The Magdalene Girls by V.S. Alexander
One of the many things I love about my reading hobby is that it affords this wonderful insight into obscurities, historical and otherwise, that I never knew about. It’s thrilling, exciting, often disturbing but always enlightening. I never knew, for instance, of the existence of the dreaded Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. Convents that once served as places of refuge, turned into cruel workhouses where women were used as free labourers in order to help fill the church’s coffins.
Young girls and women who, according to the Irish male dominant society (in many cases by the girls’ own fathers) or based on the word of Catholic priests, were deemed to have ‘fallen from grace’. These girls were sent off to the Magdalene Laundries to serve penance in order to be granted forgiveness by God; and denied all further contact with the outside world.
They were forced to work themselves to the bone in the giant laundries, lived in dire circumstances, were underfed, often abused and in many cases never allowed out again.
Coincidentally, and as it often works in life, I happen to read this book whilst the Catholic Church is holding its summit to address the many cases of abusive behaviour by priests.
The thing is, these sweatshops were a lucrative business making money for the church doing the laundry for villages, towns and cities by using powerless women as free labour. The first laundry started operating in 1758 and – believe it or not – the last laundry closed its doors in 1996, more than 230 years later.
Can you get your mind around this? I would have been able to cope learning about such atrocities if it happened way back in the in the 1700s – but to learn (and it only came to light two decades ago) that the church and convents operated these laundries until as recent as 1996, simply blew me away.
Of course, since the scandalous existence of the laundries became known and the film The Magdalene Sisters (based on true testimonies) was made, Ireland apologised to some 10 000 women who were victims of these brutal Catholic workhouses. Yet, it seems to remain a contentious subject. Was the system criminal or was it rehabilitative?
The Magdalene Girls by V.S. Alexander is an historical novel set in 1962 in Dublin, where the Sisters of the Holy Redemption ran one of the city’s Magdalene Laundries. Alexander writes a compassionate story – within a detailed historical framework – about three teenage girls who each end up at the convent due to different circumstances.
Among them, Teagan Tiernan, whose only sin is that she is pretty enough to have caught the eye of a lustful young priest and had to be removed in case he might fall into temptation. The girls become friends and together plot their escape. They can only formulate their plan during the few minutes per day when they happen to share a station in the laundry, and then only by way of their own version of sign language.
The tragedy is that, once branded as a ‘Magdalene’, the outside world offers no reprieve to these girls even if they manage to escape the convent prison. It is a devastating reality that they learn the hard way and that threatens to strip them of all hope.
It’s a heart-breaking story, but also one of courage and the meaning of friendship, love and, above all, hope. And certainly a story that the world needs to hear.
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