in founding another new type of institution in Whitechapel in 1758 – London’s Magdalene Laundry.3 It was far smaller in size and scale than the hospital and had a completely different function. It was for so-called ‘fallen women’, a catch-all term for prostitutes and unmarried mothers who found themselves pregnant and with no hope for themselves or their babies.
Ireland in the Eighteenth Century
A law providing for a House of Industry in Dublin was enacted in 1703. This was essentially a workhouse by any other name and was erected in Dublin’s south inner-city on what is now the site of St. James’s Hospital. Several more buildings were added to the original workhouse and the site eventually covered fifty acres and evolved into St. James’s Hospital. Abandoned babies and children, who ended up in the House of Industry, were sent outside to be nursed until around age five and were then returned to the workhouse from where they could be apprenticed out from the age of twelve. In 1730, the authorities renovated and divided up the workhouse with a large section set aside for babies and children, which was named the ‘Foundling Hospital’. They adopted the European custom of installing a ‘baby wheel’ (a revolving device on which babies were placed in order to gain entry to a building) and a bell to alert the doorman to a new baby’s arrival. Like Coram’s Foundling Hospital there were no questions asked, but the similarities end there. Dublin’s Foundling Hospital was swarming with vermin, highly unsanitary and no better than the workhouses. Around 57,000 children were resident in Dublin’s Foundling Hospital up to 1818. Of the 51,000 children who entered the hospital between 1796 and 1826, over 41,000 died. Between 1790 and 1796, a further investigation by the British Parliament discovered that 12,768 children had been admitted to the Dublin Foundling Hospital and 9,786 had died. Another 2,847 had simply vanished from the system entirely, and there was no record of them. It is believed that only 135 survived. If the vanished are presumed to have died, and they almost certainly did, then the inclusive mortality rate of those seven years was 99%.
Seven years after the first Magdalene Laundry opened in London in 1758, a similar project was launched in Ireland. Dublin’s laundry was founded in 1765 and it took two years to prepare the building and finances for its official opening. Lady Denny’s Magdalene Laundry opened in June 1767 at 8 Lower Leeson Street, a converted Georgian house of four storeys over basement in Dublin’s city centre. Protestant women and girls under the age of twenty and pregnant were admitted to the new residential laundry.4 The daily routine of drudgery and poor food included regular daily prayers and preaching by clergy and lay Protestants. Several customs that developed in Britain’s Magdalene Laundries were adopted in Dublin during the early years; for example, the new arrivals had their heads shaved. This was originally intended to remedy the common problem of lice. Staff quickly realised, however, that bald-headed girls were less likely to leave the laundry owing to public stigma. Later, as attitudes hardened, shaving the girls’ heads became an integral part of their punishment for ‘sins’. The Good Shepherd nuns in Britain introduced another tradition that became part of the punishment aspect of future institutional ‘care’. They issued new residents with ‘house names’. This custom originally had good intentions of ‘protecting’ the girls and saving them from their perceived shame. However, the practice ultimately warped into another instrument of punishment. Erasing identities and self-esteem became a process that would humiliate and stigmatise hundreds of thousands of girls and women across the world for centuries to come.
Victorian Britain
From the 1830s to 1900, Victorian Britain was infected with a drive to build new institutions, now considered a magical answer to society’s problems. Dozens of social laws were passed and institutions were converted or built by the hundred, by both the public and private sectors. Industrial schools, reformatories and Magdalene Laundries sprang up across Ireland and Britain. New orphanages from the late 1800s were imbued with not just a specific religious ethos but with a well-defined class role. There are many descriptions of these orphanages by the religious or lay Catholics who ran them in Britain and Ireland, and the terms used include ‘from respectable families’, ‘of the upper class’, and ‘middle-class families’.
Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1837 was the same year that saw the introduction of important new social legislation. It became compulsory to register all births, deaths and marriages with the government, a public service that was previously the domain of the various Churches.
The institution of marriage and producing legitimate children were key components of the new social order. In the first thirty or forty years of Queen Victoria’s reign, single mothers and their babies and children were increasingly demonised by the newly ‘respectable’ society. They were hidden away from genteel, respectable people in the booming network of Victorian workhouses and Magdalene Laundries where they were transformed from half-pitied, half-despised sinners into ‘inmates’ and given uniforms to wear like prisoners. In some of the British workhouses, single mothers and prostitutes were for a time forced to wear distinctive clothing; prostitutes were assigned yellow dresses, while pregnant single women were issued with red or scarlet dresses. They were separated from the ‘respectable poor’, who were encouraged to regard themselves as a distinct class above single mothers and their illegitimate children. Ironically, forcing single mothers and their children out of society and into the workhouses reinforced the prejudices towards them: they were now a burden on the taxpayer and the public purse. It was a vicious circle of stigmatisation and shame.
Church Disorganisation in Ireland after Catholic Emancipation
When Ireland’s Penal Laws that discriminated against Catholics were revoked in 1829, what was left of the Irish Catholic Church was almost penniless and disorganised, and sought international help from its nearest Catholic neighbours in France. The orders of French nuns who arrived soon dominated the various religious institutions being established around Ireland. These included the Bon Secours (France), the Good Shepherds (France), the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul (France), and later the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary (originally French from 1866 and then British from 1905). From the 1840s, the French orders of nuns expeditiously established or took control of the industrial and reformatory schools, while Magdalene Laundries were set up in all the major cities where there was enough business for a commercial laundry to survive. The Irish Sisters of Mercy were founded just two years after emancipation and played an important role in the country’s new institutions.
One point that continues to confuse people even today is the difference between Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. Most of the confusion is because the Catholic version of a Magdalene Laundry was completely different to the Protestant model in one key respect: Catholic laundries did not admit pregnant women and girls or their babies. The Catholic nuns thereby redefined what was meant by a Magdalene Laundry. From the 1840s onwards, pregnant girls were sent to the nearest public workhouse. Single mothers who turned up at the Catholic laundries, or arrived in the custody of a priest or local official, were admitted, but the child or children were placed in a nearby workhouse or industrial school also run by a Catholic order. Sometimes the different institutions were on the same land and even run by the same order of nuns, but were separated by high walls. Mothers and children were separated and never allowed to have contact again, despite living only yards apart.
Women and girls in the Catholic laundries were essentially prisoners, and conditions grew steadily worse with time. What were originally intended as refuges became de facto prisons. ‘Fallen women’ had no rights. They were sometimes worked up to 100 hours over a six-day week. Constant hunger, exhaustion and despair were the lot of these women. Many were incarcerated for life and when they died they were buried on-site in mass graves, with no names or markers, let alone proper headstones.
The difference between the Catholic and Protestant laundries are still widely misunderstood by the public and some academics and survivor activists. There is a similar difference between early Catholic and Protestant models of Mother and Baby Homes to which we shall return shortly.
Hardening Attitudes to Single Pregnant Women
