Abstract

Between the 1920s and their closure in 1996, Ireland’s Magdalene laundries confined thousands of women and girls who were deemed morally or socially deviant by the combined power of the Church and state. While nineteenth-century asylums typically served as places of reform for prostitutes, the laundries of the newly independent Irish Republic confined unmarried mothers, girls whose behavior was considered unmanageable, and girls transferred from other state-run institutions, including orphanages, industrial schools, and mother and baby homes. Under the supervision of nuns, the women were forced to do unpaid domestic labor that served as both punishment and a method of moral rehabilitation. The Magdalene laundries operated as instruments of social and institutional containment within a larger established cultural system that regulated women’s behavior in line with an idealized Irish identity defined by chastity and obedience. This system largely relied upon the perception of Irish women as representations of the nation’s moral virtue. Thus, the church and state’s obsession with perceived moral degeneration fueled their efforts to both “cure” the nation of such behavior and to conceal the fact that it existed in the first place. The endurance of the institutions throughout the twentieth century was facilitated by both the state’s capitulation to the Church and by public complicity. An ingrained culture of silence and shame normalized the confinement of women and girls, allowing their systemic abuse to persist in what was virtually plain sight. 

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