Philomena: Victims and Villains

Spoiler Alert: I include details about the film Philomena. 

I just saw the Oscar-nominated film Philomena, the story of an Irish woman’s search for the son she had in 1952 as an unmarried teen. Disowned and abandoned by her family when her aunt realized Philomena was pregnant, she gave birth in Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea. In exchange for being taken in, Philomena was forced to sign adoption papers and to be an indentured servant in the Abbey for four years to pay off her debt. For three of those years, she saw her son every day in the children’s rooms at the Abbey. One day, without any opportunity for her to say goodbye, a man and a woman arrived and took her son.

For fifty years, the nuns of Sean Ross Abbey thwarted Philomena’s repeated efforts to find her son.  With the help of a journalist, Philomena eventually located him. Adopted by Americans, he grew up to become the chief legal counsel for the Republican National Committee during the senior Bush administration. He died from AIDS before Philomena learned who he was. Judi Dench is outstanding as Philomena as is Steve Coogan as Martin Sixsmith, the journalist who took on this “human interest” story when he was retooling himself after losing his job in the Blair administration.

The major villains in the film are the nuns of Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea. Most of them display little compassion for the children or for the mothers as teens or adults. Martin heard local gossip that the Abbey enriched its coffers by selling the children to wealthy Americans. This gossip provided an avenue of investigation for Philomena and Martin. When confronted about the obstacles the Abbey erected, an elderly nun passionately justified the cruelty toward the teen mothers, the forced adoptions, and the refusal to aid mothers and children in reuniting as the girls’ penance for their wanton expression of sexuality. 

If only the victimization of unwed teen mothers and their children was limited to Ireland, nuns, and the 1950s. By the time I was 15, I somehow already “knew” that getting pregnant was the ruin of a girl’s reputation along with her dreams.  That was the in US, in a predominately Protestant community, and in the early 1960s. I had heard whispers of “shotgun weddings” and of pregnant girls who were sent away to have babies and then forced to give them up for adoption.  According to the National Vital Statistics Report, prior to 1973, 20% of US babies born to unmarried white women were put up for adoption (less than 3 % by the mid-1980s).  Ann Fessler (2006) in The Girls Who Went Away documents the experiences of unmarried white girls encouraged to give away their babies and who social workers told they would forget. Like Philomena, none of the girls ever forgot.

As portrayed in the film, the sisters of Sean Ross Abbey were responsible for the forced adoptions, indentured servitude, and thwarting the efforts of mothers and children to find each other.  But, there is no way that the nuns were solely responsible for the hardships the girls and their children faced.  The lack of power invested in nuns and the scrutiny of their behavior means that the church hierarchy was complicit. Philomena’s family disowned her and abandoned her at the Abbey. I am certain that a driving force was the family’s fear of local gossip. I grew up in a small town where any stepping outside of the “lines” was fair game for gossip and teasing for decades after, so the threat of gossip kept many people secretive, silent, and conforming.  How ironic that girls who had taken no vows of chastity were held to higher standards of sexual conduct than priests who abused young people in their charge.

The possibility of being targets of gossip probably also affected those who adopted children. In the 1950s in the US, there was enormous pressure for adults to be “normal”--heterosexual, coupled, and parents.  I am not surprised that wealthy American heterosexual couples who were infertile would turn to adoption within and outside the US.  Surely also accountable were medical and scientific institutions for failing to develop safe and effective contraceptives and religious and governmental prohibitions against contraception and abortion.  

No institution—family, schools, or religion--provided effective sex education, resulting in many girls (e.g. Philomena) having no idea how sex and pregnancy were linked and denying them the opportunity to make informed choices about sex or pregnancy. More common was vague information about the relationship between sex and pregnancy that was incomprehensible to anyone who did not already have some understanding of the relationship. For instance, I recall my mother telling me: “Never let a boy touch you.” The “movie” that ran in my mind was being caught on the barbed wired fence at my Aunt Mary and Uncle Leslie’s farm,  having to decline help from a neighbor’s son, and waiting helplessly for someone other than a boy to come by to help extract me from the barbed-wire.

Philomena is a powerful story of the ways that institutions shape individuals’ lives and simultaneously portrays ways that individuals resist mistreatment and push for a say in their own lives.  Philomena expressed no regrets for the pleasures of her first sexual experience and chose to focus on love, not hate. Philomena reminded me of all who experience restrictive and unforgiving ideas about gender and sexuality—a commonality across decades between unwed teen Philomena and her in-the-closet son and shared with millions of people today.  The film also reminded me of the problem with pointing fingers—even if pointed in the right direction, our fingers are too short to reach the depths of responsibility and too few to identify all the culprits.

References

Fessler, Ann. 2007. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. NY: Penguin.

Ventura, Stephanie J. and Christine A. Bachrach. 2000. Nonmarital childbearing in the United States, 1940-99. National Vital Statistics Reports 48 (16): 1-40.