(IRELAND)
Collider [New York NY]
November 16, 2024
By Lloyd Farley
Editor’s note: This article contains descriptions of abuse towards women that may be triggering.Ireland is no stranger to tragedy: victimized by famine, recession, torn apart by the Troubles (a period captured in FX’s Say Nothing), and more. But the film Small Things Like These has ripped the bandage off an Irish wound that was first inflicted in the 18th century, an excruciating film about a reprehensible system designed by the Catholic Church to torture and slut-shame women, masquerading as charity: the Magdalene Laundries. Only the film captures a fictional moment in the history of the Magdalene Laundries, a mere glimpse, a snapshot, into their long, shameful, and true-life history.
The Magdalene Laundries of ‘Small Things Like These’ Turned from Rehabilitation to Damnation
Tim Mielants also discuses adapting such a sensitive and important story.
The laundries were borne out of the Magdalene Movement in the mid-18th century, a campaign supported by Catholic and Protestant churches as a place for “fallen women,” primarily sex workers, to enter voluntarily, spending time rehabilitating and learning a “respectable” profession (Ireland’s first institution was founded by the Protestant Church in 1765). The goal was to use the skills they learned after leaving to earn money, and as they were practicing their crafts, any money they made supported the institution. The laundries were established in America, Australia, Britain, and other European locales, as well as Ireland. Although they started as an interdenominational effort, they became primarily Catholic institutions over time. From there, they quickly devolved from rehabilitating willing participants with short-term stays into something worse.
Per History, the focus turned to forcing women to “redeem themselves,” through lace-making, needlework, or doing laundry, and the stays grew longer (The Economist found a study of an institution where the average was almost 24 years). “Voluntarily” became mandatory, with women being sent there, even by the Irish government. The definition of “fallen women” grew to entail not just sex workers, but inmates from psychiatric centers and jails, women with special needs, rape and sexual assault victims, unwed teenagers and women who had become pregnant, and girls whose only sins were being “too flirtatious or tempting to men.“ The laundries were run for profit by orders of Roman Catholic nuns off the backs of women forced to work for free six or seven days a week as penance, largely on a diet of just bread and water.
Women Suffered Horrific Abuses in the Magdalene Laundries of ‘Small Things Like These’
Most of the women were forced to have their hair cut short, adhere to strict rules of silence, and were given new names (per The New York Times). Consequences, per History, included physical, mental, and sexual abuse, solitary confinement, being forced to sleep in the cold, and other degradations. The pregnant, unwed women would be routed to mother and baby homes, also run by nuns, where they would deliver the children, only for those children to be removed from their care and handed over to other families. One woman’s story of trying to reunite with her son was adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie, Philomena, starring Judi Dench. The women then, per The Economist, would be forced to work at the home or transferred back to a laundry. One woman (per New York Times) was so horribly abused that she tried to end her life by setting herself on fire. The same woman would recount that she escaped for three months from a laundry in Cork, only to be escorted back by “child protection “officials.
Discoveries of Mass Sites Uncover the Horrors of the Magdalene Laundries Decades Later
Two events brought the Magdalene Laundries out of the shadows and into public scrutiny. The first occurred in 1993 when a religious order in Dublin that housed a laundry sold a portion of its land to a developer, who uncovered a mass, unmarked grave containing the bodies of 155 women who had died in the laundry. A second, even more chilling, discovery came in 2017 when a large quantity of human remains were found in a mass grave on the site of what used to be St. Mary’s mother and baby home in Tuam, Galway. This came after Irish historian Catherine Corless presented research that showed a devastating 796 babies died at this laundry in the years between 1925 and 1961. If this wasn’t sickening enough, it was found that many of the babies’ bodies had been dumped in a septic tank. It’s believed that up to 300,000 women passed through the laundries. But the most troubling number is 231, the number of years between the opening of the first Magdalene Laundry to the closing of the last in 1996.
Like the claims of sexual abuse in Ireland’s religious-run schools and the shameful history of residential schools in Canada, the Magdalene Laundries are a stain on the Catholic Church, and the silence on their active participation is deafening. The Irish government, however, held themselves accountable for their involvement, and in 2013, Ireland’s president apologized to the Magdalene victims and announced a compensation fund. The Church has never given out any form of compensation to their victims or their families.
As The Economist points out, the church still manages more than 90% of primary schools and 50% of secondary, so it is largely up to films like Small Things Like These to educate and ensure that the story of the Magdalene Laundries is heard. Even a snapshot brings awareness to the larger, horrifying story.
Small Things Like These is playing in theaters now.