They were the forgotten women of Ireland,
kept under lock and key, forced to clean and sew, and to wash away the
sins of their previous life while never being paid a penny.
Some stayed
months, others years. Some never left.
They were the inmates of
Ireland’s notorious 20th century workhouses, the Magdalene Laundries.
And this week, with the publication of a government report into the dark
history of the laundries, the women came that much closer to obtaining
justice.
The laundries — a beneficent-sounding word that helped hide the
mistreatment that took place inside their walls — were operated by four
orders of Catholic nuns in Ireland from 1922 to 1996.
Over 10,000 young
women, considered a burden by family, school and the state, spent an
average of six months to a year locked up in these workhouses doing
unpaid, manual work. Some were kept there against their will for years.
Their numbers were made up by unmarried mothers and their daughters,
women and girls who had been sexually abused, women with mental or
physical disabilities who were unable to live independently, and young
girls who had grown up under the care of the church and the state.
The
laundries were “a mechanism that society, religious orders and the state
came up with to try and get rid of people deemed not to be conforming
to the so-called mythical, cultural purity that was supposed to be part
of Irish identity,” Irish historian Diarmaid Ferriter told Ireland’s
national broadcasting service, RTE, this week.
Known as the fallen
women, the workers were only entitled to leave if signed out by a family
member or if a nun found a position of work for them, and if they tried
to escape the confines of the home they were brought back by the Irish
police.
The report released this week by an Irish government committee
focused on Irish state involvement in the Magdalene Laundries and
revealed previously unknown details about the women, many of whom spent
years of their lives locked in these workhouses.
The report found that a
total of 2,124 women (26.5%) of the 10,012 admitted from 1922 to 1996
were referred by the state. Successive Irish governments have denied
that the state played a role in sending women to the workhouses.
The
report also found that the youngest girl to have been admitted was 9
years old while the oldest woman was 89. Nearly 900 women died while
working in the laundries, the youngest of whom was 15 years old. The
findings state that “the psychological impact on these girls was
undoubtedly traumatic and lasting.”
For years, advocacy support groups representing the women who lived
in the laundries have called for the Irish government to offer a full
apology on behalf of the state.
Following the release of the report on
Feb. 5, Prime Minister Enda Kenny repeatedly apologized for any “stigma”
that was attached to these “fallen women” and also apologized for the
length of time it had taken for the government to carry out the inquiry,
but he did not acknowledge that the state shared responsibility for
what happened to the women in the laundries.
He has called for a
parliamentary debate later in February at which MPs are due to discuss
how the government should respond in full to the findings of the report.
Professor James Smith of Boston College, who has written two books on
the history of the Magdalene Laundries, voiced his dissatisfaction with
the government’s response.
“I wrote in the Irish Times today
that this government would be judged on its response to the report,”
Smith said in an e-mail to TIME, “but Mr. Kenny has failed that test.”
Meanwhile, a key advocacy group, Justice for Magdalenes (JFM), has
called once again not only for an apology but also for the Irish
government to establish a “transparent and nonadversarial compensation
process that includes the provision of pensions, lost wages, health and
housing services.”
Mari Steed, co-founder and committee director for JFM, was adopted
from a laundry when she was a baby and says it was the discovery of her
birth mother’s past that motivated her to find out the truth behind the
laundries.
Steed discovered that her maternal grandmother had given birth to
four children out of wedlock, something that was greatly frowned upon by
many in mid-20th century Ireland.
Steed’s grandmother’s family, ashamed
of their daughter, sent her to Manchester to start a new life on her
own — away from her children.
Soon after she arrived in England she got
married and went on to have seven children, but she never told her
husband about her other four children in Ireland. One of these was a
girl named Josephine — Steed’s birth mother.
When Josephine was separated from her mother, she was sent by family
members to a tough residential industrial school, run by nuns, in the
city of Waterford. When she was 14, the nuns transferred Josephine to a
Magdalene Laundry in Cork, in the south of the country.
She spent the
next decade behind its walls. (Josephine is still alive but requested
that her daughter, Steed, only provide her first name to TIME).
Educated by nuns, Josephine had minimal knowledge of the outside
world and no experience of men. “They were easy prey because they were
so naive and vulnerable,” explains Steed.
The nuns found Josephine a job
working in a hospital in Dublin and allowed her to leave the laundry.
She met a man named Arthur at a dance when she was 27 and became
pregnant by him — but he had a partner and two children, says Steed, who
learned the history from her mother.
Josephine told him she was
pregnant and he went to visit his newborn baby in Cork, but he felt his
duty was to his wife and children in England. A relationship with
Josephine and her child was impossible in 1950s Ireland, although, as
Steed recalls, it was “evident he brooded over it his whole life.”
Steed spent the first 18 months of her life with Josephine in a
mother-and-baby home in Cork but was adopted in 1961 by an American
couple who lived in Philadelphia.
Josephine was heartbroken to see her baby girl taken away from her, but
she had little choice — she was a young, single Irish mother with no
financial or family support.
It was then she made the decision to never
to have children again for fear that they, too, would be taken away.
Josephine, like many other Magdalene women, fled to England once the
nuns released her from the laundry. She married twice but kept her life
in the laundries a secret from her partners.
“It was difficult for a lot
of the survivors, especially those who went to the U.K. and were really
trying to blend in,” Steed says. “It really wasn’t something you wanted
people to know because they’d make fun of you and you’d get bullied for
it.”
After they were reunited, Steed took her mother to Ireland in 2002.
It was Josephine’s first trip to her homeland in 40 years, but she no
longer felt any connection to the country where she had suffered so
much. “The more I thought about it,” recalls Steed, “what did Ireland
have for her?”
The release of Tuesday’s report means that women like Josephine may
finally have the courage to step forward and identify themselves.
But
first they need recognition of state involvement in the laundries from
the Irish government, says Steed.
“I believe the absence of an apology
and an invitation to talk about what happened has kept people silent,”
says Maeve O’Rourke, a legal representative for JFM.
O’Rourke, who
interviewed women who had been kept in the laundries against their will
for a submission to the U.N. Committee Against Torture, believes that an
official acknowledgment from the state could bring an end to the stigma
and shame associated with having lived in a laundry.
These women
“vividly described the ongoing effects to me, in terms of mental health
issues, poverty and isolation,” she says.
The testimonials she gathered paint a dark picture of the deep scars
the laundries left on the women. In the U.N. submission, one woman wrote
anonymously: “I am still treated for depression,
for years and years. And I had tried to commit suicide many times in
the past. I never found happiness. I felt like broken pieces, and I
never felt in one piece.”
Others are still nervous about returning to
Ireland — some even harbor the fear that they could be sent back to the
laundries. “I ask them how they feel now about Ireland, and they feel
betrayed,” explains O’Rourke.
“They feel conflicted because it’s their
country, it’s their identity, but it has failed them so badly.”