We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 January 2022
Convents and convent-run institutions occupied an undefined legal space during the late nineteenth century. As homes for unmarried women, they combined religious ideas of holy seclusion with contemporary ideas of the feminine private sphere. However, women religious were also major providers of charity and welfare in Britain and Ireland, with many running charitable institutions. This brought them in closer contact with the state. As factory and workshop legislation towards the end of the nineteenth century expanded to include laundries, Catholic politicians used this ambiguous societal role to argue that Magdalene asylums deserved less inspection than for-profit laundries. In so doing, they both re-enforced nuns’ right to domestic privacy and promoted their operations as a social good. This created a legal exemption for convent-run laundries, which allowed them to operate with limited scrutiny or interference. An examination of the debates surrounding factory and workshop legislation from 1895 to 1907 exposes a precedent which continued well into the twentieth century.
1 Hansard 4, xxxi (1 Mar. 1895), cols 168–74; ibid., xxxii (22 Apr. 1895), col 1455. Jacinta Prunty has highlighted the inaccuracy of using the term ‘Magdalene laundry’ as it obscures both the intended purpose and, at times, the reality of the structure of these organisations. She instead favoured the terms ‘Magdalene asylum’ and ‘refuge’ as a reflection of how the institutions labelled themselves: Jacinta Prunty, The monasteries, Magdalene asylums and reformatory schools of Our Lady of Charity in Ireland 1853–1973 (Dublin, 2017), pp 51–3. This paper will follow this approach and use the term ‘Magdalene laundries’ to refer specifically to commercial laundry rooms operated by Magdalene asylums, rather than as a synonym. With regard to the women staying in these institutions, the terms ‘penitent’ and ‘Magdalene’ have moralistic connotations, while the word ‘inmate’ suggests imprisonment. As such, the neutral term ‘resident’ will be used throughout.
2 See Hansard 4, xcii (28 Mar. 1901), cols 90–93; ibid., ciii (27 Feb. 1902), cols 1239–56; ibid., cxlv (8 May 1905), cols 1129–30; ibid., clxxi (18 Mar. 1907), col. 490.
3 For instance: Frances Finnegan, Do penance or perish: a study of Magdalen asylums in Ireland (Piltown, 2001); Titley, Brian, ‘Magdalen laundries and moral regulation in Ireland’ in Potts, Anthony and O'Donoghue, Tom A. (eds), Schools as dangerous places: a historical perspective (Youngstown, NY, 2007), pp 119–44Google Scholar; Smith, James, Ireland's Magdalene laundries and the nation's architecture of containment (Manchester, 2008)Google Scholar; Fischer, Clara, ‘Gender, nation, and the politics of shame: Magdalene laundries and the institutionalization of feminine transgression in modern Ireland’ in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, xli, no. 4 (2016), pp 821–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clough, Miryam, Shame, the church and the regulation of female sexuality (London and New York, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Luddy, Maria, Prostitution and Irish society, 1800–1940 (Cambridge and New York, 2007), pp 76–123Google Scholar.
5 Prunty, Our Lady of Charity in Ireland.
6 McCarthy, Rebecca Lea, Origins of the Magdalene laundries: an analytical history (Jefferson and London, 2010), pp 155–97Google Scholar.
7 Luddy, Prostitution and Irish society, p. 101; Titley, ‘Magdalen laundries and moral regulation’, pp 127–9.
8 In the strict ecclesiastical sense, the term ‘nun’ only refers to the members of an enclosed order. A woman in an active congregation is referred to as a ‘sister’ and the general term is ‘woman religious’. However, as the term ‘nun’ is generally used to refer to both women in both active and enclosed congregations, the terms ‘nun’ and ‘woman religious’ are used interchangeably throughout.
The term ‘private sphere’ refers to the domestic world, which was widely considered the domain of women in the nineteenth century, as opposed to the ‘public sphere’, which was coded as masculine and consisted of most industry, business and political activities, as well as the majority of public spaces.
9 For an overview of Irish institutions and the surrounding scholarship, see Catherine Cox, ‘Institutional space and the geography of confinement in Ireland, 1750–2000’ in Thomas Bartlett (ed.), The Cambridge history of Ireland: vol. iv, 1880 to the present, pp 673–707.
10 Ibid., p. 685.
11 Reidy, Conor, ‘Poverty, alcohol, and the women of the state inebriate reformatory in Ireland, 1900–1918’ in Brophy, Christina and Delay, Cara (eds), Women, reform and resistance in Ireland, 1850–1950: ordinary and outcast (London, 2015), pp 125–30Google Scholar.
12 Ibid., p. 123.
13 Clear, Caitriona, Nuns in nineteenth-century Ireland (Dublin and Washington D.C., 1989), pp 100–12Google Scholar.
14 Magray, Mary Peckham, The transforming power of the nuns: religion power and social change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (New York and Oxford, 1998), p. 9Google Scholar; Larkin, Emmet, ‘The devotional revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’ in American Historical Review, lxxvii, no. 3 (June 1972), pp 626–44Google Scholar.
15 97.9 per cent of women religious were members of active congregations in 1864, decreasing to 95 per cent by the end of the century: Clear, Nuns in nineteenth-century Ireland, p. 111.
16 Magray, Transforming power of the nuns, p. 105.
17 Kissane, Noel, Saint Brigid of Kildare: life, legend and cult (Dublin, 2017), pp 223–4Google Scholar; Clear, Nuns in nineteenth-century Ireland, pp 103–5.
18 For instance, see Anne Power, The Brigidine Sisters in Ireland, America, Australia and New Zealand, 1807–1922 (Dublin, 2018); Prunty, Our Lady of Charity in Ireland.
19 Magray, The transforming power of the nuns, p. 83.
20 Cox, ‘Institutional space and the geography of confinement’, p. 684.
21 Luddy, Prostitution and Irish society, p. 84.
22 Fintan O'Toole, ‘Exquisite lace and dirty linen: the taming of girl power’ in Vera Kreilkamp (ed.), The arts and crafts movement: making it Irish (Chicago, 2016), pp 179–93.
23 Cox, ‘Institutional space’, p. 683.
24 Luddy, Prostitution and Irish society, pp 77–82. The first Catholic asylum opened in 1798 in Townsend Street, Dublin.
25 Luddy, Prostitution and Irish society, pp 78–82.
26 Prunty, Our Lady of Charity in Ireland, p. 18; Finnegan, Do penance or perish, p. 21; Clear, Nuns in nineteenth-century Ireland, p. 105.
27 For a more detailed description of life in Irish Magdalene asylums during this period, see Finnegan, Do penance or perish and Luddy, Prostitution and Irish society, pp 76–123. For similar research in the British context, see McCarthy, Origins of Magdalene laundries and Susan Mumm, ‘“Not worse than other girls”: the convent-based rehabilitation of fallen women in Victorian women’ in Journal of Social History, xxix, no. 3 (1996), pp 527–47.
28 Desmond Greer and James W. Nicolson, The factory acts in Ireland, 1902–1914 (Dublin, 2003), pp 284–7.
29 Ibid.; Hansard 4, xxxi (1 Mar. 1895), cols 168–74.
30 Annual report of the chief inspector of factories and workshops for the year 1902. Part I. ― reports, v [C 1610], H.C. 1903, xii, 5 (Table 1). A paucity of records mean it may not longer be possible to identify precisely how many Magdalene asylums there were (Luddy, Prostitution and Irish society, p. 82, note a). Therefore, it is necessary to rely on this broader category.
31 Rene Kollar, ‘“A foreign and wicked institution”?: The campaign against convents in Victorian England (Eugene, OR, 2011), p. 20; Susan Mumm, ‘Making space, taking space: spatial discomfort, gender and Victorian religion’ in Karen Sayer (ed.), Victorian Space(s), Leeds Centre Working Papers in Victorian Studies, viii, no. 8 (Leeds, 2006), p. 4.
32 The most famous of these were given at Bath by Rev. M. Hobart Seymour in 1851, though they continued throughout the century: Kollar, Foreign and wicked institution, pp 39–56.
33 Ibid., pp 57–104. Escaped nuns claimed to have fled convents, typically after being imprisoned by other nuns. For the most part, their accounts have been conclusively proven to be spurious.
34 Hansard 3, cxvi (14 May 1851), cols 948–88.
35 E.R. Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (London, 1968), pp 53–79.
36 Hansard 3, cxvi (14 May 1851), col. 987.
37 A bill to facilitate the recovery of personal liberty in certain cases, p. 2, H.C. 1852–3 (486), vi, 2.
38 Hansard 3, cxxvii (10 May 1853), cols 79–82.
39 Ibid., cxxviii (23 June 1853), col. 680; Walter L. Arnstein, Protestant versus Catholic in mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the nuns (Columbia and London, 1982), p. 63.
40 Arnstein, Protestant versus Catholic, pp 143–8.
41 The Tablet, 11, 18 June 1853.
42 Hansard 3, cc (8 Apr. 1870), cols 1594–6.
43 Irish Times, 27 Apr. 1870.
44 Alvin Jackson, Home Rule: an Irish history, 1800–2000 (Dublin, 2003), p. 25; Paul Bew, ‘Parnell, Charles Stewart (1846–1891), politician and landowner’, O.D.N.B.; Colin Barr and Daithí Ó Corráin, ‘Catholic Ireland, 1740–2016’ in Eugenio F. Biagini and Mary E. Daly (eds), The Cambridge social history of modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2017), pp 76–77.
45 Conor Mulvagh, The Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, 1900–1918 (Manchester, 2016), p. 8. See also the following entries in the D.I.B.: Michael Laffan, ‘Redmond, John Edward’; James Loughlin, ‘Devlin, Joseph’; Frank Callanan, ‘Dillon, John’; Owen McGee, ‘O'Connor, Thomas Power’.
46 Hansard 4, xxi (1 Mar. 1895), cols 90–93.
47 Greer and Nicolson, The factory acts in Ireland, pp 285–7. For an overview of labour laws that emerged from the industrial revolution, see Douglas Brodie, A history of British labour law: 1867–1945 (Oxford and Portland, 2003).
48 Hansard 4, xcv (17 June 1901), cols 634–6; A bill [as amended by the Standing Committee on Trade] to amend and extend the law relating to factories and workshops, H.C. 1895 (329), iii, 133.
49 Hansard 4, xcii (28 Mar. 1901), cols 90–93.
50 A bill [as amended by Standing Committee B] intituled an act to amend the Factory and Workshop Act, 1901, with respect to laundries, and to extend that act to certain institutions to provide for the inspection of certain premises, H.L. 1907 (315), ii, 185.
51 See Greer and Nicolson, The factory acts in Ireland.
52 Hansard 4, xcv (17 June 1901), cols 634–6; A bill to amend the factory and workshop acts, H.C. 1901 (130), ii, 45.
53 Hansard 4, xcv (11 June 1901), col. 114.
54 Susan Mumm, Stolen daughters, virgin mothers: Anglican sisterhoods in Victorian Britain (Leicester, 2001), pp 86–90.
55 Moritz Kaiser, ‘The House of Mercy, Clewer and the State’ (unpublished paper presented at Ecclesiastical Historical Society winter conference, University of London, Jan. 2019).
56 Jennifer Wallis, ‘A home or a gaol? Scandal, secrecy, and the St James's inebriate home for women’ in Social History of Medicine, xxxi, no. 4 (Nov. 2018), pp 774–85; Trial of Charles Zierenberg (t18940305-316), Mar. 1894, Old Bailey Proceedings Online (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/images.jsp?doc=189403050067) (6 May 2019); Trial of Wilhelmina Frederica Emilia Clara Zierenberg (t18940305-316), Mar. 1894, Old Bailey Proceedings Online (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/images.jsp?doc=189403050074) (6 May 2019). The couple were tried for perjury following a civil suit for libel against one of their accusers. They were found not guilty.
57 Hansard 4, xcv (11 June 1901), col. 136; ibid., (17 June 1901), col. 655.
58 Wallis, ‘A home or a gaol?’, p. 784.
59 Hansard 4, xcv (11 June 1901), col. 133–4.
60 Annual report, chief inspector of factories and workshops, 1902, p. v.
61 Finnegan, Do penance or perish, pp 20–23.
62 Titley, ‘Magdalen laundries and moral regulation’, p. 127.
63 Freeman's Journal, 7 May 1895.
64 Ibid.
65 Even beyond public debates, the silence of women religious in the archival record is striking. The papers of the archbishop of Dublin, William Walsh, contain no letters from female congregations on the topic, nor do the papers of James Redmond (Dublin Diocesan Archives, Walsh Papers; N.L.I., Redmond Papers). Closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic have prevented the consultation of other bishops’ correspondence.
66 Magray, Transforming power of the nuns, pp 87–106.
67 Clear, ‘Limits of female autonomy’, p. 17.
68 Freeman's Journal, 5 May 1895.
69 Hansard 4, xcv (11 June 1901), cols 133–5.
70 Ibid., (17 June 1901), cols 674–5.
71 Dublin Diocesan Archives, Walsh Papers, 35/1 and 258/7.
72 Bishop of Waterford to J.J. Clancy, 16 Apr. 1907 (N.L.I., Redmond Papers, MS 15,176).
73 Kollar, Foreign and wicked institution, pp 147–69.
74 Hansard 4, xcix (13 Aug. 1901), cols 664–78.
75 Ibid., xcv (11 June 1901), col. 135.
76 While all accepted this premise in theory, in 1901 Herbert Asquith questioned the I.P.P.'s certainty that all Magdalene laundries were altruistic, noting that ‘Frequently charity covers a multitude of industrial sins’: ibid., (17 June 1901), col. 657.
77 Ibid., (11 June 1901), col. 114.
78 Ibid., clxxiv (14 May 1907), col. 423.
79 Bill to amend and extend the law relating to factories and workshops (1895).
80 McCarthy, Origins of Magdalene laundries, p. 8.
81 Hansard 4, clxxiv (14 May 1907), col. 742.
82 Ibid., xcv (11 June 1901), col. 113.
83 See the Factory and Workshop Act, 1907, 7 Edw. VII, c. 39, s. 5(2)(d) (28 Aug. 1907).
84 Prunty, Our Lady of Charity in Ireland, pp 48–9.
85 Hansard 4, xcix (13 Aug. 1901), cols 659–63, 676.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid., col. 676.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid., cols 664–5.
90 Hansard 3, cc (29 Mar. 1870), col. 889.
91 Ibid., (8 Apr. 1870), col. 1591.
92 Irish Times, 27 Apr. 1870.
93 Magray, The transforming power of the nuns, pp 9, 88–122.
94 Clear, Nuns in nineteenth-century Ireland, pp 86–91. This is true of choir nuns only. Lay sisters, whose roles were to carry out the domestic duties of the convent, tended to be from poorer backgrounds than their counterparts.
95 Ciaran O'Neill, Catholics of consequence: transnational education, social mobility and the Irish Catholic elite 1850–1900 (Oxford, 2014), pp 167–89.
96 Dermot Meleady, John Redmond: the national leader (Dublin, 2018), p. 300. The other leaders do not appear to have had close family ties to any female religious institutions.
97 Hansard 4, xcix (1901), cols 674–7.
98 Ibid., col. 679.
99 58 & 59 Vict., c. 37, s. 22(3)(3) (6 July 1895).
100 Annual report, chief inspector of factories and workshops, 1902, appendix 1, p. xxiv.
101 Ibid., p. v.
102 Anderson reported that her inspectors found that there was ‘willingness on the part of Managers to admit them personally … in those cases where even voluntary inspection has been (and still is) firmly refused’: Annual report of the chief inspector of factories and workshops for the year 1905. Reports and statistics, p. 256 [C 3036], H.C. 1906, xv, 680.
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid., p. 257.
105 Ibid., p. 363.
106 Greer and Nicolson, The factory acts in Ireland, p. 297.
107 Finnegan, Do penance or perish, p. 228.
108 Luddy, Prostitution and Irish society, pp 100–02.
109 Ibid.; Titley, ‘Magdalen laundries and moral regulation’, p. 137.
110 Smith, Architecture of containment, pp 44–84. For examples in Northern Ireland, see Leanne McCormick, Regulating sexuality: women in twentieth-century Northern Ireland (Manchester, 2009), pp 40–41.
111 Supported by the Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership (Arts and Humanities Research Council).
