Society was to blame, not just the Sisters

Eibhear Walshe

History In the aftermath of painful moments of revelation in our social history, scholars have to tread a very careful path. James M Smith's study of Ireland's Magdalen laundries comes in the wake of a great deal of debate and anger about this difficult chapter from our recent past.

Over the past 20 years, the bleak lives of these confined and, thus, marginalised women, lives of unpaid servitude, have been brought into the public eye in Ireland for the first time. Much of this important recovery work has been done by historians, playwrights, screenwriters, visual artists and documentary makers. Smith, a literary critic, evaluates diverse contemporary representations of the women of the Magdalen laundries within the context of the available historical information about these institutions. Most usefully, he also measures the relationship between historical record and literary interpretation to good effect. Dealing with such an emotive subject, Smith makes his own position clear: "The difficulty attending the writing of this book was not, as one might expect, in the research tasks of compiling the resources and mining through the archives . . . The challenge, rather, was how to separate academic detachment from personal indignation. Moral outrage and academic detachment do not sit easily on the same page."

Nevertheless, the tone of Smith's method and writing here is balanced and compassionate, sensitive to the injustices done to these women in the laundries but scrupulous in terms of historical and archival research. Originally places of refuge for socially marginalised women, the Magdalen laundries became institutions for containment in 20th-century Ireland. As Smith writes: "Containing sexual immorality, specifically illegitimacy and prostitution, behind the walls of Ireland's mother and baby homes and Magdalen asylums helped to constitute and to perpetuate the fiction of Irish cultural purity".

These laundries operated with the tacit consent of Irish society at all levels, concealing women at the centre of so-called "problem" issues such as single motherhood, infanticide and illegitimacy within these sites of confinement. Unlike the industrial schools or orphanages or mental hospitals, there was a different system of committal for the laundries, more of a process of referral than committal. Although the Magdalen penitents were never officially categorised as insane or bad or incapable, this was exactly how they were perceived within their society. This may account for the fact that, as Smith points out, all the television and film documentaries about the Magdalen laundries have been made outside Ireland, unlike some of those investigating abuse in Irish orphanages or in industrial schools. Yet the Magdalen laundries provided Irish society at large with a place to conceal unwanted evidence of sexual activity.

Smith explains his chapter divisions in these terms: "They each evaluate how popular and popularizing forms (drama, documentary, film, visual art) reimagine the elided history of Ireland's Magdalen laundries. Although they give voice to a population that was intentionally silenced, and represent the nation's hidden containment culture, these cultural forms have the potential to close down the past."

IN THE FIRST part of his study, Smith provides all the important social and legislative history of these institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries, including a lengthy analysis of the influential Carrigan Report of 1931, an attempt to understand some of the most pressing social problems of the new Irish State. In the second part of his book, called "The Magdalen Laundry in Cultural representation", he examines diverse texts and artworks such as Patricia Burke Grogan's compelling dramas Eclipsed and Stained Glass at Samhain , and the various documentaries, memorials and art installations inspired by the stories of the women in the laundries. In his chapter on the 2002 film The Magdalen Sisters , made by Peter Mullan, Smith offers a balanced reading of a well-intentioned but (in my view) melodramatic film.

Smith is, rightly, hard-hitting about the cruelty of life within these institutions for the women penitents, the loss of liberty, the grind of hard physical work. At the same time, he questions any scapegoating of the religious orders involved. In Smith's own words, "In this broader context, I analyse the discourse of religious vocations in a still- decolonising Ireland to underscore how the nuns on-screen, like the Magdalen penitents they imprison, are also the products of their society, a society defined by a hegemonic social control. I do so not to absolve the responsibility of the religious orders that operated the laundries but rather to underscore the need for Irish society - family members, communities, state, and church - to own the Magdalen scandal and to support calls for redress, reform, and reparation for victims and survivors". Exactly.

Smith makes the point that, in the Mullan film: "The portrayal of Sister Bridget, the convent's tyrannical and heavy-handed mother superior, betrays the director's ambivalent relation to the demands of history and entertainment." Overall, Smith commends Mullan because "his film reveals how both communities of women - the sinners and the saintly - operate in relation to external national, societal, and familial forces".

The scholarship underpinning this study is solid and impressive - even in the footnotes there is a wealth of supporting information. For example, he points out that the claim that 30,000 women were committed to these places in Ireland in the 19th and 20th century is a commonly made one but cannot be proved as long as the archives and records for the laundries remain inaccessible. Smith's most thoughtful chapter is that on remembrance and memorials, where he examines the plaques, installations and commemorative sites in Cork and Dublin.

He concludes his book with a call for recognition, apology and compensation: "In the historical context I have outlined, cultural representations of the Magdalen Laundries powerfully illuminate contemporary Irish society's obligation to the survivors of the nation's architecture of containment. They document the culpability of church, state, family, and community in maintaining the open secret of the laundries and the abuse of thousands of women confined therein". This is a fair-minded, scholarly and sensitive study of a profoundly difficult chapter in our recent and living history.

Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment By James M Smith University of Notre Dame Press, 320pp. $28

Eibhear Walshe lectures in the department of English, University College Cork. His biography, Kate O'Brien: A Writing Life, was published by Irish Academic Press in 2006

? 2007 The Irish Times