The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence

This exceptional history from public policy scholar Brangan (The Politics of Punishment) spotlights the traumatic experiences of the girls and women institutionalized in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. These industrial laundries operated by the Catholic Church—the last of which closed in 1996—doubled as “Ireland’s main carceral institution,” imprisoning and enslaving approximately 10,000 girls and women perceived as “fallen.” Aiming to counter a “powerful misconception” about the Laundries—they are often confused with the likewise sinister Mother and Baby Homes—the author contextualizes the Laundries within the rise of an authoritarian style of Catholicism in the impoverished and chaotic years after Ireland’s independence and provides a glimpse of their horrors through accounts from survivors, whose descriptions of day-to-day life form the book’s harrowing emotional core: from the humid and dangerous environment of the laundry itself, to women’s inability to socialize with others, to the nuns’ draconian punishments like forcing one woman to “eat from her bowl like a dog” or only referring to the women as numbers. The women’s confusion, shame, and dehumanization (“We were never allowed... to be human, really”) come alive in terrible force, as does their despair that “no one was coming for them.” After they escaped the Laundries, the women struggled within a society they barely knew after being left sequestered and uneducated. Brangn delivers a profoundly haunting account of stolen lives. (May)