I recently saw the movie The Magdalene Sisters. Here’s the premise: For 150 years, ending in 1996, teenage girls in Ireland who got pregnant or raped, or were so attractive it was assumed they would eventually become promiscuous, were sent by their parents to prisonlike asylums run by the Catholic church. Nuns oversaw day-to-day operations. The girls were forced to work in laundries from dawn till dusk 364 days a year and were fed only gruel. The asylums were surrounded by high walls topped with broken glass and had locked gates and bars on the windows. Nuns stood guard at night to make sure no one escaped. Far from being released upon turning 21, these girls were imprisoned for life; in the words of the movie’s mother superior, “I decide when or if you’re allowed to leave.” Thirty thousand women were locked up in these asylums over the years.
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I’m assuming even the Catholic church in Ireland wasn’t exempt from laws against false imprisonment and the like, so these women had to know they were being held illegally. Despite the high walls and so on, it’s hard to imagine a woman of, say, 35 having remained there since age 18 or 19 simply because she’d been physically prevented from leaving. Could a religious organization hold someone against her will decade after decade? Wouldn’t the more determined eventually find a way out? The inmates outnumbered the nuns by a wide margin. It’s not like the nuns were armed. What gives? –Mark Reynolds, Carol Stream, Illinois
- Named for the New Testament prostitute, the Magdalene movement originated in 18th-century England. Magdalene asylums took in fallen women–prostitutes initially, then unwed mothers and eventually, in Ireland at least, any female suspected of being out there sexually, including girls who were simply flirtatious. In Sex in a Cold Climate, the 1998 documentary by Steve Humphries that inspired Mullan to make his film, four former inmates speak chillingly of the cruelty of the nuns in charge, some of whom had once been inmates themselves. A good if narrow account is Do Penance or Perish: A Study of Magdalen Asylums in Ireland (2001) by Frances Finnegan.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
