Women who found themselves pregnant outside of marriage were treated in this abominable, state-sanctioned, widespread way because it was another woman's fault.
Actually if you read the article I posted by Goretti Horgan, you will find that in Ireland,
"before the famine attitudes to sex remained open, were often earthy, and celebrated women’s sexuality as well as men’s
The Midnight Court, a long poem written in Irish in 1780–1781, described an imagined court of women putting the men of Ireland on trial for being useless in bed. The poem, banned in its English translations until the last decades of the 20th century, gives some insight into attitudes to women’s sexuality. Here an older woman laments the plight of a younger sister, married to an old man with no interest in sex:"
"Line by line she bade him linger
With gummy lips and groping finger,
Gripping his thighs in wild embrace
Rubbing her brush from knee to waist
Stripping him bare to the cold night air,
Everything done with love and care.
But she’d nothing to show for all her labour;
There wasn’t a jump in the old deceiver."
"The idea of women controlling their fertility was not the taboo subject it was to become. There was a folktale about St Brigid – supposedly a contemporary of St Patrick – who was renowned for her work with fertility in all its forms. Brigid met a young woman distressed because she was pregnant: ‘Brigid prayed, then she blessed the woman, laid hands on her womb, and the foetus miraculously disappeared’."
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/2001/isj2-091/horgan.htm
It was only at the height British colonial brutality in Ireland, while a woman was at the helm of the British empire, that rights of Irish women went into serious decline.
The 'elite' where seizing control of the next generation of labour in Ireland. This wasn't about a battle of the 'sexes', it's was about reinforcing the 'class' system!!
