The Magdalen Asylums

...

One of the most important aspects of the laundries has to be the women who occupied them, in the nineteenth century the women that frequented the asylums were mainly prostitutes who hadn’t reached a point in their lives yet where they were seen as being unredeemable (Luddy 2002). By the time the laundries of the twentieth century had come into place the women that were being placed in them differed greatly than the prostitutes that had gone before, these were women which were just viewed as being of questionable morals. Sometimes a woman only had to be seen as too attractive would be a temptation to the men she would encounter in society, again this was reflected in the movie through the use of the character Bernadette, she was sent to the asylum after being observed getting too much attention from the boys in the schoolyard (Mullan 2002). Other reasons would be that the woman was pregnant outside of marriage, or that she had been a victim of an incestual relationship with a male member of her family or she had been raped by any male in the community. Smith states “Although the convent registers are rarely explicit about the family circumstances leading to this practice, many of the women undoubtedly were compromised by the perception of sexual immorality, be that as a result of unmarried motherhood, rape, incest, or sexual abuse (Smith 2009,p4) It was always the women who were seen as needing punishment not the men even if she herself had been the victim of a crime by a man (Finnegan 2001). “any woman, whether she freely gave herself or was violated, could be considered a fallen woman and placed in the same category as a prostitute” (McCarthy 2010). It is important to highlight the difference between the women, as the women that were sent to the asylums in the twentieth century were not prostitutes, they would be considered normal women by the standards set in society today. One such woman who tells her story in a recent book is Kathleen Legg. Kathleen even draws a comparison of her own experience and that of what is shown in the movie “The Magdalen Sisters” (Mullins 2002). When telling her daughters of here time in the laundry her daughter asks her:

“A what? You mean like that movie?”

“The Magdalen Sisters”

“Yes”

……….

“That one with Anne-Marie Duff in it and Gearldine McEwan as an evil nun,’ She shuddered.

“That was awful!”

I nodded. ‘It wasn’t exactly like that. In some ways it was worse. Certainly there was mental cruelty.’ (O’Riordan 2015, pp. 79-80)

These women were scarred for life due to their experiences in these institutions and if it had not been for some of these brave victims coming forward and speaking up, their stories might have been forgotten and lost forever.

It’s easy to distance ourselves from a wrongdoing in society when it does not affect us directly, today we have the extra cushion of time, and the more time that passes and the more victims of these asylums that pass away the easier it becomes to forget about these places. Reading the facts and statistics of these asylums does not begin to reflect the pain and suffering that the women endured within the walls of the institutes. It’s not until you read the personal accounts of real women who lived through the nightmare of being in a Magdalen Laundry that the true horror of what occurred is portrayed. O’Riordan tells the true story of five women who went through the Magdalen Laundries and they recount their horrifying experiences first hand (O’Riordian 2015). It is through these womens personal accounts and women like them that the Irish public has become so aware of the Magdalen Laundries. They were given a platform on which to speak by documentaries such as ‘’States of Fear’’ (Rafferty 1999), ‘’The Forgotten Maggies’’ (O’Riordan 2009) and ‘’Sex in a Cold Climate/ The Magdalen Asylums’’ (Humphries 1998). Certainly if it had not been for these woman and the publicity they generated the Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny would not have felt the pressure or need to issue them with an apology for the abuse they suffered at the hands of the state and by the nuns in these institutions. The apology however did not come until the 19th of February 2013, too late for all the women he had passed away previous and for all the women whose bodies were disposed of in mass graves on the sites of these Asylums (O’Riordian 2015). What had begun as institutes to help women in the nineteenth century later turned into a means of persecuting and exploiting women in the twentieth century, the extent to which will not be fully known until the religious orders turn over their archival records, which as of yet they are refusing to do (Smith 2009).

Referances:

Finnegan, F. (2001) Do penance or perish : a study of Magdalen Asylums in Ireland, Piltown, Co.Kilkenny: Congrave Press

Luddy, M. (2002) ‘Magdalen Asylums 1765-1992: Introduction’ in Bourke, A. (ed) Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women's Writing and Traditions, Cork: Cork University Press.

McCarthy, R. L. (2010) Origins of the Magdalene Laundries: An Analytical History, North Carolina; McFarland and Company.

Mullan, P. (2002) The Magdalene Sisters, [DVD], Dublin: Miramax Films.

O'Riordan, S. (2015). Whispering Hope: The Heart-Breaking True Story of the Magalen Women. London: Orioin.

Smith, J. M. (2007) Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the nation’s architecture of containment, Manchester: Manchester University Press.