23/03/2022
Channel Five News reports that acclaimed author of books for young people, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, whose Tracy Beaker range is one of the longest running shows on the children’s channel CBBC, has written a new novel aimed at the twelve plus age group and dealing with a largely forgotten but harrowing chapter in women’s history. Her new book deals with Mother and Baby Homes in early sixties Britain. Before the liberation movements of the later sixties, Britain was still highly repressive and young women who were pregnant out of wedlock were often consigned to such homes, where enormous psychological pressure was placed upon them to give up their child for adoption. Wilson revealed that there were many older women now, whose lives were still affected by the knowledge that the state had effectively taken away their babies. Sadly NHS staff were sometimes complicit in the cruelty of these institutions which only began to be phased out in the wake of women’s liberation politics and other new social movements at the close of the decade. “Baby Love” will be available at all good bookshops. Why not support a local independent bookstore or an LGBTQIA store such as Brighton’s Feminist Bookstore online, Cwpaned O Ge in Caerdydd / Cardiff and News from Nowhere in Liverpool – just a few choices amongst many others.
