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

The Magdalen in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

C H A P T E R 1 The Magdalen in Nineteenth-Century Ireland There is no branch of state service for which religious communities are more especially fitted, and in which they succeed more notably, than in the rescue of fallen women. Mary Costello, “The Sisterhood of Sorrow. No. II.— The Magdalens,” 15 March 1897 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. Entry to the asylum requires that the penitent women “abjure” their former habits and lead lives of “virtue,” “sobriety,” and “restraint.” They must be prepared to “look upon the joys of this world as at an end” and spend their “remaining days in works of usefulness and abnegation .” And, Costello underscores, the women must enter the asylum 23 Smith 01 7/12/07 1:56 PM Page 23 T H E M AG DA L E N ASY LU M A N D H I S TO RY 24 voluntarily, for the “Sisters have no legal control,” and the women remain “free to leave the institution at any moment they like” (Costello 1897b, 7). One might reasonably ask how the nuns supported their charitable activities, since unlike the industrial and reformatory schools also managed by many religious congregations, Magdalen institutions were never funded by government capitation grants. In the main, these institutions survived by means of a combination of charitable donations, endowments received through wills and legacies, and the operation of commercial laundries in which the penitent women worked without remuneration .2 In addition, many sectors of society benefited from the religious communities’ “state service.” The governing burden of the British colonial administration was lightened as it increasingly ceded responsibility to the Catholic Church for areas of social welfare including education, health care, and institutional provision. Irish society in general, especially the emerging Catholic middle class, strengthened its identity as a nation; its sense of modernization and progress was increasingly vested in notions of social and moral respectability. The religious communities acquired significant social and cultural authority through their charitable work and, in the case of the Magdalen asylums, accumulated financial resources through the operation of commercial and presumably profitable enterprises. Some penitents even might be seen to have benefited from the short-term refuge of the Magdalen in the absence of alternative forms of relief and assistance. In laying the historical background for this study of the Magdalen institutions in twentieth-century Irish society, this chapter considers the intersection of these spheres of interest in the preceding century. The written history of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums is almost exclusively focused on nineteenth-century Ireland. Indeed, the historical record comes to an abrupt end with the advent of the twentieth century . Because the religious congregations that operated these laundry institutions continue to deny access to records for women entering the asylums after 1900, historians are constrained in what they can say, with authority, about the Magdalen laundries as they developed and continued to operate throughout the past century. We know that these voluntary asylums developed in the nineteenth century in relation to apparently high levels of prostitution in Irish society.3 We know that the asylums reflect the emergence of women’s involvement in philanthropy. And we also know that they signal the dominant influence of Catholic Smith 01 7/12/07 1:56 PM Page 24 female religious in postfamine Ireland. This history underscores, moreover , how Ireland’s Magdalen asylums changed significantly throughout the first 133 years of their existence. Institutions founded with a philanthropic mission became, by the close of the nineteenth century, more carceral than rehabilitative in nature. The origins of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums stretch back to 1767 when Lady Arbella Denny opened the first refuge for “fallen women” at 8 Leeson Street in Dublin.4 As its mission, the asylum promised the women that they would be sheltered from “Shame, from Reproach, from Disease , from Want, from the base Society that ha[d] either drawn [them] into vice, or prevailed upon [them] to continue in...