Shaped By Silence: Stories from Inmates of the Good Shepherd Laundries and Reformatories by Rie Croll (review)

Since the 1990s, reports, commissions, and studies have revealed the extensive historical abuse of vulnerable populations within institutions whose stated purpose was moral reform, protection, or education, especially of young people, most often girls and women. Shaped by Silence explores the stories of five women (two Canadian, two Australian, and one Irish) who endured the harsh, punitive regimes of the Roman Catholic Church's Sisters of the Good Shepherd between the 1930s and the 1960s. Often incarcerated at the whim of family or clergy who defined these young women as unmanageable or as sexually promiscuous, these tales of transnational cruelty reveal the exploitation of their labour, erasure of individual identity–as they were often renamed– and denial of real education. Furthermore, communication with other inmates was forbidden, and they endured intimidation, limited family contact, severe punishments (such as isolation), and constant surveillance. While Irish Magdalene laundries have become more widely known through investigations, apologies, and popular culture, much less is known about these institutions in other parts of the world, including Europe, England, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Canada. Variously labelled as industrial schools, asylums, homes, or reformatories, these laundries emerged in nineteenth-century Ireland alongside prisons, asylums, and workhouses. The histories revealed here are remarkably similar under the authoritarian rule of the Good Shepherd sisters.

As author and cultural sociologist Rie Croll argues, it is important to hear these stories in the face of attempts to deny the abuse, erase the wrongs, and the refusal to open the archives. The aging of former inmates and the disappearance of the physical infrastructure also threaten to obliterate their lives. Croll draws on the many reports and commissions available and on some historical research. For the Canadian stories she cites Joan Sangster's Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family and the Law in Ontario, Andrée Lévesque's Making and Breaking the Rules: Women in Quebec, 1919–1939, and Tamara Myers's Caught: Montreal's Modern Girls and the Law, 1869–1945. The author's background as a therapist for abused girls and women provided her with access to the online group "Justice for Magdalenes." Over several years of involvement with the group, Croll was able to interview the five women between 2009 and 2016. Conscious of her academic position and influence, she encouraged interviewees to shape their own stories and to decide what to include/exclude. Their intentions, Croll reports, are to make their stories widely known, to challenge the dominant narratives about these institutions, and to bring these experiences into the political realm. In 2016, a widely circulated magazine article brought contact with three more women, two of whom are Canadian, whose search for information about female relatives suggests the intergenerational effects of such incarceration.

Two of the five interviewees spent time in Canadian laundries, one in Saint John, the other in Toronto. Chaparral (her chosen name) is Indigenous. Born in 1934, she grew up in the Saint John laundry where her thirteen-year-old mother was sent–on the advice of a priest–because she was pregnant as a result of rape. Her mother spent many years there until she was no longer able to work and was then put out on the street. Chaparral spent eighteen years in the institution, treated as a bastard and subjected to sexual and other forms of abuse. Her birth was not registered, further erasing her identity and reinforcing her sense that she was at fault. Although she lost herself in addiction and prostitution and experienced violence from partners, with the help of a doctor and through creative writing, she eventually became involved with Indigenous youth in suicide prevention. A court case against the religious order failed to bring any redress.

Like Chaparral's mother, Autumn (a pseudonym) was thirteen years old when she was sent, by a magistrate, to Toronto's St. Mary's Training...