Daily Mail Still from The Magdalene Sisters
If you don't know the story of the Magdalene
Laundries, or have not seen the harrowing 2002 theatrical film The Magdalene Sisters
-- well, it’s another story of
infuriating injustice, one of the hidden horrors of European Christian theocracy
that you find hard to believe and don't really want to know about, so I
hesitate to say that you should, but, yeah, you should. It’s been largely
disregarded because its victims were poor, helpless women. Here’s the description
of the institutions from RationalWiki:
A Magdalene laundry, also known as a Magdalene asylum [named for Mary Magdalene, the supposed prostitute], was a house for women who had "fallen" from "moral correctness"…
These asylums were a network of laundries operated by the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and elsewhere, and run by the Sisters of a range of orders. Many women lived and died in these institutions with little hope of escape. The only way they could be freed was by being claimed by a relative. Often, family members were told that the women had moved away, and would be impossible to find because they had assumed new identities.
