One of the most serious debates of the 21st century will be how, when and if we have children, and how, where and by whom they will be cared for. In the last 10 years Ireland has experienced the beginnings of that debate, with fundamental questions raised about parenting, institutional care and rights to identity. Books like Banished Babies, by Mike Milotte, Sophia's Story, by Susan McKay, and Suffer the Little Children, by Mary Raftery and Eoin O'Sullivan, have explored differing aspects of how Irish society has dealt with children. Mannix Flynn, Paddy Doyle, Christine Buckley and many others have bravely given their own testimonies of damaged childhoods and their struggles to recover dignity and identity.
In 1904, 47 children between the ages of two and six were taken on a long train journey from the Sisters of Charity's Foundling Hospital in New York to the twin mining towns of Clifton-Morenci in Arizona. They were accompanied by three Sisters of Charity and four nurses. They were to be placed for adoption with a number of Catholic Mexican families who had been vetted by the local parish priest. These "orphan trains" were a common feature of life in America at this time.
On arrival at Clifton, the nuns were besieged by a number of the town's "Anglo" women, who felt that placing the children with Mexican families amounted to child abuse, and proposed to take them for themselves. Over the next few days, 16 of the children were placed with their designated Mexican families and kidnapped from them by a posse made up of the husbands of the protesting women. The remaining children were transported back to New York, with great difficulty, as they were also in demand for adoption by the town's white women.
Although the children's abduction was entirely illegal, attempts by the Sisters of Charity to regain their guardianship of them were unsuccessful, in spite of a number of court cases culminating in an appeal to the Supreme Court. The episode was covered widely in the contemporary press, and most commentators supported the actions of the townspeople.
Linda Gordon, an historian of the American family, has used these events to explore issues of race, gender, class, economics and theories of the family in a beautifully constructed narrative and analysis of a flashpoint in American domestic history. She gives us a multi-faceted account of the main players: the mothers of the children, all single, poor Irish women in New York; the Sisters of Charity, anxious to place the children in their care in Catholic homes; the Mexican women who wished to adopt the children, mostly married to miners who were paid extremely badly by the copper barons for whom they worked; and the white women who engineered the children's abduction, in the business of constructing a social identity for themselves by defining others as inferior.
While class played a significant role in the story, race is the real issue. Racial stereotypes took time to solidify in frontier towns, and before the orphan incident, Clifton-Morenci still maintained a fluid attitude to race, although Mexicans were less well paid than white workers and few of them had moved to middle-class status. The issue of motherhood drew the lines firmly: Mexican women were defined as dirty, ill-educated, degenerate and unfit to take on the care of white children. The children became commodities, symbols of competing desires and aspirations, supposed to satisfy longings which went well beyond Gordon's definition of adoption: "A family-building strategy that could overcome infertility, comfort and console women far from home, and very possibly provide a means of increasing the family income in the future."
GORDON uses her multiplicity of sources with great skill, all the time reminding us that some participants in the story have left no record of their experiences, particularly the children's birth mothers, the children themselves, and the Mexican families with whom they were to be placed. She contextualises the event superbly, giving us a well-rounded portrait of Clifton-Morenci at the time, as well as taking us through the ideological and emotional processes which moved people to act as they did. The book uses the same techniques so well deployed by Angela Bourke in The Burning of Bridget Cleary, another examination of a single event with huge implications and illuminations to offer. The picture of a town and a society being constructed on the economic bedrock of exploitative copper-mining, with class, gender and race categories establishing themselves rapidly and often unconsciously, is compelling, exciting and depressing.
Gordon elaborates the white agenda to primitivise Mexicans as classless and undifferentiated, so that "Mexican" came to mean poor, ignorant and degraded. She refers to this process, beautifully, as a "decivilising fallacy". Gordon points out that white and Mexican women had many things in common: a desire to civilise their community through church and school; an intense interest in public health issues, particularly water supply and sewerage facilities; a capacity to mark important events with celebrations of an appropriate kind; and, most of all, an intention to be good mothers to their children. They could have made common cause on these issues, but the general white insistence on racial superiority made this impossible. "The women of both groups looked at each other across a `gender frontier', a border drawn by different gender practices along with religion, language, food and class, all making up `race'. The orphan story is a tragedy generated from silence, created because two groups of women could not speak to each other."
There are two sets of ghosts haunting this narrative: the children from the Foundling Hospital, and their birth mothers. It is very unlikely that the children who remained in Clifton-Morenci with their new adoptive families ever managed to meet the women who gave them birth. The story of these women has been tackled to some extent by Gordon herself, in her work on single mothers of the period, but there is a lot more to do. Gordon's work on the archives of the Foundling Hospital revealed heart-breaking notes from some of the mothers. For example: "This is little Augusta, born January 30, 1870. O Crule Poverty"; "Please do not give him up as I shall claim him some day with the help of God"; "It gives me much pain to part with my boy, but circumstances oblige me to do so". Could any of these women have imagined that their children, or others like them, would become pawns in the struggle to establish superior racial identity in the far south-west?
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Catriona Crowe is an archivist at the National Archives of Ireland and a board member of the Women's History Project