magdalene laundries

René Ostberg 11-22-2022
Black and white image of nuns in a "mother and baby home" line a room filled with children in several cribs

Sean Ross Abbey in County Tipperary, Ireland, was one of three mother and baby homes run by the Sacred Heart Adoption Society.

WHEN MARI STEED began searching for her birth mother in Ireland, she knew little about the system of secrecy and abuse that would lead her to co-found a social justice group to right its many wrongs. Born in 1960 in a convent-run “mother and baby” home in County Cork, Steed was one of more than 2,000 “banished babies” adopted from Ireland to the United States beginning in the 1940s. As an 18-month-old, she was taken to Philadelphia.

When Steed became pregnant as a teen, she was put in a Catholic-run home in Philadelphia and made to give up her child. In the mid-1990s, she decided it was time to find both the daughter who had been taken from her and the birth mother from whom she’d been taken. Her American family were “decent people,” Steed told me. “I don’t have any serious qualms with my upbringing. But I did begin to search for my mother to find out more about where I’d been.” She created a website to connect with other adopted people of Irish birth.

Eventually, Steed learned her mother, Josie, had given birth to her out of wedlock and had been born to an unwed mother herself. In Ireland, such circumstances put Josie on the full merry-go-round of church-and-state institutions before the age of 30: a county home, an industrial school, 10 years in a “Magdalene laundry,” and finally the mother and baby home. Steed, who lives in Virginia now, recalled she at first had no clue what all this information meant. “‘What are laundries?’ I didn’t even know what that was at the time.”

The answer led Steed down a rabbit hole of secrecy and obstruction. Originally founded in the 18th century as places of refuge for so-called “fallen women,” Magdalene laundries evolved into institutions where women and girls labored for no pay as penance for transgressing Catholic Ireland’s moral and class codes. In his book Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment, Boston College professor James M. Smith described a system of interconnected institutions “including mother and baby homes, industrial and reformatory schools, mental asylums, adoption agencies, and Magdalen laundries.” (Ireland’s first such institution was called the Magdalen Asylum for Penitent Females, using an archaic spelling of Magdalene.)

The Editors 11-21-2022
An illustration of Nicole Hockley holding a picture of her deceased son as she stands among orange flowers. A quote from her about taking action in the wake of loss is beside her.

Nicole Hockley’s son Dylan was one of 26 killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Hockley is co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise, which seeks to prevent violence in schools, homes, and communities. / Illustration by Louisa Cannell

ONE DOESN'T NEED Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction to see the frightening potential of theocracy. In this issue, writer René Ostberg tells a chilling story of a malign collusion of church and state — in this case, the Irish Catholic Church and the newly formed Irish state of the 1920s. Together, the two institutions acted as morality police, imprisoning women and girls for the “crime” of becoming pregnant out of wedlock — as Ostberg puts it, “for transgressing Catholic Ireland’s moral and class codes.” More than 10,000 Irish women and girls were incarcerated in so-called Magdalene laundries run by Catholic religious orders with state funding, the last of which wasn’t closed until 1996.

11-16-2022
The cover for the January 2023 issue of Sojourners features a white Bible with gold leaf pages. A gold-plated pistol sits under the book board with some bullets around it.

A fringe Christian ideology helped stoke an out-of-control gun culture. People of faith are working to take back the conversation.

the Web Editors 8-25-2018

Pope Francis smiles next to Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at Dublin Castle during his visit to Dublin, Ireland, Aug. 25, 2018. REUTERS/Stefano Rellandini

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar delivered a firm challenge to Pope Francis and the Catholic Church Saturday in Dublin Castle, where the two met with authorities, civil society, and diplomatic corps. Pope Francis visits the country after decades of revelations of abuse of women and children at the hands of clergy. Hundreds died from apparent malnutrition, unwed mothers lived in servitude, and many of their babies were illegally adopted.

Paige Brettingen 5-01-2013

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — When the Republic of Ireland apologized to the wayward girls who were sent to the Magdalene laundries for hard work and no pay, Teresa Bell felt encouraged. Surely, she thought, the government of Northern Ireland would do the same.

Nearly three months later, she’s still waiting.

Bell was one of thousands of young girls who were sent to the Magdalene workhouses run by Roman Catholic nuns when she got pregnant at age 16. She worked long hours washing clothes with no pay and little rest; after giving birth, her daughter was put in an orphanage.

Bell never recovered from the shame.