Biography: Despite efforts to portray her as a feminist heroine, a book about a Dublin abortionist fails to convince
When the Supreme Court delivered its judgment in the X case on March 5th, 1992, Mr Justice Niall McCarthy delivered a scathing critique of the legislative branch of government. Referring to the 1983 constitutional amendment on abortion, he said: "The failure by the legislature to enact the appropriate legislation is no longer unfortunate, it is inexcusable. What are pregnant women to do? What are the parents of a pregnant girl under age to do? What are the medical profession to do?"
Thirteen years later, there is still no legislation, but there are, as usual, thousands of Irish women travelling to the UK every year to have safe, legal abortions, having taken one of the most difficult decisions they are ever likely to face in secrecy and often in shame.
Even that option was denied to Irish women until 1967, when abortion was legalised in Britain. A list of the desperate remedies for unwanted pregnancies in the absence of safe abortion includes: hot baths, gin, knitting needles, pennyroyal, castor oil, quinine, skipping, jumping from a height, household detergents and ergot of rye, almost all useless and some dangerous. For those who could pay, there were illegal abortionists; Ray Kavanagh's short biography of Mamie Cadden tells part of the story of one of these, who practised in Dublin from the 1930s to the 1950s, with intervals served in jail for abandonment of a child and "procuring a miscarriage".
Mary Ann (Mamie) Cadden was born in the US in 1894, but brought to Ireland the following year. In her early 30s, languishing in the family shop in Co Mayo, she decided to train as a midwife, and qualified in 1926. She established a nursing home in Rathmines, and carried on her business there until 1939, when she was disqualified as a midwife due to being convicted of abandoning an infant (the child, that of one of her patients, was dumped at the side of the road in Dunshaughlin, Co Meath).
After serving a year in Mountjoy for this, she again set up business, this time providing treatment for dandruff, constipation and skin problems, but also performing abortions. Kavanagh's account of the 1944 police clampdown on abortion services in Dublin is interesting, although his conclusion that this was a deliberate campaign may well be mistaken. In 1945, "Nurse" Cadden was sentenced to five years' penal servitude for procuring a miscarriage, after a trial in which the patient was the main prosecution witness.
Kavanagh's version of Mamie Cadden suffers from his fascination with her blond hair, her red MG sports car, her capacity to eat in the Gresham and drink in the Shelbourne, her fur coats, her jewellery, and what he frequently refers to as her sexiness. The photograph on the front cover of the book presents us with a hard-faced woman with dyed frizzy blond hair, very far from Kavanagh's picture of her. And this dissociative tendency is mirrored in his championing of her as a liberated feminist with high professional standards.
Kavanagh's righteous defence of Cadden's professionalism sits poorly with the evidence of her own botched operations, resulting in two deaths and who knows what injuries, as well as the obvious squalour in her small flat in Hume Street, where Helen O'Reilly died on her kitchen table in 1956 from an embolism, due to Cadden's incompetence. His admiration of her alleged espousal of women in trouble is in stark contrast with her own vilification of them as whores. The fact that she was providing a much-needed service to desperate women who were denied access to contraception does not of itself make her a feminist heroine. She was well paid for her work, and insisted on money up front. Vera Drake she was not.
In 1956, Cadden was charged with the murder of Helen O'Reilly (a deserted mother of six), convicted, and sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life, as had been the practice since the 1920s when women were faced with the death penalty. Kavanagh's account of her trial, a notorious event at the time, is vivid and comprehensive, and demonstrates fairly clearly that she should never have been convicted of murder, nor even possibly of manslaughter, since the evidence against her was so flimsy. When the judge, pronouncing the death sentence, wished that the Lord might have mercy on her soul, her response was "I'm not a Catholic. Take that now". She died in the Central Mental Hospital in 1959.
It's very hard to like Mamie Cadden, especially when we read in her statement to the police, after O'Reilly's death, that Cadden considered the dead woman to have had "the mouth of a prostitute". She emerges generally as a greedy, unpleasant, judgmental character, albeit willing to take risks, acutely aware of Ireland's rigid class structure, and disrespectful of pompous authority. Kavanagh's obvious affection for her has the presumably unintended effect of making the reader suspicious of what often looks like special pleading, and thus failing perhaps to give her what credit she may be due.
The book would have been greatly improved by proper footnotes. Kavanagh has made extensive use of the court files in the National Archives, already mined by Sandra McAvoy in her excellent work on abortion in this period, and detailed references to the files would have been useful.
Catriona Crowe is President of the Women's History Association of Ireland, and a Senior Archivist in the National Archives
Mamie Cadden: Backstreet Abortionist By Ray Kavanagh Mercier Press, 224pp. €12.95