corrupted the domestic sphere that Irish society so idealized.70 IV. Education and Training The level of medical education that abortionists possessed was often a point of contention in the courts. In the cases studied here, all of the women accused of assisting in the abortions, except for the two women who practiced on themselves, were midwives, nurses, or “handywomen”—traditional childbirth attendants without official training who worked within informal health networks. The accused men, however, had less medical knowledge or training. One male defendant, Patrick O’Neill, pretended to be a physician but was not. Dublin’s William Coleman may have had copies of Saunder’s Medical Hand Atlas and a volume of Green’s Encyclopaedia of Medicine and Surgery in his office, but he was no doctor—he had been trained as an electrician.71 When the male defendants in the Irish examples possessed formal medical training, they were doctors whom women specifically sought out for help. For example, Hyman Levison, Rasfara Mahara, and John Sidupo were physicians or medical students. Both men and women abortionists had their medical knowledge questioned in early twentieth-century Irish courts, but the men who faced critique appear to have been under scrutiny as a result of their ethnicity or national affiliation, while the women faced prejudice because of their perceived lack of qualifications. Rasfara Mahara claimed to be a Harvard-educated doctor, and while the court questioned the veracity of this statement, its inquiry appears to have been largely racially biased.72 Mahara was Indian and advertised some medical practices that were seen as unorthodox in the Western view of medicine, such as phrenology, which likely undermined his credibility in the eyes of the court and linked his abortion activities with quackery and foreignness.73 The Irish courts made the medical education of women defendants a central area of inquiry. It is striking that in the Irish case, the accused women abortionists were more likely than men to have had some medical training. Indeed, here the Irish evidence departs from that of contemporary Britain. According to Jones, from 1900 to 1967, British women abortionists rarely had medical training, while male defendants did.74 The reason for Ireland’s uniqueness here may have to do with the persistence of alternative and often feminized medical traditions in the island. Like in England, beginning in the late 1700s, male physicians in Ireland began pushing women out of their traditional roles as healers or midwives.75 These efforts, however, were less successful in Ireland and particularly in rural areas, where local lay midwives, often called “handywomen,” continued to practice. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the professionalization of nursing and midwifery, culminating with the creation of the Central Midwifery Board in 1918, attempted to eliminate handywomen once and for all.76 Ciara Breathnach argues that this board was the Irish Free State’s attempt to centralize and modernize medicine in Ireland.77 Following this medicalization and professionalization, “handywomen” were increasingly portrayed as individuals who endangered the lives of both mothers and children.78 Almost uniformly by the early twentieth century, religious, government, and medical authorities denigrated handywomen.79 This disdain for handywomen within the Irish medical system made its way into depictions of women abortionists brought before courts. Irish nurses and midwives who practiced abortions were likened to handywomen or quacks. In 1942, Mary Lonergan, for example, fit stereotypes of the handywoman nearly perfectly, as she was “kn[own] to be well up on matters of pregnancy and childbirth,” but was not a trained medical professional.80 Lonergan was found guilty for administering poison to procure an abortion after she suggested a solution of nitre and salts to BC. In other cases, women abortionists with stated medical training were depicted as having stereotypical characteristics often assigned to “dangerous” handywomen. Mary Roseburg was listed as a maternity nurse, but the court noted that she “was disqualified about twelve years ago.”81 In the case against Mary Moloney, the court directly challenged her medical education, indicating that her practice was more similar to that of an untrained handywoman than a licensed nurse. Moloney stated that she was a “maternity nurse,” but prosecutors insisted that “she has been referred to in this case as nurse . . . she is not known to have any qualifications whatever.”82 The court also suggested that she must have learned any medical skills she possessed from her partner and co-defendant Williams, a man and a licensed chemist, proclaiming that that Williams “procured the instruments” for Moloney and that she “undoubtedly acquired her knowledge from him.”83 The comparison of women abortionists to handywomen underscored impressions that both were dangerous or even deadly. Abortionists who were handywomen, midwives, and maternity nurses were linked with criminality and death; most of the abortion cases that appeared in court were a result of the patient becoming ill or dying. The male-dominated courts equated abortion, a crime they saw to be of serious moral consequence, with a profession which, for the vast majority of history, was gendered female. Thus, the connection between abortion, handywomen, and midwives gendered abortion as a female crime committed on and by women. V. Race, Ethnicity, and Religion When the Dublin District Court met in 1931, on its agenda was a criminal case charging tailor Marks Rubenstein and doctor Hyman Levison with conspiring to abort the pregnancy of Rubenstein’s lover, BK.84 According to BK’s court deposition, Rubenstein became disturbed after hearing of her unexpected pregnancy; he then sought assistance from Levison, who in turn referred her to another doctor. The often-confusing testimonies of BK and other witnesses in the case exposed not only intricate “backstreet” abortion networks but also complex views of religion and ethnicity in 1930s Ireland. Rubenstein and Levison were both members of Dublin’s small Jewish community, and they knew each other through membership in the Grand Order of Israel. Their Jewishness appeared as noteworthy in the case, and Dr. Levison, a prominent member of the community, called six other local Jewish men, including a rabbi, to testify on his behalf. JC, listed as an “ex-member” of the Civic Guard, was a witness in the case. He said in his deposition that he and an acquaintance visited the tailoring shop of Marks Rubenstein, where Rubenstein told them of his “messy” situation with the pregnant BK. JC later visited BK himself, where, in JC’s words, they had the following conversation: I told her I came to point out first of all that Rubenstein was a married man and a Jew and asked her did she know that. She said “Yes” I asked her was she a R.C. [Roman Catholic] and she said she was. I asked her why she lowered herself to such an extent. She said that there was no “come-Back” now, that everybody had her under observation. She told me of the illegal operation and had mentioned the black doctor and also told me the medicine she had taken recently had come from his son in London, and that she said she had been everything in the world to him, and he now wanted to get rid of her; and she called him a “dirty Jewish louser” and sooner than have the operation she would take his life. I told him I had advised her either to see her clergy or to discontinue the association before I left.85 While BK's reference to a ‘black’ doctor is puzzling, the anti-Semitism in this testimony is evidence. And it coexisted with JC’s apparent horror that BK had “lowered” herself with not only a Jewish man but also one who was married. By referencing BK’s Catholicism, JC reminded her that she had violated religious and national norms through her sexual behaviors. Whether BK actually used the phrase “dirty Jewish louser” when talking to JC about Rubenstein is unclear—it is certainly possible that JC invented this for the courts—but this was an expression that likely had an effect in 1930s Ireland. Dermot Keogh and Cormac Ó Gráda have demonstrated that anti-Semitism in modern Ireland likely reached its peak earlier in the century, after a pogrom in Limerick in 1904 and during the Great War, when some of Ireland’s people mistakenly viewed their Jewish neighbors as German.86 Ireland’s small Jewish community was limited to urban areas such as Limerick and especially Dublin. Dublin’s Jewish residents worked as shopkeepers, merchants, and professionals;87 most lived near the South Circular Road, in an area known in the early twentieth century as “Little Jerusalem.”88 While some Jewish-Irish memoirists wrote of the “hospitable and tolerant land of Erin,”89 others experienced different realities. According to Dublin’s Chaim Herzog, who came of age in the first half of the twentieth century, I was always aware that somewhere in the background I was being judged by different standards. When a Jew was arrested for a crime, the entire Jewish community shuddered, because it was expected that all Jews would be thought guilty of the crime.90 The prejudices against Jewish male defendants because of their ethnicity and religion also intertwined with mistrust because of their status in the urban, middle-class world and their perceived wealth. According to Ó Gráda, Ireland’s Jews were known for their “propensity for entrepreneurship,” which, as we have discussed, could be antithetical to Irish national values.91 Marks Rubenstein, defendant in the case above, was a tailor, one of the most popular occupations for Jewish men in Dublin. Documents describing his 1931 prosecution alongside his friend Dr. Hyman Levison portray his relationship with BK, the woman with the unwanted pregnancy, as a classic yet sinister story of sexual coercion. According to BK, Rubenstein had promised to marry her and said that they would “go away together.”92 She claimed in court that she resisted the notion of an abortion but ultimately bowed to the influence of Rubenstein, who also paid for the procedure. This case also is one of only a few describing violence; BK told the court that Rubenstein “hit me on the nose and knocked me down” at one point.93 In addition to the Jewish Hyman and Levison, three male defendants from the 1920s to the late 1940s were African immigrants, one (Capaldi) was Scottish with Italian parentage, and one (Mahara) was Indian. In court, Mahara was described as having a range of foreign-sounding names: “Rasfara Mahara alias Rangi Rahnee alias Rupert Costello de Montmorency alias Rupert Ghansaka.”94 Interestingly, Mahara’s appearance and body, unlike those of other Irish male defendants, came under examination at court. An undercover policewoman who later arrested Mahara said that when she visited him for a scheduled pregnancy termination, he answered the door “clad in pyjamas and dressing gown.” When she asked to see the doctor, “He said come right in.”95 This description demonstrates a hint of sexual depravity and an interconnected fear of racial otherness: the court must have imagined Mahara, in his pajamas, waiting for the young Irish woman, hoping to profit from her misfortune but also, perhaps, to seduce her. The motif of the foreign seducer of innocent Irish womanhood was convincing in 1930s and 40s Ireland. Newspaper descriptions of a 1944 trial involving a British defendant, Dennis Booth, also reflected anxieties about foreignness. In this case, however, Booth’s Britishness was outweighed by the fact that his two alleged accomplices were Nigerian immigrants. The Nigerian men were medical students, and they were accused of giving an abortion to an Irish woman, who was Booth’s lover, in their own apartment. In court, the prosecution revealed that Booth was the main instigator of the abortion, giving his lover, KM, the money for it. KM attempted to gain access to the abortionists Moloney and Williams; when she proved unsuccessful, she asked the Nigerian students, with whom she was friendly, for help. The Irish Times headline describing the case on June 7 underscored the “Coloured Medical Students’ Defence.”96 Three days later, the headline summarizing the verdict in the trial read, “Two Coloured Medical Students Convicted.”97 Most scholarship on race and racism in Ireland focuses on recent immigration trends and the supposed creation of a newly multicultural Ireland in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet there was racial, ethnic, and religious diversity in Dublin in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Indeed, several scholars have exposed the myth of Ireland’s racially and ethnically homogenous past.98 Sociologist Bryan Fanning posits that late twentieth-century discussions of a “new” racism in Ireland caused by recent immigrants serve to obscure Ireland’s multicultural—and racist—past. Indeed, writes Fanning, “Ireland was never immune from the racist ideologies” of the early twentieth century and indeed, like other western states, adopted “colonial ideologies of western superiority.”99 In the 1944 Nigerian men’s trial, the defendants’ lawyers addressed the issue of racism in open court: Mr. Kingsmill-Moore said that there were always the pitfalls of rumour and prejudice in such a case . . . They had also to guard against the prejudices of nation against nation, and such prejudice was doubly reinforced when dealing with people of another colour. The accused men were entitled to as fair and impartial a trial as if they were white men.100 At stake here, according to the defense, was not just “colour” or race, however; it was also national identity—nation against nation. Notions of foreignness and otherness meshed with race in this example. All three defendants were convicted, receiving between eighteen months and three years in prison. Sabatino Capaldi, in contrast, a British national born of Italian parents, was acquitted in 1948 of conspiring to procure the abortion of a Dublin woman. In this case, however, the actual abortion procedure and subsequent miscarriage occurred in London.101 In fact, when Capaldi and his lover approached a Dublin doctor for assistance, he not only refused them but also informed the police of their actions. When Capaldi and the woman flew to London for an abortion, they were arrested. In this case, Capaldi’s foreignness was worth mentioning, but the fact that the actual abortion occurred outside of Ireland made it exceptional. Exporting abortion to Britain was something that some Irish people at the time seemed comfortable with—after all, many expected such a vice of the former colonizer. Capaldi’s case, then, was less threatening than others and indeed fit with notions that abortions occurred in Britain, not on Irish soil. In her work on the representation of abortionists in twentieth-century Britain, Emma L. Jones writes that legal records “reveal a host of professional outcasts across the period—men of ‘weak’ or foreign medical credentials, foreign nationality, or ethnic minority.”102 Concerns about the involvement of “others” in abortion work were not limited to Ireland, then. In the Irish postcolonial context, however, even more was at stake. The glorifying of fecund motherhood and fears that Ireland’s women were not adequately birthing the nation permeated legal records and media depictions. Abortionists appeared as destroyers of Irish babies and the Irish nation. In the 1945 prosecution of George Jackson, the judge spoke to the jury before it made its decision. He maintained that abortion cases represented “mankind at its worst.” “No worse class of case could come into court than this,” he said, “child murder in the mother’s womb. That is what it comes to, —racial suicide, birth control; countries decay and die through racial suicide and birth control.”103 In an era when abortion trials underscored the fear of “race suicide,” the abortion-related crimes of men perceived as non-Irish or “other” against Irish women and babies appeared particularly grievous. V. Conclusion Writing of twentieth-century Britain, Emma Jones and Neil Pemberton assert that abortion “reflected cultural anxieties concerning social class, sexuality, race, and medical knowledge, and even permitted a range of voices to comment on the dangers of modern urban life and gender and family relations.”104 This same idea held true in twentieth-century Ireland, but across the Irish Sea, where postcolonial identity formation was still fraught, such fears were heightened. Our analysis of newspapers and court records illustrates the interlinking concerns that abortionists came to symbolize in Ireland. For the fledgling state, men and women abortionists represented a danger to the nation. They also were connected with notions of deviancy and “otherness” in the courts and media. Women abortionists often worked outside of the home and were bold in speech and dress and unmotherly—all opposites of the ideal Irish woman. Highlighted for male abortionists were their non-Irish ethnicities and non-Christian religions, making them outsiders in predominantly Catholic Ireland. A key factor in the crimes of both women and men abortionists was how society perceived them as a corrupting and possibly contagious force, harming Irish women and Irish society and threatening the very fabric of the nation in a key postcolonial moment. Footnotes The authors wish to thank the following for financial support that enabled this research: the Fulbright Association, the University College Dublin (UCD) Humanities Institute, the History Department at the College of Charleston, and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the College of Charleston. They also thank the staff of the National Archives, Dublin, Sandra McAvoy, and Adelaide Hoffman for valuable assistance with this research. Address correspondence to Cara Delay, History Department, The College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29424. Email: [email protected]. 1 Diarmaid Ferriter, Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (London, 2009), 255. 2 In 1922, the twenty-six-county Irish Free State was created, with six counties in Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom. The Free State became Éire in 1937 and remained thus until 1949, when the Republic of Ireland formed. This article focuses on the Free State, Éire, and the Republic. 3 Ruth Fletcher, “Reproducing Irishness: Race, Gender, and Abortion Law,” Journal of Law and Society 28, no. 4 (December 2001): 2005. 4 See, for example, Barbara Brookes, Abortion in England, 1900–1967, 2nd ed. (New York, 2013 [1988]), 2–3. 5 Chrystel Hug, The Politics of Sexual Morality in Ireland (New York, 1998), 78. 6 Ferriter, Occasions of Sin, 258. 7 The same was true for other parts of twentieth-century Europe and for the United States. See, for example, Patricia Knight, “Women and Abortion in Victorian and Edwardian England,” History Workshop 4 (Autumn, 1977): 57 and Leslie Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (Berkeley, CA, 1997), chapter one. 8 For an example, see the statement of Kathleen Gilbourne, February 24, 1948, Central Criminal Court Laois, National Archives of Ireland (hereafter NAI). Following the lead of other historians who have written on abortion, in order to preserve privacy, we do not use the full names of women seeking abortion. We do, however, refer to the full legal names of the accused, almost all of whom were discussed in published newspaper accounts at the time. 9 Historians working on other parts of Europe have observed similar realities. See, for example, Willem de Blécourt, “Cultures of Abortion in The Hague in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Sexual Cultures in Europe: Themes in Sexuality, ed. Franz X. Eder, Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma (Manchester, UK, 1999), 195–212. According to Barbara Brookes, writing on twentieth-century England, the “staggering” number of abortion requests that Marie Stopes encountered in the 1920s testifies to the procedure’s ubiquity at the time. Brookes, Abortion in England, 4. 10 Leanne McCormick, “‘No Sense of Wrongdoing’: Abortion in Belfast 1917–1967,” Journal of Social History 49, no. 1 (2015): 125–48; Sandra McAvoy, “Before Cadden: Abortion in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ireland,” in The Lost Decade Ireland in the 1950s, ed. Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan (Cork, Ireland, 2004), 147–62; Cliona Rattigan, “‘Crimes of Passion of the Worst Character’: Abortion Cases and Gender in Ireland, 1925–50,” in Gender and Power in Irish History, ed. Maryann Gialenella Valiulis (Dublin, 2009), 115–39; and Cara Delay, “Kitchens and Kettles: Domestic Spaces, Ordinary Things, and Female Networks in Irish Abortion History, 1922–1949,” Journal of Women’s History 30, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 11–34 and “Pills, Potions, and Purgatives: Women and Abortion Methods in Ireland, 1900–1950,” Women’s History Review 28, no. 3 (July 2018), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09612025.2018.1493138. 11 McCormick, “‘No Sense of Wrongdoing,” 132–36. 12 See Delay, “Kitchens and Kettles” and “Pills, Potions, and Purgatives.” 13 Emma L. Jones, “Representations of Illegal Abortionists in England, 1900–1967,” in The Female Body in Medicine and Literature, ed. Andrew Mangham and Greta Depledge (Liverpool, UK, 2013), 196. 14 In May 2018, the Republic of Ireland, via a popular referendum, voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment. In September 2018, the Thirty-Sixth Amendment was signed into law. “Eighth Amendment Repealed as Irish President Signs Bill into Law,” BBC News, September 18, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45568094. Abortion services became available in some parts of Ireland in January 2019. 15 One exception is Mamie Cadden. Sentenced to death for an abortion-related offence in 1956, Cadden became a public symbol of deviance and resonated in popular culture for decades. In addition to appearing in several television documentaries, including RTE’s Scannal in 2007, and serving as the subject of a biography by Labor Party executive Ray Kavanagh. See Ray Kavanagh, Mamie Cadden: Backstreet Abortionist (Cork, 2005). 16 Louise Ryan, Gender, Identity and the Irish Press, 1922–1937: Embodying the Nation (Lewiston, ME, 2002), 6. 17 Ryan, Gender, Identity and the Irish Press, 289. 18 Abortion in Ireland after independence and partition continued to be regulated by the 1861 UK Offenses against the Person Act, Sections 58 and 59, which read: “Every woman, being with child, who, with intent to procure her own miscarriage, shall unlawfully administer to herself any poison or other noxious thing, or shall unlawfully use any instrument or other means whatsoever with the like intent; and whosoever, with intent to procure the miscarriage of any woman, whether she be or be not with child, shall unlawfully administer to her or cause to be taken by her any poison or other noxious thing, or shall unlawfully use any instrument or other means whatsoever with the like intent, shall be guilty of a felony, and being convicted thereof shall be liable . . . to be kept in penal servitude for life.” See http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/24-25/100/contents. 19 In order to find criminal abortion cases, we first searched newspapers for articles on abortion cases, identifying names, places, and dates. We also consulted the work of sociologist R. S. Rose, who, in the 1970s, conducted a comprehensive inventory of the criminal court records housed in the National Archives, Dublin (R. S. Rose, “An Outline of Fertility Control, Focusing on the Element of Abortion, in the Republic of Ireland to 1976.” [PhD diss., Institute of Sociology, The University of Stockholm, 1976]). Finally, we searched all referenced and available court records at the National Archives, Dublin. We chose fifteen cases from the larger pool for use in this study. The cases selected were those that had complete court trial records as well as detailed newspaper accounts. 20 This figure only counts the main defendants in the cases. In some instances, like the KM case, multiple people were charged. In these cases, only those who actively assisted with the abortion process were considered in this number. Central Criminal Court, Dublin 1944, NAI. 21 This figure does not include the two cases in which the accused were also the recipients of the abortion, as these are unique and are discussed separately in this article. One of the accused women was seventeen; the other’s age is unknown. 22 Emma L. Jones and Neil Pemberton, “Ten Rillington Place and the Changing Politics of Abortion in Modern Britain,” The Historical Journal 57, no. 4 (2014): 1088. 23 Similar trends occurred in 1920s Germany, where abortionists who charged for services were viewed as worse than those who did not, and convicted “for-profit” abortionists typically received the harshest sentences. Cornelie Usborne, Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany (New York, 2007), 103–4. 24 State Books at Circuit Court, Dublin, 1929, NAI. 25 State Books at Circuit Court, Dublin, 1929, NAI. 26 Court of Criminal Appeal (hereafter CCA), file 1949/50, NAI. 27 Louise Ryan, “Irish Female Emigration in the 1930s: Transgressing Space and Culture,” Gender, Place, and Culture 8, no. 3 (2001): 275. See also Ferriter, Occasions of Sin, 217. 28 Mervyn Horgan, “Anti-urbanism as a Way of Life: Disdain for Dublin in the Nationalist Imaginary,” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 30, no. 2 (fall 2004): 38. 29 State Files at Central Criminal Court, County Laois 1948, NAI. 30 CCA file 60/1945, NAI. 31 Central Criminal Court, Dublin 1943, NAI. 32 The Central Statistics Office, “The Average Industrial Wage and the Irish Economy,” accessed August 9, 2018, https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-hes/hes2015/aiw/ and “Earnings by Gender,” https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-hes/hes2015/ebg/. 33 Jones and Pemberton, “Ten Rillington Place,” 1088. 34 “The Abandoned Child Case,” Leinster Leader, July 30, 1938. 35 CCA file 60/1945, NAI. 36 Margaret Anna Cusack (the Nun of Kenmare), Women’s Work in Modern Society (London, 1874), 18, 32. 37 Tina O’Toole, “The American Dress: Migrant Objects in Irish Literature,” Irish Studies Review 26, no. 1 (2018): 73. 38 See Cara Delay, Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism (Manchester, UK, 2019), chapter one. 39 Maria Luddy, “Sex and the Single Girl in 1920s and 1930s Ireland,” The Irish Review 35 (2007): 80. 40 “Alleged Abandonment of Baby,” Belfast Newsletter, August 4, 1938. 41 Clara Fisher, “Gender, Nation and the Politics of Shame: Magdalen Laundries and the Institutionalization of Feminine Transgression in Modern Ireland,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 4 (2016): 823. 42 Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester, UK, 2013), https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cofc/detail.action?docID=4083820. 43 See Jessie Ramey, “The Bloody Blonde and the Marble Woman: Gender and Power in the Case of Ruth Snyder,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 3 (2004): 625–50 and Lucy Bland, “The Trials and Tribulations of Edith Thompson: The Capital Crime of Sexual Incitement in 1920s England,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 3 (2008): 624–48. 44 CCA file 1943/53, NAI. 45 CCA file 60/1945, NAI. 46 Tom Inglis and Carol MacKeogh, “The Double Bind: Women, Honour and Sexuality in Contemporary Ireland,” Media Culture and Society 34, no. 1 (2012): 74–5. 47 McCormick, “No Sense of Wrongdoing.” 48 State Files at Circuit Court Monaghan 1935, NAI. 49 CCA file 60/1945, NAI. 50 See, for example, the case of Kathleen Gilbourne, State Files at Central Criminal Court, County Laois 1948, NAI. 51 CCA file 1943/53, Dublin, NAI. The court records do not provide additional information on why Moloney’s son was in the industrial school. 52 For comparative examples, see Angus McLaren’s “Birth Control and Abortion in Canada, 1870–1920,” The Canadian Historical Review 59, no. 3 (1978): 319–40 and Joanne Richdale, “‘I Don’t Care What It Is Going to Cost, I am Prepared to Pay’: Men’s Voices and Abortion in New Zealand, 1919–1937,” New Zealand Journal of History 46, no. 1 (2012): 21–36. 53 Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, “Power, Gender, and Identity in the Irish Free State,” in Irish Women’s Voices: Past and Present, ed. Joan Hoff and Moureen Coulter (Bloomington, IN, 1995), 127. See also Gerardine Meaney, “Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics,” in A Dozen Lips, ed. Ailbhe Smyth (Dublin, 1994), 191. 54 Lindsey Earner-Byrne, “Reinforcing the Family: The Role of Gender, Morality, and Sexuality in Irish Welfare Policy, 1922–1944,” History of the Family 13 (2008): 360. 55 Catherine L. Innes, Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1935 (Athens, GA, 1993), 41. 56 CCA file 1943/53, NAI. 57 CCA file 1943/53, NAI. 58 CCA file 1943/53, NAI. 59 State Books at Circuit Court, Dublin 1929, NAI. 60 State Files at Central Criminal Court, County Laois 1948, NAI. 61 State Files at Central Criminal Court, County Laois 1948, NAI. 62 Jennifer Redmond, “The Politics of Emigrant Bodies: Irish Women’s Sexual Practice in Question,” in Sexual Politics in Modern Ireland, eds. Jennifer Redmond, Sonja Tiernan, Sandra McAvoy, and Mary McAuliffe (Dublin, 2015), 74. 63 State Files at Circuit Court Clonmel, Tipperary 1942, NAI. 64 State Files at Circuit Court Clonmel, Tipperary 1942, NAI. 65 State Files at Central Criminal Court, County Laois 1948, NAI, and CCA file 1943/53, NAI. See also “Court Packed for Second Day of Cadden Trial,” The Irish Times, October 24, 1956. 66 State Files at Central Criminal Court, County Laois 1948, NAI. 67 Mary E. Daly, “Marriage, Fertility and Women’s Lives in Twentieth-Century Ireland (c. 1900–c.1970),” Women’s History Review 15, no. 4 (September 2006): 574. 68 Clara Fischer, “Gender, Nation, and the Politics of Shame: Magdalen Laundries and the Institutionalization of Feminine Transgression in Modern Ireland,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 4 (2016): 822. 69 Luddy, “Sex and the Single Girl,” 81. 70 For more, see Delay, “Kitchens and Kettles.” 71 CCA file 1937 /8, NAI. 72 State Books at Circuit Court Dublin 1929, NAI. 73 State Books at Circuit Court Dublin 1929, NAI. 74 Jones, “Representations of Illegal Abortionists,” 197. 75 Philomena Gorey, “Managing Midwifery in Dublin: Practice and Practitioners, 1700–1800,” in Gender and Medicine in Ireland 1700–1950, ed. Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh and Margaret Preston (Syracuse, NY, 2012), 123–24. 76 Ciara Breathnach, “Handywomen and Birthing in Rural Ireland, 1851–1955,” Gender and History 28, no. 1 (April 2016): 46. 77 Breathnach, “Handywomen and Birthing in Rural Ireland,” 46. 78 Breathnach, “Handywomen and Birthing in Rural Ireland,” 40–42. 79 See, for example, Lady Dudley’s Scheme for the Establishment of District Nurses in the Poorest Parts of Ireland. First Annual Report, April 23, 1903–April 23, 1904, 10. 80 State Files at Circuit Court Clonmel, Tipperary 1942, NAI. 81 State Files at Circuit Court, Dublin 1943, NAI. 82 CCA file 1943/53, NAI. 83 CCA file 1943/53, NAI. 84 CCA file 1931/23, NAI. 85 CCA file 1931/23, NAI. 86 Dermot Keogh, Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork, Ireland, 1998), 71. 87 Cormac Ó Gráda, Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 43. 88 Stuart Rosenblatt, The Yidiot’s Guide to Irish Jewish Ancestry (Dublin, 2011). 89 Bernard Shillman, A Short History of the Jews in Ireland (Dublin, 1945), preface. 90 Chaim Herzog, Living History: A Memoir (New York, 1996), 9, cited in Keogh, Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland, 79. 91 Ó Gráda, Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, 90, 78. In addition, as Ó Gráda argues, early twentieth-century Ireland was hardly immune to the stereotype of the Jewish moneylender, and several times the case mentioned Rubenstein providing money for BK. CCA file 1931/23, NAI. For more, see Ó Gráda, Jewish Ireland, 61–71 and 180–81. 92 CCA file 1931/23, NAI. 93 CCA file 1931/23, NAI. 94 State Books at Circuit Court, Dublin, 1929, NAI. 95 State Books at Circuit Court, Dublin, 1929, NAI. 96 Irish Times, June 7, 1944. 97 Irish Times, June 10, 1944. 98 Bryan Fanning, Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester, UK, 2002); Caitriona Ni Laoire, Childhood and Migration in Europe: Portraits of Mobility, Identity and Belonging in Contemporary Ireland (Farnham, Surrey, UK, 2011); Steve Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience (London, 2004); and Steve Garner, “Ireland: From Racism without ‘Race’ to Racism without Racists,” Radical History Review 104 (spring 2009): 41–56. 99 Fanning, Racism and Social Change, 1, 8. 100 Irish Times, June 7, 1944. 101 Irish Times, July 15, 1949. 102 Jones, “Representations of Illegal Abortionists,” 204. 103 CCA file 60/1945, NAI. 104 Jones and Pemberton, “Ten Rillington Place,” 1087–88. © The Author(s) 2019. 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