A IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Louise Brangan (Nominated Fellow, 2024-25)
Purging the Crisis
Across the 20th century, Ireland incarcerated over 11,000 women and girls in Magdalene laundries, run by religious orders of nuns. These were harrowing places, that did incalculable harm to those sent there. Understandably, the focus of scholarship and activism concerning the laundries is now largely contemporaneous, interested in how to achieve justice for this past and how to hold wrong doers accountable. In this paper, I wish to explore a potentially overlooked and taken for granted aspect of this history: How did this system come to be? Laundries had been in operation since the 19th century. Yet is it widely accepted that they took a punitive turn in the 1920s, expanding in both scale and hardening in purpose. How this happened, and why, remains surprisingly opaque.
Following Stuart Hall, I use archives and newspapers from this period in the hopes of “trying to catch public opinion, unawares, in the very moment of its formation”. And in doing so, raise a question about the relationship between historical recovery and refinement and the work of justice today.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
Passcode: b1QpaAD7