The Magdalene enslaved labor camps were initially Protestant

I don’t mind doing laundry. Even if you hate it, the word laundry is more appealing than “asylum.” But the Magdalene Laundries were asylums where “fallen women” were forced into labor, sometimes worked to death. 

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: February 19, 2013--

The Magdalene enslaved labor camps were initially Protestant, but the Catholics didn’t want Protestants to have all the

female-oppression fun and got into it hard. The first was founded in London in 1758 and the idea quickly spread to other countries, including Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., Canada, and especially Ireland. Ireland went big. 

Part of the reason was rampant poverty in Ireland, which leads to sex work. They’re described as places to “get rid of people not conforming to … Irish identity.” That included not just sex workers, but women who had children out of wedlock, the daughters of unwed mothers, women guilty of petty crimes, women of “loose morals” and “flirtatious women,” victims of rape, women with mental health issues, and young girls or teens who didn’t have familial support. They were put in prison and made to work. The work they did was more demanding than what those in actual prisons filled with hardened criminals were forced to do. 

But that wasn’t the public perception. Rather, it was about “treating” these poor lost souls and bringing them back into God’s grace blah fucking blah. The last Magdalene asylum didn’t close in Ireland until 1996. It’s estimated 30,000 women were imprisoned in them in Ireland alone, and that about 1,700 died. In 1993 a mass grave of 155 women was uncovered at one of the asylums in Dublin. 

Doors were locked, windows barred, high walls topped with broken glass. These were prisons, labor camps where women were forced to work doing laundry and needlepoint for the enrichment of the churches operating them. Their hair was shorn, their clothes taken and traded for drab uniforms, just like any prison. Silence was enforced, friendships forbidden, and visitation from the outside frowned upon and heavily supervised by domineering nuns. 

There was physical and emotional abuse, solitary confinement, sexual abuse, and starvation. They were told over and over that they were “worthless sinners.” And the government was in on it, giving money to the asylums in exchange for laundry services. Some spent years in these prisons, others were in for life. 

In early February of 2013 a watered-down report of the atrocities of the Magdalene asylums was presented by an Irish senator. The prime minister (called the Taoiseach) of Ireland was feeling the pressure and eventually made a public apology for the state’s role in the asylums on February 19, 2013. 

After the report came out two nuns who worked in an asylum anonymously went on an Irish national radio station and said, “Apologize for what? Apologize for providing a service?” The following July the U.S.-based Catholic League said, “No one was imprisoned … There was no slave labor … It’s all a lie.” They described it as a “realistic response to a growing social problem.” Fucking douchebags.