It is estimated that up to 30,000 women passed through these institutions, named after the biblical figure Mary Magdalene. In the name of “saving” them, these women were kept there against their will indefinitely, and some remained imprisoned for the rest of their lives. Steve Humphries’s documentary Sex in a Cold Climate explains how women were thrown into these workhouses for “offences” such as giving birth without being married. He describes the accounts of Phyllis Valentine, who was sent to one of the laundries because she was considered “too pretty,” and of Martha Cooney, put away after she complained that a cousin had sexually molested her.

Once inside, women worked in the laundries for no pay, often had their names changed by the nuns in authority and were subject to brutal and degrading punishment. They were forbidden from having contact with the outside world and kept isolated from their families and children. They were prevented from talking to one another during the day and from establishing any kind of association among themselves. As The Magdalene Sisters demonstrates, the women were also subject to sexual abuse by priests.

The film shows that the laundries were businesses from which the orders that ran them profited. “I wanted to show in the film how these places were very clean and efficient factories. The whole point was that from the outside they looked okay,” explained Mullan.

The rationalization for this barbaric institution—backed explicitly or tacitly by the church hierarchy and other bourgeois authorities—was that these women, known as “penitents,” needed to “atone for their sins.” They were allegedly incarcerated to be protected from themselves and to protect society from their influence.

The reality was that these institutions served a social function for the rulers of Ireland—not only to dehumanize those imprisoned, but also to try to strike fear among broader layers of women and to bolster other institutions that reinforce women’s second-class status.

The laundries’ existence became well enough known in Ireland to become part of the broader system of social control. Children who misbehaved were told to mend their ways or “they’d be sent to the laundries with the sisters.” At the same time, the social stigma attached to being locked up in the laundries meant that for many decades women who had been detained there would rarely speak out about what they had experienced.  
 
Advances for women’s rights
The release of the film comes in the context of a crisis facing the Catholic Church hierarchy, one expression of which has been the widespread exposure of cases of sexual abuse committed by priests. The roots of this crisis lie not in a “sex scandal,” as it is often presented in the big-business media, but in the gains that have been made in the fight for women’s liberation. These advances have occurred, in varying degrees, in countries across the globe. The material basis for this progress, won in struggle, has been the historic influx of women into the workforce, which has led to their greater economic independence and to changes in social attitudes among women and men.

The official doctrine of the church on many social questions is more and more in conflict with the views of many working people. Catholic Church teachings on marriage and its opposition to divorce are at odds with the experience and views of growing numbers of people. One registration of this was the majority vote in favor of making civil divorce legal in Ireland in 1995.

The institutions that administered and profited from the system of the “laundries” are also declining. In 2000 there were fewer than 11,000 Irish nuns at home and abroad, down from more than 18,000 in 1970.

Maintaining the Magdalene Laundries no longer became a feasible way to reinforce the oppression of women. In 1996 Mary Robinson, then president of Ireland, unveiled a plaque in honor of the women held in these institutions.

In 1999 Irish prime minister Bartholemew Ahearn publicly apologized to the thousands of former inmates of the orphanages and industrial schools that the Catholic Church also ran with equal terror and violence for many decades. He established a compensation fund for the victims, but women who had been incarcerated in the Magdalene Laundries were excluded from it, as they were deemed “private” institutions, not subject to the state’s control.

After the film sparked a wider debate on this issue, the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas issued a public apology for the treatment of women in the laundries.

Mullan’s film has had a big impact in Ireland, with an estimated one quarter of the population of that country having seen it. It has also been met by condemnation by some forces. The Vatican’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, denounced the film as “an angry and rancorous provocation.” It was also denounced by the U.S. Catholic League as “anti-Catholic.”

One fact that should not be lost is that these institutions were neither uniquely Catholic nor Irish. Writing in The Guardian, Fiachra Gibbons points out that there were plenty of similar Magdalene Laundries in Britain, mostly run by Protestant churches. Their function was not religious but social. The church was simply the particular form that was used to maintain this institution of women’s oppression.

The first laundries were established at a time when all of Ireland was under direct British rule, before the anticolonial struggle that led to the creation of an independent state in 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties. In the wake of this uncompleted anti-imperialist struggle, maintaining the laundries became a part of what Ireland’s new capitalist rulers viewed as necessary for assisting in the oppression of women and consequently in the consolidation of capitalist rule in the new state in the decades after the war of independence.

By 1937 Ireland had adopted a new constitution that upheld the Catholic Church’s positions on marriage and divorce. It even had a provision stating that the state should restrict women’s access to paid work: “the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”

Successive Irish governments played their part in maintaining the laundries. In some cases the transfers of orphaned children from industrial schools to the laundries was authorized by the state. In one scene The Magdalene Sisters replicates a photograph of a church parade in which women held in the laundries participated. They are closely guarded by cops, ensuring they can make no attempt at escape.

The film depicts the successful escape of some of its leading characters from their incarceration. However, for the great majority of those who remained trapped inside, it took far-reaching changes in women’s position across society before the laundries finally became a thing of the past.

The Magdalene Sisters is a powerful film about a story that had to be told.  
 
 
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