‘Fallen Mothers’

Abstract

In 1924, in a custody case before the Court of Appeal in London, Sir E. M. Pollock described the relationship between an adulterous mother and her daughter succinctly: ‘Although her mother has fallen, she remains her mother’ (B. v. B. 182; for details of this and other cases cited in this chapter, please refer to Table 3.1). Pollock’s statement represented a dramatic reversal of a nineteenth-century view that judges should not grant adulteresses custody of their children, a position that Parliament had formally adopted in 1839 when it made maternal adultery a statutory bar to custody. This censure of adulterous mothers reflected Victorian ideology. Although motherhood could not coexist with virginity, mothers as an ideal were nevertheless associated with sexual purity. The tendency to polarize maternity and sexuality influenced judges to punish women who breached the dichotomy. By 1924, both legislators and judges had begun to adopt a more lenient view. In the early twentieth century the principle that became the determining factor in custody decisions was the welfare of the children. When judges came to acknowledge that even ‘fallen’ mothers could create an environment in which children could flourish, maternal adultery could no longer be a bar to custody.