The ‘Scandal’ of Scotland’s Unmarried Mothers
The high incidence of illegitimate births in rural Scotland was front-page news in the early 1950s. Within two decades, what had once seemed an aberration was increasingly becoming the norm.
In late 1953 the journalist Liam Regan found himself in the kitchen of a house on the coast of Banffshire in northeast Scotland. It was a rural district, where the main sources of employment were farming, fishing, or working at the local whisky distilleries; the nearest city, Aberdeen, was roughly 50 miles away. As he wrote in his report, Regan was speaking with a ‘middle aged housewife’ when her adult daughter was introduced. But when he addressed the older woman as ‘Mrs’, she ‘embarrassed’ him by revealing that she was ‘no merrit’ (not married). Nor was her status as a single mother unusual in the area. Over the course of the following two days, various local men who spoke with the journalist obligingly pointed out other unmarried mothers who lived in their communities, some of whom had prodigious numbers of offspring. ‘She’s got ten children and she’s single’, one such informant claimed, pointing out a ‘pleasant faced’ young woman who passed them on the street.
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