Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment

Introduction

Introduction The Politics of Sexual Knowledge The Origins of Ireland’s Containment Culture and the Carrigan Report (1931) Whenever a child is born outside wedlock, so shocked is the public sense by the very unusual occurrence, that it brands with an irreparable stigma, and, to a large extent, excommunicates the woman guilty of the crime. James F. Cassidy, The Woman of the Gael (1922) 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 faced shame, betrayal, and exile. With little or no social welfare system to fall back on, her choices were limited to entering the county home, begging on the streets, or possibly resorting to prostitution. Cassidy’s scenario carefully avoided the unmarried mother’s male partner, father to her illegitimate child. Similarly, he ignored the social powerbrokers— church and state—that facilitated these communal responses. 1 Smith 00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 PM Page 1 The historically powerful Catholic Church and the fledgling Irish Free State cooperated increasingly throughout the 1920s as the self-appointed guardians of the nation’s moral climate. Already by 1925 this partnership had provoked legislation establishing censorship of films and proscribing divorce, characteristic hallmarks of the socially repressive Free State society. These initiatives were followed by a series of official investigations , for example, the Inquiry Regarding Venereal Disease (1926), the Committee on Evil Literature (1927), and the Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor Including the Insane Poor (1928). Such inquiries typically generated lengthy reports that resulted in legislation addressing social and moral issues, including the Censorship of Publications Act (1929), the Illegitimate Children (Affiliation Orders) Act (1930), the Legitimacy Act (1931), the Registration of Maternity Homes Act (1934), and the Dance Halls Act (1935). This chapter examines the historical contexts informing one final church-state initiative from the early Free State years, the Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts (1880–85) and Juvenile Prostitution (hereafter referred to as the Carrigan Committee), its ensuing report, and the subsequent Criminal Law Amendment Act (1935). The Carrigan Report, I propose , was a formative moment in establishing an official state attitude toward “sexual immorality” and the subsequent legislation in authorizing the nation’s containment culture.1 In its concrete form Ireland’s architecture of containment encompassed an array of interdependent institutions: industrial and reformatory schools, mother and baby homes, adoption agencies, and Magdalen asylums, among others. In its more abstract form this architecture comprised both the legislation that inscribed these issues and the numerous official and public discourses that resisted admitting to the existence and function of their affiliated institutions (Smith 1997, 2001). In arriving at a hegemonic discourse that responded to perceived sexual immorality , the Carrigan Report and the Criminal Law Amendment Act sanitized state policy with respect to institutional provision. They disembodied sexual practice by obscuring social realities, especially illegitimacy , in discursive abstractions. And they concealed sexual crime, especially rape, infanticide, and abuse, while simultaneously sexualizing the women and children unfortunate enough to fall victim to society ’s moral proscriptions.2 Moreover, this official discourse helped to construct an illusion of political nonpartisanship against the backdrop I R E L A N D ’S M AG DA L E N L AU N D R I E S 2 Smith 00.Intro 7/12/07 1:54 PM Page 2 of post–civil war divisiveness. Finally, it helped to engineer widespread public consent by way of the legislative agenda, even while the operative functions of the institutional response to sexual practice were shrouded in secrecy. An examination of the Carrigan Report and its political reception in this context underscores how the discourse of sexual immorality enabled, even as it was perceived to threaten, postindependent Ireland’s nativist national imaginary.3 Recent feminist historiography has considered how the project of national identity formation in the decades following independence mobilized Catholic notions of sexual morality in ways that were particularly oppressive for Irish women.4 Against the backdrop of partition and fueled by the desire to “create a new imagined community within the boundaries of the...