The mothers ripped away from their babies and condemned to a life of slavery in the
I was an unmarried girl / I’d just turned 27 / When they sent me to the sisters / For the way men looked at me / Branded as a jezebel / I knew I was not bound for Heaven / I’d be cast in shame / Into the Magdalene laundries.
That’s the first verse of a moving song recorded in 1994 by the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, and subsequently covered by other stars. It stands as just one example of the horrified fascination with an appalling episode in Irish history that continues to rouse both artists and historians.
Dr Louise Brangan is an Irish academic who has made injustice and punishment her specialism. In this powerful contribution to the well-known story of the Magdalene laundries there is plenty of both for the women who endured the terrible conditions in them – but it is clear Brangan feels the Irish State and Catholic Church got away far too lightly.
Judi Dench in Philomena
People may have seen films (Philomena, starring Judi Dench, is one), heard songs and read books about the Catholic Church’s profitable institutions that cruelly exploited ‘fallen’ women, and yet do they know the whole story? More important, has Ireland itself ever truly broken the silence that covered up the evil for many decades?
The horrific story of the Magdalene laundries bears retelling, since each new generation needs warning about what can be done in the name of church and state – not to mention a collective culture of ‘deference and obedience’.
The Magdalene laundries (also known as Magdalene asylums) were institutions from the 18th to the late 20th century operated by Roman Catholic orders. They functioned as prison-like workhouses in which women and girls did laundry in brutal conditions, watched over by nuns who were too often contemptuous and callous.
In their view, the inmates were as stained as the clothes they washed, and the unpaid, hard labour was penitence for their perceived ‘sins’ – although some little girls had done nothing wrong and were being punished for the actions of their mothers.
It is estimated 30,000 women were confined in these institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries, about 10,000 were admitted after Ireland’s independence in 1922.
The hellish places were named after the Biblical figure Mary Magdalene – historically misidentified as a ‘fallen woman’ or a repentant prostitute, reformed by her devotion to Jesus. The very name carries the chilling weight of religious intolerance.
Brangan is careful to point out that the laundries were not (as is often thought) places where young women gave birth to illegitimate babies who were promptly taken away for adoption, and which then doomed the sorrowful mothers to blistering toil. No, the institutions were the final part of a whole web of deprivation and ill-treatment. A child might be born in a County Home to an unmarried mother, be sent to live with a relative who in time sent her back, be dispatched to a grim Industrial School for orphaned and abandoned children and there experience ‘regimented beatings, force feeding, sexual abuse’.
The inside of a former laundry
The nuns would threaten the girls with something worse if they didn’t behave: incarceration in one of the laundries, where some women would remain, in a sort of slavery, for the rest of their lives. ‘For Brigid, having played fast and loose with school rules, it was a life sentence. Adult men sentenced for murder in the 20th century were rarely expected to serve more than seven years. Somehow, in the 1940s, the mildest transgressions of women and girls caused more outrage than the taking of a life.’
In this authoritative, quietly passionate account, the author wisely takes the reader right back to ‘the men who made Ireland’, after the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the ‘small but thuggish civil war’ that then broke out. Modernism would be rejected, purity preached from pulpits, and Ireland organised ‘according to Irish ideals and catholic standards’. To ‘vocal morbid purists . . . fallen women came to be seen as the enemy within’.
Faith and fear made the population complicit. The people in small towns who knew about the laundries kept quiet because, after all, their daughters wouldn’t be affected. Until they were. Then shame and judgment made ordinary people cruel as well as silent. This was fertile ground for the abuse of power, wielded in this story by the nuns who were synonymous with the laundries.
Brangan tells the stories of Brigid, Carmel, Eileen, Nora, Mary, Catherine and many others, all skilfully woven into a narrative that affords them their sad place in history, at the same time dignifying them with her own measured anger and compassion.
It’s not until the end of her fine narrative that the author reveals that as a very young child, visiting her grandmother, she would see a ‘strange, shuffling line of old women’ whom she now believes to have been ‘Magdalene women’. She remembers her grandmother telling her, ‘You knew when a girl got into trouble because she would disappear one day and no one ever spoke of her again.’ We can be grateful that this family memory ‘set me on this path’ of bearing witness.
Where does that path lead? To disbelief, sorrow and rage, even for someone with previous knowledge of the historical facts. For this is not a story we can dismiss as merely historical, as if the passage of time can consign it to an age remote from modern Ireland. For it was not until 1996 that Ireland closed its Magdalene laundries.
That was when my own 16-year-old daughter was dancing to the Spice Girls. With Mary Robinson then as Ireland’s first female president, ‘girl power’ seemed an unassailable feature of the new age.
Not so. There will always be the nameless women and babies in those unmarked graves, always the pain of the survivors, a culture of denial and/or justification in the church, and a collective memory of conniving guilt.