Magdalenes and Nuns: Convent Laundries in Late Victorian England

Abstract

The life and exploits of Mrs. Minnie Morrison, born to Protestant parents on 19 April 1897, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and the privately published story of her alleged sufferings probably did not attract much attention.1 Product of a broken home, Minnie spent her early years with a foster family and in orphanages until the age often, when she was sent to an institution run by a local convent, the Home of Good Shepherd, where the mother superior changed Minnie's name to Teresa She described her first night in a locked dormitory as a miserable experience. The next day began at 4:30 AM when all the girls, including the non-Catholics, were forced to pray Roman Catholic prayers and attend Mass. Following worship the nuns introduced Minnie to her new work, ironing clothes in the laundry. Her young life suddenly became a servitude: her letters were censored, she was humiliated and physically abused by the nuns, and the work in this sweatshop demeaned her. Some time later, the convent placed her with a family, but then for some reason-Minnie was unclear about the circumstances-she was chloroformed and forcibly taken back to the Home of Good Shepherd. Again she toiled in the laundry. Alleged atrocities continued. The mother superior, annoyed that Minnie wore some prohibited jewelry, ...put the red hot poker against my rings and melted them from my fingers.2 Because of the severity of this wound, she was admitted to a hospital, where a doctor amputated her hand. After returning to the convent, she was forced to work with large sewing machines. The other girls treated her as a pariah, and the nuns continued to punish her for breaches of the severe rules. Minnie claimed, for example, that she had to kneel in the middle of a room for five days as a penance and lived on a starvation diet for three weeks in a so-called dungeon. Finally in 1919 when she was twenty-two years old, Minnie made a dramatic escape from the convent and her laundry prison. She eventually got married, renounced the Roman Catholic Church, and wrote about her experiences. This personal uncorroborated account of one woman's alleged sufferings represents an example of that sensationalism and anti-Catholicism which earlier sought to portray convent life as unnatural, inhumane, and cruel, and therefore a serious threat to American society. Recently, however, the public was introduced to the existence of convent laundries through news reports and an unsettling movie. These presentations, naturally, captured more attention and elicited more outrage than Minnie Morrison's 1925 expose. A television documentary, Sex in a Cold Climate, appeared in England on Channel 4 in March 1998. It detailed the life of young Irish girls sent to laundry asylums run by convents because of alleged sexual sins or inappropriate behavior. Many had become pregnant outside of marriage. Named Magdalene Asylums after the woman who reformed her supposedly dissolute life when Jesus forgave her (Luke 7:36-38; 8:2), these institutions sought to reform the modern day Magdalenes through hard work, prayer, and the discipline associated with Roman Catholic convents. Interviews with survivors detailed examples of physical and mental brutality and the degrading work in the convents' laundries. The last of these asylums closed in 1966; over thirty thousand girls and young women had spent some time there as Magdalenes. More explosive and unflattering, however, was the attention generated by the release of the 2003 Him, The Magdalene Sisters, which explored the life of four Dublin women and their debasing experiences in a convent laundry. The four crimes, coquettish behavior, suffering rape during a wedding celebration, and two girls bearing children out of wedlock, sent these Magdalenes to the convent to perform penance for their transgressions through hard labor and rigid discipline. Ill-treatment by the nuns also became a part of the daily routine at the laundry. The movie portrayed the nuns as cruel, sadistic and wicked. …