Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment
Publication Year: 2007
Published by: University of Notre Dame Press
Cover
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
I begin with those whose love and support sustains me on a daily basis, my wife, Beatriz, and our daughter, Isabel. I also thank my parents, siblings, other family members, and good friends for their constant encouragement over the years. I acknowledge too the real-life victims and survivors of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries and the nation’s architecture...
Preface
This book has three primary objectives. First, it offers a partial history that connects Ireland’s Magdalen laundries and the nation-state’s nativist politics in the postindependence era. Second, it critically evaluates cultural representations of the Magdalen laundries that have, over the past fifteen years, recovered these institutions from the amnesia...
Introduction
Writing in the same year the Irish Free State was founded, James F. Cassidy, himself a Catholic priest, captured the inherent contradictions informing contemporary Irish attitudes toward women’s virtue and outlined the ramifications for those women who violated the social and moral ideal. Branded by the public as simultaneously a mother and a criminal, a family member and an outcast, the unmarried mother...
The Magdalen in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Writing just three years before the dawn of the twentieth century, Mary Costello explicitly links the work of religious congregations that operate Magdalen asylums with “state service.”1 She explains that the nuns’ task requires that they accept “one, two, or three hundred souls,” women from the lowest fields of “licence,” “pleasure-craving temperaments,” and “confirmed inebriates,” and offer them “a spiritual hospital” in which to repent their sinful ways and seek spiritual salvation....
The Magdalen Asylum and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland
Halliday Sutherland‘s interview with the Sisters of Mercy offers a unique perspective on daily life in Galway’s Magdalen asylum midway through the twentieth century.1 It also reveals the anachronism of this nineteenth century paradigm for social control in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the Sisters of Mercy might very well be describing the...
Remembering Ireland's Architecture of Containment
Contemporary stories representing Ireland’s Magdalen laundries emerged in a decade that witnessed a distinct shift in the nation’s willingness to confront its recent past. Although traditionally silent when challenged with controversial social problems, Ireland began to “speak out” in the 1990s with a new openness most evident in controversies generated by the media—particularly in those focusing...
(Ef)facing Ireland’s Magdalen Survivors
Ireland’s last Magdalen laundry closed its doors in October 1996. Two years later a French documentary team obtained unprecedented access to the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge’s Gloucester Street asylum where approximately forty former penitents remained in the nuns’ care. Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen depicts these women in the convent’s chapel, actively participating in the Catholic mass, and receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion. Viewers also see women in their...
The Magdalene Sisters
Peter Mullan’s award-winning film The Magdalene Sisters (2002) tells the stories of four young Irish women incarcerated in a Magdalen asylum.1 The film purports to take place in a convent on the outskirts of Dublin between 1964 and 1968.2 Most Magdalen penitents, like the characters Margaret and Patricia in the film, were institutionalized for that peculiarly Irish sin, perceived sexual immorality; some were single...
Monuments, Magdalens, Memorials
On 20 April 1996 a small crowd of about thirty people gathered in St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, for the unveiling of a plaque attached to a park bench to commemorate countless Irish women who lived and died in the nation’s Magdalen asylums dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century (fig. 6.1; “Magdalen Women Plaque Unveiled” 1996). Set on a small metal plate against a background of sculpted faceless...
Conclusion
Placed in the historical context I have outlined, cultural representations of the Magdalen laundries powerfully illuminate contemporary Irish society’s obligation to the survivors of the nation’s architecture of containment. They document the culpability of church, state, family, and community in maintaining the open secret of the laundries and the abuse of thousands of women confined therein. They...
E-ISBN-13: 9780268092689
E-ISBN-10: 0268092680
Print-ISBN-13: 9780268041274
Print-ISBN-10: 026804127X
Page Count: 312
Illustrations: Images removed; no digital rights.
Publication Year: 2007
OCLC Number: 694144469
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