Hello Friends,

I’d like to discuss some books at length. Don’t forget you can choose to listen to the audio (located above).

I read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize , Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, The Irish Times Best Book of the 21st Century) and wanted to learn more about the Magdalene Laundries of Ireland.

Small Things Like These

If you’re unfamiliar with Small Things Like These, you are in for a beautiful reading experience! Oh to be able to write like Keegan. What a voice. The novella takes place in a small Irish town in the 1980s during the Christmas season. When a coal merchant delivers an order to a Catholic convent that runs a Magdalene Laundry, he discovers a freezing girl who has been locked in the coal shed overnight. In returning her to the convent, he finds a world of abuse and imprisonment for the girls and young women who are pregnant and new mothers. As he questions what his response should be, the frightening political and social power of the nuns and the Church are made clear. This is a tale of a test of moral courage.

The Fallen

So powerful was this little novella that it inspired me to find The Fallen by Louise Brangan, a research-based book on the twentieth-century history of the Laundries told through the stories of six young women and girls who were inmates there. I purchased the audiobook version. Again, the story was powerful and shocking. I decided to get the print version from interlibrary loan to have a closer look. Just as my copy was available, it was announced that The Fallen had made the The 2026 Cundill History Prize Shortlist.

The two epigraphs at the beginning of The Fallen indicate that Brangan plans to bring the truth to light and force a reckoning:

In some instances, one may not talk of forgetfulness, for one cannot forget what one has never attempted to know. —Gordon Horwitz, In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen

What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us. —Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie

The Women and Girls of the Laundries

The prologue discusses a fifteen-year-old girl named Eileen who disappeared from her job as a maid at a bed-and-breakfast in Dublin in February 1954. She enjoyed the job. However, one night when her friends were out and she was on her own, two women appeared in the townhouse and decided that Eileen was destined to become a fallen woman. They told her she had to go with them. Like all Irish children, she was raised to unquestioningly obey adults, and so she did. The women dropped her into a Magdalene Laundry, stealing her freedom and ruining her life. She’s given as an example of the kind of girl who ended up in the laundry. She was born in a Mother and Daughter Home, which means that she was considered illegitimate. She lived with relatives who weren’t very kind to her until she finally got away and found her job in the bed and breakfast. She was not pregnant, nor was she an unwed mother. This is one of the important things Brangan clarifies about the Magdalene Laundries. They were not really for ‘fallen women,’ even though people assume that they were and Small Things Like These indicates as much.

In fact, Brangan must also correct the record about information that rolls at the end of the Small Things film, which is based on the novella. It states that there were 56,000 young women who were sent to the Laundries and the children born there were taken from them. The government‘s official calculation of women and girls in the Laundries is 10,012; informed historians consider this an underestimation. However 56,000 seems high. It is, in fact, a figure from an official state investigation into something different—the inmates held in Mother and Baby Homes during the 20th century.

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The Magdalene Laundries

What actually happened in the Laundries belied the serenity of the Irish countryside of the twentieth century, where the general population was considered to be quite moral. From the period of Irish independence in the 1920s, there weren’t very many people in prison. Brangan argues that this doesn’t mean many people, particularly women and girls, weren’t imprisoned. They lived in various “psychiatric hospitals (known then as mental asylums), industrial and reformatory schools for poor orphan children, county homes (formally work houses that were rebranded after Irish independence) and Mother and Baby Homes, where women and girls who were pregnant outside marriage were sequestered. Then there were the Magdalene Laundries.”

Brangan points out that these institutions housed over 1% of the total Irish population, an incredible rate, and that people there became “ensnared rather than supported.”

The Magdalene Laundries were Ireland’s main carceral institution. While they had initially been run by ordinary people both Catholic and Protestant, they eventually became regimented and religious places of punishment. However, the state colluded with the church in running them. There were ten Magdalene Laundries, which circled the island, run by four religious orders of nuns. The inmates there did everyone’s laundry: priestly vestments, prisoners’ uniforms, hotel and restaurant linens, family laundry, everything. They were not allowed to speak to one another—complete silence at all times was the rule—much less form friendships.

Outside of cleaning laundry, what happened there was a dark secret before activists demanded a reckoning in the mid 2000s. Former inmates were interviewed, particularly between 2009-2015. While the Laundries were active, some women managed to escape, but the tales they told at the time were generally not believed. People couldn’t imagine the nuns running the Laundries because they had not had the same kind of experiences with women religious, who might have been very kind to their families, helping them with alms and with their family troubles.

Punishment for Uncommitted Sins

Brangan tracks six women and girls were confined to the Laundries. One was imprisoned for truancy from school; another because strangers considered her pre-delinquent; yet another to save a family’s reputation. While each of their stories is different, all of them were unwanted, homeless, abused, or rejected. Their stories are unique and utterly compelling, deserving the full treatment they receive in the book. After reading about them, I had nightmares about inescapable places.

In 2009, when there had been a period of pronounced hand ringing about the horrors of the past, the author John Banville wrote what remains one of the most eloquent and uncompromising statements on the topic of Irish silence. ‘Never tell, never acknowledge, that was the unspoken watch word. Everyone knew, but no one said.’”

Immediately upon entrance into the Laundries, inmates’ names were taken away, and they were given pseudonyms. They were not allowed to speak to each other; they were not allowed to form friendships. This meant that girls who were new didn’t know where they were. They started rumors that the women around them were prostitutes or women who had illegitimate babies. Yet they learned this didn’t make sense because there were also much older women there. The others were like them: abandoned, abused, neglected, rejected by their families.

They had to work long hours in very hot and horrible environments. For example, girls who worked in the sorting rooms found it absolutely disgusting. One woman described it as “‘all filthy dirty and the smell of it and everything was awful.’ None of them could adjust to the fetid air. It was ‘wreaking, stinking, bleach, smell of piss, urine, always had that smell, always.’”

The food was also described as a nasty watery swamp of stew. There was no toilet paper, just crumpled up newspapers. Ironically, the girls had to wash their own laundry on their own time, at the sinks in their dormitory. They weren’t even allowed to use the laundry equipment, and so, sometimes, they would bring their “wet underwear into the bed with them and lie on top of it as they slept hoping that the heat of their bodies would wick enough of the wet from them so they could be worn again the next morning.”

The girls and women were insulted and they were told things like “You’re here because no one wants you.” “You’re dirt.” “Your mother didn’t want you.” “Your father won’t come for you.” “No wonder your family doesn’t want you, look at you.” “You are illegitimate; you’ll end up like your mother.” “You are nobody, and you have nobody.”

They were required to say the same prayers that the nuns did as part of their devotional life, but they didn’t have any of the nuns’ social capital, and all their years of devotion didn’t earn it for them.

Disobedience could result in inmates having their hair cut off. Talking might result in a dinnertime punishment of being forced to sit on the floor in front of the group with a bowl, eating their food while saying “I am nobody. I am nobody. I am nobody.”

When these girls and women finally had a chance to venture back into society, they often couldn’t negotiate the world. They have not been well educated or educated at all in the Laundries.

Brangan declares this was only possible because the Irish people gave “unfettered deference” to the church. “Irish people genuflected, lit their candles, muttered their novenas, and undertook their penitential obligations. … the logic of the laundries was the logic of Irish life.”

Twentieth-Century Ireland

To help the reader understand why, she dives into Irish history and politics of the twentieth century.

In 1932, in the heart of the worldwide Great Depression, the government of Ireland was in a bad situation. They had rising income taxes, oil was expensive, they had cut teachers’ and policemen’s wages, and austerity was everything. At the time, a new populist Catholic party was working to take over, and when the country had a snap general election, the government was dissolved. The election brought in this Catholic group. When they gained power, their leader wrote a note to the Pope that their intention was to “maintain with the Holy See that intimate and cordial relation which has become the tradition of the Irish people.”

At this point, the government had extreme protectionist ideas, so they launched a tariff on British goods. Britain retaliated by enacting tariffs of up to forty percent on Irish imports. A secret report called the Carrigan Report concluded that something had to be done about the immorality of the Irish people. Government officials confidentially sent copies to the Catholic hierarchy and asked what they should do next. They wanted to bring the law in line with Catholic teachings and practices, so they ushered in legislation that would do so. They created a censorship bill, and then, in 1935, without any debate, passed into legislation the Criminal Law Amendment Act and the Public Dance Halls Act. They kept people from having too much fun. They decided that in schools, children would not be taught anything that would help them critique or to question, so kids ended up being fed a diet of fear, superstition, self-abnegation, and obedience. They also felt that girls who had ‘a marked tendency towards sexual immorality’ would be better off in Catholic rather than state run institutions. There’s a lot more to this, obviously (thus an entire book, which I highly recommend you read), but this is how the Laundries became prevalent.

The book concludes with the demise of the Laundries, the last of which closed in 1996 and with the 21st century reckoning. Highly recommended!

Like all good books of research, The Fallen has an excellent notes section and index. I noticed that the last work cited was the New Yorker Fiction podcast episode entitled “Andrew O’Hagan reads Edna O’Brien” with Deborah Treisman, December 1st 2015. It’s a great story about a small country village where the people sternly judge one of their neighbors and destroy her life. Since you are a lover of good stories, I recommend you have a listen.

Our thought experiment

How does the story of what happened in twentieth-century Ireland relate to what is happening in the United States today? What could happen to the U.S. in the near future?

This is what happens when you have certain people with certain religious ideas running the country and at the same time promoting the idea that you’re not allowed to resist. What Brangan refers to as “a repressive and censorious atmosphere.” We are regularly told that we don’t have to worry because the religious fundamentalist societies we are familiar with are not Christian. But fundamentalists across religions have much more in common with one another than they do with more liberal practitioners of their own faiths.

I’m betting that someone looking to earn an academic degree could draw some comparisons (conservative Catholics in the Supreme Court, J.D. Vance’s conversion, giving religious leaders political power, high tariffs, new ‘laws’ without debate [Presidential orders], current rates of incarceration in the U.S., etc.).

Speaking of J.D. Vance and His Conversion

I’m not going to buy Communion because I don’t want to fund Vance, but some of what I’ve read in reviews is gobsmacking. If you have any knowledge of the Roman Catholic Church—I was raised in it—the idea that you can just stay at home and have Mass there is ludicrous. The purpose of the Mass is the celebration and partaking of the Eucharist—the body of Christ. This cannot be done at home. It’s a sacrament requiring ritual and an ordained priest. And if you aren’t going to church, why pick a title like Communion? Does he understand a basic definition of the word?

J. D. Vance’s Straussian Moment from Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB)

The US vice president wrote his new book without citing his source—Peter Thiel.

J.D. Vance’s Conversion from London Review of Books

By James Butler

Why would anyone buy this? Vance has been a willing participant in a squalid government sunk in graft which has gutted the agencies that might restrain or regulate private avarice. The labour share of income is at a historic low. The most obvious question is not whether Vance believes what he claims to believe, but why, if he believes it, he acts as he does. Halfway through Communion he quotes, without irony, a recovering addict who passed on some homely advice: show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future. Perhaps Vance has forgotten who he’s been hanging out with.

…

Early in the book, Vance says he believes ‘Jesus Christ’s teachings are true.’ But the programme he outlines is more interested in the social utility of faith as an institution: unlike secularism, which has produced ‘racial conflict and gender division’, Christianity is ‘the most powerful force for cultural cohesion’. Yet Christianity can be ethically difficult and politically unsettling, difficulties Communion mostly seeks to evade. Should it cease to be useful, or if evasion is no longer possible, perhaps Vance will find his way to another conversion.

And one more thing about Vance to clarify his ethic

JD Vance says he’s doing ‘God’s work – and if that leads to the end times, OK’ from the Guardian

Vice-president says on evangelical podcast he would feel ‘not shocked if the antichrist was walking among us’

Thanks!

Thanks for reading! Please click like, share, and leave a comment. Next week is our biweekly “Library and Banned Books News.” Until then, be well.

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