ABSTRACT
This moment constitutes my rst memory. The weeping mother is my own and on the day in question, I am her three-year-old daughter. I am the same age as the daughter of Ruth Ellis.
There is no doubt that what we are dealing with in the hanging of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Britain, is both tragic and complex for all concerned. From my own point of view as a bewildered child in 1955 while watching my good mother cry for a putatively bad one, and in the years following when I would work as a psychotherapist, I have wondered a great deal about mothers. I would bear witness to and be complicit in the over-simplication of the most complex ethical problems faced by the task of mothering, mine as well as those of others. I would come to wonder about the myths that underpin our interpretation of ‘the maternal’ and it is to one of these myths that I shall turn to today, the myth of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God.
