‘You aren’t the first and you won’t be the last’

Abstract

During the last decades of the 20th century, notions of morality related to sexuality and family life underwent a dramatic transition in Ireland. In this paper, I explore changing attitudes towards a rapidly growing population of unmarried mothers in a small community in rural Ireland. In my analysis, I draw upon recent work on the anthropology of ethics, morality, and cultural change to analyze the ways in which individual experiences of ethical conflict and transformation relate to aggregate processes of cultural change. My analysis of one woman’s account of her own moral epiphany speaks to the limits of conceptualizing ethico-moral change as a necessarily conscious or cognitive process.