The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland's Legacy of Silence

A haunting and brilliantly researched history that interrogates the culture of shame in Ireland and tells the full story, for the first time, of the women confined within the walls of the Magdalene Laundries in the 20th century

Everyone familiar with Ireland’s history has heard of the Magdalene Laundries, places where “fallen” women were sent for reform, but few understand that the Laundries were part of a larger carceral system in Ireland. There were prisons and also asylums, industrial and reformatory schools, Mother and Baby Homes, and County Homes, each of which operated alongside the Magdalene Laundries. All together this system confined more than one percent of the Irish population, a staggering rate that outstrips the current rate of mass incarceration in the United States.

The Magdalene Laundries targeted women, and the actions that could necessitate a woman’s reform were vast: wearing a short skirt, smoking, defiance, or pregnancy out of wedlock. Women were taken off the street, admitted by their families, or sent by the state. Once a woman entered the system it was almost impossible to leave.

Louise Brangan pulls back the curtain on the insecurities of a young nation, showing that Ireland believed that if women could be controlled so could an entire populace. She shares the stories of the girls who were kept there: Eileen, born into a Mother and Baby Home; Carmel, forced to take a new name when she entered the Laundries; and Brigid, so broken by twenty-seven years of confinement that she discovered she was unsuited to life in everyday society after her release. These stories taken directly from the historical record restore the dignity of the women who were sent away and re-contextualize the decades that the Laundries acted as a de facto jail for Irish women.

This has remained one of the darkest and most misunderstood periods of recent history. The Fallen compels readers to not only confront this shameful past but to ask a deeper question: What do we choose to remember?

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