The Fallen
The Lost Girls of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A haunting and brilliantly researched history which interrogates the culture of shame in Ireland, and tells the full story, for the first time, of the women confined within the walls of the Magdalene Laundries in the 20th century.
Everyone familiar with Ireland’s history has heard of the Magdalene Laundries, places where “fallen” women were sent for reform, but few understand that the Laundries were part of a larger carceral system in Ireland. There were prisons, but also asylums, industrial and reformatory schools, Mother and Baby Homes, and County Homes, each of which operated alongside the Magdalene Laundries. Taken together, this system of confinement held over one percent of the Irish population, a staggering rate that outstrips the current rate of mass incarceration in the United States.
The Magdalene Laundries specifically targeted towards women, and the actions that could necessitate a woman’s reform were vast: wearing a short skirt, smoking, defiance, or, most troubling, pregnancy out of wedlock. Women were taken off the street, admitted by their families, or sent by the state when a girl had no family. Once a woman entered the system, it was almost impossible to leave.
In writing this book, Louise Brangan has pulled the curtain back on the insecurities of a young nation, showing that Ireland believed that if women could be controlled, so could an entire populace. She shares the stories of the girls who were kept there: Eileen, who was born into a Mother and Baby Home; Carmel, who was forced to take a new name when she entered the Laundries; Brigid, so broken by twenty-seven years on the inside of a laundry, who discovered that once she was released she was completely unsuited to life in everyday society. These stories, taken directly from the historical record, restore the dignity of the women who were sent away and recontextualize the decades that the Laundries acted as a de facto carceral system for the women of Ireland.
This has remained one of the darkest and most misunderstood periods of recent history. The Fallen compels us not only to confront this shameful past, but to ask a deeper question: what do we choose to remember?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This exceptional history from public policy scholar Brangan (The Politics of Punishment) spotlights the traumatic experiences of the girls and women institutionalized in Ireland's Magdalene Laundries. These industrial laundries operated by the Catholic Church—the last of which closed in 1996—doubled as "Ireland's main carceral institution," imprisoning and enslaving approximately 10,000 girls and women perceived as "fallen." Aiming to counter a "powerful misconception" about the Laundries—they are often confused with the likewise sinister Mother and Baby Homes—the author contextualizes the Laundries within the rise of an authoritarian style of Catholicism in the impoverished and chaotic years after Ireland's independence and provides a glimpse of their horrors through accounts from survivors, whose descriptions of day-to-day life form the book's harrowing emotional core: from the humid and dangerous environment of the laundry itself, to women's inability to socialize with others, to the nuns' draconian punishments like forcing one woman to "eat from her bowl like a dog" or only referring to the women as numbers. The women's confusion, shame, and dehumanization ("We were never allowed... to be human, really") come alive in terrible force, as does their despair that "no one was coming for them." After they escaped the Laundries, the women struggled within a society they barely knew after being left sequestered and uneducated. Brangn delivers a profoundly haunting account of stolen lives.
