Content warning: rape; sexual, emotional, and physical abuse; forced labor; eating disorders; mental illness
My uncle hadn’t briefed me ahead of our movie night to see The Magdalene Sisters (2002). I didn’t bother to investigate the movie’s premise, either. I simply accepted his invitation, which came shortly after the film’s U.S. release in 2003, and we went on a Thursday evening to an intimate theatre in Philadelphia. While we waited for the lights to dim, he mentioned that this movie was based on true events and people. I gave a quick nod to acknowledge I’d heard him.
The film begins with an innocuous wedding party; the priest chants as he plays the bodhrán. However, with swift escalation, Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is lured by her cousin off the dance floor to an empty storage room. There he kisses her against her will, and, when she attempts to stop his advances, rapes her. Watching the scene unfold, I gripped the arms of my seat, helpless that I couldn’t rescue her from under the weight of his body on top of hers or move his hand covering her mouth, stifling and silencing her screams.
My confusion and frustration intensified when, after she confides in a wedding guest, some of the men (including her father) throw her disgusted looks, rather than hold the cousin accountable for his actions. To make matters worse, the following morning Margaret is sent to a home for wayward girls, commonly known as the Magdalene laundries or asylums — places rampant with abuse of all kinds, little to no formal education, and forced physical labor — where she’d pay for someone else’s crime.
In her March 2018 History article, Erin Blakemore notes, “Ireland’s first […] Magdalen Asylum for Penitent Females in Dublin, was founded by the Protestant Church of Ireland in 1765,” to reform prostitutes, as well as prevent “susceptible” women (i.e., those who’d been seduced, had sex outside of marriage, or had conceived out of wedlock) from becoming prostitutes. Over time, though, the laundries became primarily Catholic institutions, run by the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Charity, the Good Shepherd Sisters, and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, but were “supported by the Irish government, which funneled money toward the system,” Blakemore states. As a result, the conditions were as survivor Maureen Sullivan says, “worse than a prisoner. A prisoner had rights; we had no rights. Everything was taken from me — my name, my rights as a child to grow up and play with other children; my rights to communicate with other people.”
The residents who lived in The Magdalene Laundries, “an interlocking system of orphanages, industrial schools, ‘mother and baby homes’ for unwed mothers and church-run institutions,” according to Ed O’Loughlin, were forced to leave their real names behind, just as Sullivan, and called “child” or “penitent” instead. O’Loughlin says, “Some women were confined to the laundries for life and were forced to work long hours in poor conditions with bad food, no pay and little or no medical or educational support. The women and girls […] were told they should toil as penance for their sins.”
According to Carol Ryan, in her 2011 New York Times piece, “The story of the Magdalene women was uncovered in 1993 when a religious order in Dublin […] sold a portion of its land to a developer. The bodies of 155 women who had died in the laundry were exhumed from unmarked graves and the media began to ask questions.” But these laundries were far from a “thing of the past” in 1993. In fact, Gary Culliton reported on September 25, 1996, at the closing of Ireland’s last laundry, located on Sean Mac Dermott Street, “A woman in her twenties with a mild mental handicap was admitted as recently as last year.”
In 2002, upon the release of Peter Mullan’s film, The Magdalene Sisters, the story of the hidden corruption of the Magdalene Laundries made international headlines.
When I saw the film, I’d already felt unfulfilled as a member of the Catholic Church. I’d become increasingly aware of stories of sexually abusive priests across my state and across the country, and I questioned the teachings and “truths.” And then, The Magdalene Sisters, though fictionalized, presented yet another twisted facet of the Catholic Church’s embedded patriarchy and problematic treatment of women.
After Margaret gets sent away for being raped, Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) is sent away for being too beautiful and flirtatious, and Rose (Dorothy Duffy) for being an unmarried mother. Their stories converge at the Magdalene Asylum, with Crispina (Eileen Walsh), an unmarried mother who has cognitive impairments. These women, along with the countless others, are forced to stay at the asylum, bearing their “sins,” working for their redemption through prayer and physical labor.
Already perturbed at the ridiculous reasons for their captivity, I found it difficult to watch the inmates suffering during the scenes of physical labor, such as when the four featured women scrub soiled linens on boards in basins of hot water. There are other intense scenes of physical abuse, like when Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan) beats Rose with a belt. Real survivor, Mary Smith, confirms in an oral history that the nuns enforced strict rules of silence and ruled the laundries through beatings.
But these scenes seemed like child’s play compared to the outwardly destructive and inhumane scenes.
For many women, our hair is a symbol of youth, beauty, and fertility. Bernadette, too, uses her hair as a means of playfulness and flirtation. When she is caught trying to escape the dormitory, however, the nuns’ punishment is to cut her hair, stripping her of her femininity and forcing her to be homely. Sister Bridget even asks what Bernadette will do without her beauty, implying that perhaps there’s nothing left to do except repent and achieve salvation.
While the loss of her hair is detrimental to Bernadette’s image, it is only the superficial component. The underlying problem in this scene is that the delivery boy who was originally involved in the escape plan conveniently gets to change his mind after calling her a whore (the added insult to injury), and is able to go on with his life, scot-free, in the same fashion as Margaret’s cousin at the beginning of the film. Bernadette suffers the consequences of someone else’s actions, humiliated.
Similarly, Crispina pays for a priest’s actions, ultimately with her life. After repeated sexual abuse throughout the film, she finally reveals physical evidence of her assault. She is told to be quiet and is taken to a new home for women with mental illness, where she succumbs at 24 to her illnesses, including bulimia and anorexia. The subtext of these scenes is even when someone causes you pain, shut up and go away!
The worst scene is when the nuns force all of the inmates to stand in a line, naked, in the communal bathroom to be treated as entertainment devices in a sadistic game. The nuns degrade the women with commentary and comparisons of their body parts and pubic hair. They abuse the women’s vulnerability and desecrate their dignity, rather than being valued and treated with respect.
As told to Joe Humphreys for The Irish Times, director Peter Mullan claims that survivors, as part of a sampling of 118, “denied that women were stripped naked and examined by nuns” but that the “use of hair cutting as punishment is confirmed by a set of laundry ‘house rules.’” Humphreys’ same article raises the question of other factual inaccuracies and “concerns about some of the dramatisations,” raised by former novitiate Patricia Burke Brogan, whose own play, Eclipsed, highlights the plight of the laundry residents.
The film’s final note states that over 30,000 women across Ireland had been treated in the same way as the four main characters. I knew this film would stand as an unfortunate relic of the Catholic Church’s tainted past, encapsulating the stories of hordes of women who’d lived, worked, and suffered in the laundries.
In 2014, Padraic Halpin reported, “Advocacy groups for women forced to work at the Catholic Church’s notorious Magdalene laundries in Ireland backed calls from the United Nations for religious orders to pay compensation and face prosecution for decades of abuse.” Although the Irish government agreed to pay 58 million euros ($78 million) to hundreds of Magdalene laundry workers as a result of state-sanctioned punishment, the Catholic nuns who ran the laundries did not contribute to the compensation scheme. In addition, though the Catholic Church criticized The Magdalene Sisters as “propaganda,” all four religious orders that operated the laundries declined participation in the only Irish-made documentary on the topic, called The Forgotten Maggies (available on YouTube).
The documentary showcases several women whose harrowing testimonies make Margaret’s, Bernadette’s, Rose’s, and Crispina’s respective stories seem far from outlandish. Though the Catholic Church is still rife with problematic practices, at least the asylums can no longer hold women captive.
