Ireland's Magdalen laundries and the nation's architecture of containment
By: James M. Smith
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Manchester
Language: eng
Number of pages: 275
ISBN-13: 9780719078880
Subjects: Women; Institutional care; History; Prostitutes; Rehabilitation; Church work with prostitutes; Catholic Church; Unmarried mothers; Reformatories for women
Description: "Focusing on ten Catholic Magdalen laundries operating between 1922 and 1996, Smith presents us with the first history of women entering these institutions in the twentieth century. Magdalen laundries were workhouses in which the state incarcerated Irish women who were perceived to be a threat to the moral fibre of society, where inmates performing hard labour, received no official sentences, had no mandated release dates, and were forced to give up their individual identities and assume new names for the length of their incarceration." "Because the religious orders have not opened their archival records, Smith argues that Ireland's Magdalen institutions continue to exit in the public mind primarily at the level of story (cultural representation and survivor testimony) rather than history (archival history and documentation)."--Jacket.
Notes: Originally published: Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: the politics of sexual knowledge: the origins of Ireland's containment culture and the Carrigan Report (1931); title: The Magdalen asylum and history: mining the archive; title: The Magdalen in nineteenth-century Ireland; title: The Magdalen asylum and the state in twentieth-century Ireland; title: The Magdalen Laundry in cultural representation: memory and storytelling in contemporary Ireland; title: Remembering Ireland's architecture of containment: "telling" stories on stage, Patricia Burke Brogan's Eclipsed and Stained glass at Samhain; title: (Ef)facing Ireland's Magdalen survivors: visual representations and documentary testimony; title: The Magdalene sisters: film, fact and fiction; title: Monuments, Magdalens, memorials: art installations and cultural memory; title: Conclusion: history, cultural representation ... action?; title: Appendix; title: Notes; title: Bibliography; title: Index.