generalspeaking

Societal Dysfunction

"Almost to a body, the [surviving] women described them [Magdalene Laundries] as 'Dickensian'."
"Everything was taken away that was a reminder of a possession of identity. [The institutions based on the notion of contagious] moral pollution."
"They're told that they are bad, they're shameful, they're sluts, that they have done something really wrong. The state has imprisoned them and the Church has imprisoned them, and their families have abandoned them."
"The language that's used to describe them is shameful -- you need to clean, you need to clean, you need to clean, you need to be penitent. You are not worthy of your old name. You may not mention  your former life. This is a stripping-away, through ideology and words, that creates a stigma that becomes internalized and believed -- believed as fact."
"It broke their resistance to other more immediate and explicit forms of violence in their lives."
"The state was working with the church, and families were, too."
"[Women were seen as] solely responsible for any sexual transgression that's happening in society."
"The very system of incarceration that was supposed to reform them, became a significant factor in shaping their lifelong inequality. Those who the church and state targeted for saving were simultaneously treated as bad, dirty and unsalvageable."
Rie Croll, associate professor of social cultural studies, Memorial University, Newfoundland

Relatives of victims of the Magdalene Laundries hold a candle lit vigil in solidarity with Justice for Magdalene Survivors and their families outside Leinster House in Dublin, Ireland, on Feb. 19, 2013. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Peter Morrison

"Those poor women. They staggered on to the street [at the 1996 closure of the last Magdalene laundry in Dublin]."
"He said [Irish politician] they didn't even know how to cross a busy, modern street."
"They were so institutionalized. It was heartbreaking."

These were Catholic institutions for wayward girls and women. They were called the Magdalene Laundries, meant to provide asylum to "fallen" women; unwed mothers, former prostitutes, young girls who ran away from home.... Women and girls as young as 12 or 13 were institutionalized in these places to live out their lives as labourers, boiling and stirring, rinsing and wringing and hanging out laundry in service to wealthy, respectable members of society.

They were given the opportunity to redeem themselves by this labour, living in isolation from decent society for they were indecent by implication.

While the laundries infamously began in Ireland, they also turned up in the U.K. Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada. In Canada the Sisters of the Good Shepherd operated over a dozen of these institutions for girls and women; from the Maritimes, to Ottawa, to Vancouver. These 19th Century institutions were a plague posing as a rescue mission for naughty girls and women where they would learn a respectable trade and be useful to society.

The last to remain in operation was in Toronto. The St. Mary's Training School was finally shuttered in 1973.

Few records survive. There is no data on how many Canadian women were incarcerated or how many now survive. Survivors and their families shamed into silence. In these institutions, at dawn the nuns clapped their hands to awaken the women who leaped out of bed, dropped to their knees and prayed. They were dressed in long cotton dresses and aprons. Dressing was performed under their nightgowns for no one, not even those among whom they lived, must see their naked bodies.

A Magdalene Laundry in England in the early Twentieth Century, from Frances Finnegan, Do Penance or Perish, Congrave Press, 2001.Wikimedia Common

Quietly washing, silence reigned throughout as they filed into the dining hall for their meals, and then in equal silence into the laundry workroom. Where they were to spend the day, boiling, scrubbing, rinsing, squeezing, hanging laundry to dry, then ironing it. An hour before bedtime a break would be announced when they would make rosaries for sale to the public. Their ordinary street clothing had been confiscated, hair and nails cut short. Their given names were abandoned as they were re-named, forbidden to use their own.

They might remain in the laundries on an indefinite basis, or their length of time extended at will; their sins were to have become involved in sex work, or having been pregnant out of marriage; others "defiant", "incorrigible", or "wayward", others yet "lipping off to their parents, smoking cigarettes, stuff that in those days would have been shocking", explained Rie Croll who had interviewed as many of the former inmates as she could find. One of whom had been declared "unmanageable", sentenced in 1961 to a reformatory for sneaking away from her abusive parents in preference to spending evenings with friends.

One of the interviewed had been born in a Good Shepherd Laundry in Saint John, New Brunswick in 1934, her mother a 13-year-old Indigenous girl, impregnated through gang rape. Mother and daughter worked side-by-side from the time the girl reached eight years of age until she finally managed to escape over a fence, at age 18. The institutes were used to shield society's violence and dysfunction within families where adolescent girls, victims of incest ended up; little wonder families felt no urgency in reclaiming them.

Labels: Catholic Church, Imprisonment, Magdalene Laundry

posted by Pieface @ Friday, June 14, 2019