CANADA
The Western Star
Jeff Green /Research and Reason columnist
Published on July 04, 2016
Survivors of Magdalene Laundries deserve peace after years of suffering
It’s often gut-wrenching, but Dr. Rie Croll says there’s a sense of “urgency” in her research aimed at collecting stories of women forcibly confined in female-only laundries and reformatories before “they are forever lost to history.”
Her current research brings together stories of women from Ireland, Canada and Australia who spent time in institutions known as Magdalene Laundries. Many of these facilities were run by various orders of Roman Catholic nuns. The laundries operated from as early as the 18th Century before the last one closed in Dublin, Ireland 20 years ago.
“While the stated purpose of these institutions was the reform of prostitutes, unwed mothers, and ‘incorrigible’ girls, the stories I’ve gathered tell us that the inmate population contained countless unwanted, stolen, socially inconvenient, disregarded and/or neglected girls and women,” explained Dr. Croll, an associate professor and chair of Teaching and Learning at Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus in Corner Brook.
“Confinement in the laundries — and related reformatories — essentially served to regulate and curtail the sexuality of generations of girls and women while the church exploited all of them as unpaid laundry labourers.”
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