From Darkness to Sunshine: Blind Babies, Families and the Sunshine Homes, 1918–1939

Abstract

This article examines the contrast between the interwar British state's emphasis on motherhood and the justification for the institutional care of a relatively small group of blind babies. After the First World War, concerns about the state of the nation were addressed in part by legislation and an increase in the number of organisations which purported to help mothers to bring up healthy babies. The interest in mothers who gave birth to blind babies centred on the poor mother's ability to cope with a visually impaired infant. The authorities’ concerns, anxieties about the association between impaired senses and learning difficulties expressed by eugenicists and unease surrounding the long-term social and economic costs of blindness supported early intervention. The narrative of the overwhelmed and neglectful mother was juxtaposed with the benefit of institutionalisation, which justified the removal of some blind infants from their homes. The metaphor of the dark home and unenlightened mother was replaced by one of light and knowledge emanating from the brightly painted environs of the Sunshine Homes for Blind Babies. During the interwar period, positive reports and articles in newspapers, magazines and charitable propaganda, supported by powerful elites including the British royal family, presented the Sunshine Homes for Blind Babies as caring spaces full of the love of dedicated professional nurses, and kind, wealthy benefactors; there were no reports produced to suggest anything but the most positive experience for the infants. Essentially, a blind infant's biological family was metaphorically, and in some cases literally, replaced by a new institutional family of carers and visitors.