‘Of Looseness and Depravity’ – Contextualising Magdalene Asylums

This is the second in a series of articles discussing the Magdalene Laundries in 20^th century Dublin and reflecting on those aspects which appertain to urbanity and religion. The articles are part of my research project ‘Strike or Punishment: Urban Spaces and Female Laundry Workers in 20^th century Dublin’ which seeks to investigate historical notions of behaving im/properly as Irish, Catholic, and working women. I would like to thank Martin Christ and Claudine Moulin for their helpful criticism in preparing this text. While the first article introduced the Magdalene Laundries, the third part will be concerned with the urbanity of the laundries.

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I knew from day one, from the day I went in there, from the first night I slept in there, I didn’t want to be there. Once I heard that bolt going on that door, I was hysterical and I couldn’t go out and it was seven o’clock in the evening and it was a beautiful evening and I wanted to go out and run around [on] the grass, and when I was told we can’t go out, we can sit on the stairs and talk, I just remember sitting on the stairs and saying to the girls, ‘what do you do all day? [1]

As Sarah would find out, she and the other Magdalene women in Seán McDermott Street would work. Sarah was twice sent to Seán McDermott Street in Dublin, run by the Roman Catholic order of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity (OLC). She remembers being seventeen the first time she entered in the late 1970s, but not exactly how long she stayed. She also had to work in the in-house laundry at High Park convent in Drumcondra, run by the OLC as well, and the one in Seán McDermott Street. The Magdalene laundry in Seán McDermott Street was located in what could be called a particular part of town, and this was no coincidence, historically speaking.

Following the previous introduction to the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland, I turn now to their historical background. Magdalene asylums emerged out of specifically urban (and gendered) imaginaries of the eighteenth, and especially nineteenth century Ireland. The asylums in the cities were an effect of the religious transformations of post-Famine rural Irish society. By the late 19^th century, narratives of the representations of the problematic nature of the nexus of women, cities, and work, especially sex work, was well established, not only but crucially also in the eyes of professionals of the Roman Catholic Church. In writings on Dublin, the commentators, usually of higher social standing and privilege, worried much more over what urban women – especially at night – than about what men did. The third part of this series will turn to the Magdalene asylums as a case for the study of historical urbanity.

A post-emancipation, post-Famine powerhouse of devotion

In 1829, Daniel O’Connell and his Catholic Association, having mobilised the island’s Catholic population in a series of quintessentially democratic ‘monster meetings’ with hundreds of thousands of participants, won Catholic Emancipation from the British government under Wellington.[2] Emancipation, in the form of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, repealed the last vestiges of the penal laws introduced after defeat to William of Orange in the 17^th century. In the 1840s, twenty years after emancipation, the failing of the potato crop and British mismanagement brought on the Great Famine which, by killing about one million people, also erased much of the cultural, religious, and linguistic foundations of rural Irish society, acting as the perhaps biggest modernising impetus in 19^th century Ireland.

During the Home Rule campaigns (from the 1870s until 1918), the Irish political landscape was structured by the co-operation between non-physical force, anti-colonial/nationalist actors like the National Party under Parnell, and the Roman Catholic Church, then under Cardinal Paul Cullen and his ultramontane supporters. The reforms set in motion by Cullen, together with the societal upheaval of the Famine years and the experiences of political mass mobilisation, fed into the so-called ‘devotional revolution’ which, unforeseen at the time, transformed most people in Ireland into practicing, pious Catholics.[3] As some have argued, the interest of the clergy to better regulate spiritual life in the parishes along Roman lines, particularly included a patriarchal interest in the everyday and spiritual life of Irish women, while also trying to get rid of popular forms of religious practice like station masses (see also the 1883 painting by Aloysius O’Kelly). As Delay has noted, “regulations on bodies were an integral part of the Church’s nineteenth-century reform efforts, and ideologies about gender informed the goals and trajectory of the devotional revolution” (Delay 2020, 99)

The fundamental religious and cultural transformations brough on first by the Famine, and then the political nationalist struggle effected changes to rural landownership. By the early 20^th century owner-occupier farms, usually worked on by one family, had replaced Anglo-Irish landlordism and corresponding landless rural proletariat (see Garvin 1986, 468f). From the mid-19^th century until the 1920s, landownership, and with its all things rural and Irish, were the bone of political contention on the island. During this period, rural imaginaries – in which women acted as the generational container of a devout, Gaelic-speaking society – became hegemonical in Irish nationalism (Fischer 2016). Scepticism towards the city (historically seats of colonial power) was further augmented by the Gaelic revival movement in literature and the arts towards the end of the 19^th century.

Seen from the countryside, larger cities like Cork, Belfast, but especially Dublin were the places where women became ‘loose’, unmoored from the behavioural ties to respectability, and adrift in the sea of modern urban sociability. Migration to the cities, both by men and women, reflected the limits of family-based agriculture. The small farms no longer sustained all members of the family. In pre-Famine rural Ireland the whole family contributed to the upkeep on the farm and spheres of work were not as yet so gendered as later when the “occupations open to women in post-Famine agriculture dwindled as did their marriage prospects” (Daly 1981, 75). As employment opportunities for farm children were limited locally, people had to move. Traditional forms of moving off the farm, like marriage, became increasingly unavailable as rural demographics changed (Ibid). 19^th and 20^th century Ireland were of course characterised by continuous and high levels of emigration. While the overall population of Ireland declined in the post-Famine century, Dublin grew in terms of inhabitants (Brady and McManus 2021).

Many families were at a loss of what to do with their daughters. As workers in the household (or on the farm), they did not contribute monetarily to the family income. Working outside the home was problematic, both for the absence of labour prospects (in under-industrialised country) and due to the dominant Catholic values. Culturally as well, the woman of leisure – who dedicated her time to unpaid labour to the husband, the family home and raising the children – was adopted by the majority as the ideal (Daly 1981, 76). Leaving the home to work or to get a formal education was often no option due to financial constraints. The few available white-collar jobs were usually considered a runway to marriage and subsequent exit from the labour market. Many of those without family or waged work turned to charitable institutions and other philanthropic outlets.

The Magdalene asylums, founded first in the second half of the eighteenth century, were one such relief structure. As James Smith succinctly observed, ‘we know that these voluntary asylums developed in the nineteenth century in relation to apparently high levels of prostitution’ (Smith 2007, 24) and that they ‘reflect the emergence of women’s involvement in philanthropy’ as well as ‘the dominant influence of Catholic female religious in postfamine Ireland’ (Ibid).

“Of looseness and depravity” – Sin City Dublin 

In 19^th century Ireland, as in other contexts before, Magdalen asylums were founded as a strategy, followed both by lay people and religious professionals, of dealing with urban conditions of life, not only in material terms. In Dublin’s case, crowded living conditions and abject poverty, were exacerbated and reflected by the steadily density and diversity of its residents. These urban conditions held within them a potential, even promise, of anonymity, transgression and rule-breaking, for men and women alike. The imagery of Dublin as a particularly sinful city has a long pedigree. In the early 18th century already, the Alderman William Fownes (later to become Lory Mayor), compared lively Dublin to “sedate commercial” London at the time:

Taverns and Public-houses and Coffee-houses are kept open most part of the Night and a continual Noise, and Quarrels, often ensue; numbers passing and repassing the whole Night long, lewd Women temped to strole about and meet with those disordered by drinking, etc. The Watches little regarded and when they would examine and prevent disorders, they are frequently overpower’d and abused. (Flood 1974, 80)

From the end of the 19th century onwards, the moral degradation of hitherto innocent/untainted rural women by urban life was paralleled by worries over the architectural decay of inner-city, Georgian Dublin in the form of tenement housing and inner-city ‘slums’. Via ascriptions of prostitution, the term “slum” itself was gendered as female as soon as it entered language in Dublin in the late 1890s. When the Reverend Stephen Gwynn, a Protestant nationalist, complained of Dublin as “one of the most immoral cities” of Europe, he worried about the handful of Dublin’s main streets to both sides of the Liffey and the women using them:

The principal streets of London, of Brussels, of the great cities in France and Germany had by no means that air, whatever be the reality, of looseness and depravity which invaded our main thoroughfares with the fall of night. (…) Foreigners had [to his own knowledge] come to our shores and gone away speaking very plainly of their impressions gained from our streets concerning what we once claimed as the special glory of our Irish girls. (Flanagan 2018, 152)

From the late nineteenth century until today, (social) housing and urban poor were the salient concern for the city’s elites, be the involved in city planning, local politics, or religious care. Worries over slums, and women in slums, as voiced by the Reverend J. Gwynn, S.J. in 1910 remained preoccupied with the latter half of a story, that is the consequences and not the causes of the socio-economic imbalances on the island. The life of women before they moved to the cities or ran into difficultries was rarely reflected upon, and their presence in carceral institutions of care thus de-historicised.

As said, the possibilities of a future, and work, drew women and men to cities, Irish or foreign. In urban contexts, waged female labour included domestic labour, industrial labour like printing or box making, sweating and cottage labour (usually manually producing good paid for by the item), sex work, catering, and shop work. For many women, the urban kaleidoscope of anonymity, density and diversity created niches and instances of self-determined sociability, as well as of patriarchal regulation by neighbours, employers or colleagues.

“The G.H.Q of Veneral Disease”

The image of Dublin as a sinful city resurfaces in the first years of the Irish Free State and contemporary policies toward sex work and venereal diseases. In 1924, a draft version of the Report of venereal disease in the Irish Free State, quotes the Jesuit R.S. Devane: “Dublin seems to me the G.H.Q. of Venereal Disease as it is of the prostitute and the brothels, or till lately had been” (Howell 2003, 330). If Dublin was the headquarters of venereal disease, the Monto district around Montgomery St (later Foley St) was its head office.

Perhaps the best-known representation of the Monto can be found in James Joyce’s Ulysses. In the ‘Circe’ Episode Joyce has Stephen and Lynch enter ‘Nighttown’, Joyce’s term for the Monto, via ‘Mabbot Street’:

A form sprawled against a dustbin and muffled by its arm and hat moves, groans, grinding growling teeth, and snores again. On a step a gnome totting among a rubbish tip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. A crone standing by with a smoky oil lamp rams the last bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone makes back for her lair swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the doorstep with a papershuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts, clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy ups with both hands the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a corner two night watch in shoulder capes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate crashes; a woman screams; a child wails. Oaths of a man roar, mutter, cease. Figures wander, lurk, peer from warrens. In a room lit by a candle stuck in a bottleneck a slut combs out the tatts from the hair of a scrofulous child.

(Joyce 1963, 562–63)

Walking down the street, a short scene with a local sex worker takes place, in which Lynch is silent but the addressee of Stephen’s ruminations:

STEPHEN Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro. Alleluia.

(The famished snaggletusks of an elderly bawd protrude from a doorway.)

THE BAWD (Her voice whispering huskily.) Sst! Come here till I tell you. Maidenhead inside. Sst.

STEPHEN (Altius aliqantulum) Et omnes ad quos pervenit acqua ista.

THE BAWD (Spits in their trail her jet of venom.) Trinity medicals. Fallopian tube. All prick and no pence.

[…]

STEPHEN (Triumphaliter.) Salvi facti i sunt.

(Joyce 1963, 564)

A couple of steps further down the street, Lynch exclaimes: “Pornosophical philotheology. Metaphysics in Mecklenburg street!”. Soon after they meet Bloom and move to a ‘kip house’ (brothel) where they spend the rest of the night.

[image tenements]

The Monto district, located roughly between Mountjoy Square to the Northwest, and Connolly Station to the Southeast, was defined by its run-down Georgian townhouses which, abandoned by their initial owners, were now divided up and home to Dublin’s poor.

The 19^th century street names – Glouchester, Mecklenburg, Buckingham, Amiens, Gardiner – were links to a time when the colonial upper-class developed this part of town and were eponymically honoured. Following their departure, the spacious townhouses were incrementally divided up as poorer people moved to the area. By the early 20^th century, it was not unusual for one family to occupy one room in the tenements, without running water and precarious heating. The tenements were interspersed with and included brothels and pubs catering to all social strata, including colonial British troops. Some have argued that the Monto district was Europe’s largest red-light district in the early 20^th century (although no comparative studies have been published on this so far), with up to 1,600 women working locally.

Stephen’s Latin comments illustrate how the spatial concurrence of sex work and poverty was mirrored in the concurrence of religious and sexual imaginaries. To early 20^th century Dubliners, concerns over the moral architecture of the inner city found their manifestation in the decaying buildings, and vice versa. The dreadful living conditions in the Monto prompted more privilegded members of Dublin’s to get involved. In the early 1820s, the lay woman Brigid Burke founded an ‘asylum’ for women on then Glouchester Street (renamed Seán McDermott St in 1933).

In 1867, the OLC took over the asylum. As the Atlas of Lost Rooms shows, most of the structures standing today were developed after the OLC takeover. In the late 19^th century, as Cara Delay has argued, the Irish Catholic clergy had drawn the link between unordered, undisciplined bodies of their parishioners, and subsequently strove to discipline them also through space: ‘the reforming of existing religious spaces and the creation of a new built environment were key to managing the bodies of the devour and policing “deviant” sexuality” (Delay 2020, 110). At the same time, the Catholic Church, especially priests, ‘preached devotion to the Virgin from the pulpit, which, like bishop’s pastorals asserted that mothers, who should look to Mary as a model, were, alongside nuns, the only women who could achieve true Irish Catholic piety’ (Delay 2020, 102). In Magdalen asylums, three groups of women could potentially come into contact: The sisters of the OLC who were preciously close to that “true Irish Catholic piety”; unmarried women and girls though to being in need of spiritual and bodily salvation/disciplining, in various stages of assumed or projected virginity, some resembling the Virigin Mary in having given birth to children with dubious paternity.

The bolted doorway of Sean McDermott Street is one possible visual representation of the Magdalene asylums as part of the Irish “architectures of containment” (James Smith) which developed in the early 20^th century. The embeddedness of the Magdalene Laundries in state-church regulated social control and the individual mistreatment of the Magdalene women – who were beaten, shaved, punished and forced to work – might be considered as an ethical ‘looseness’, if not ‘depravity’, on the side of those running and benefitting from the Magdalene institutions, including the religious professionals.

The last part of this series will turn to the question how the concept of urbanity can help us approach the social and material structures which anchored the Magdalene asylums in the city.

List of Works Cited

Brady, Joseph, and Ruth McManus. 2021. Building Healthy Homes: Dublin Corporation’s First Housing Schemes, 1800-1925. Dublin: Four Courts Press.

Daly, Mary E. 1981. ‘Women in the Irish Workforce from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times’. Saothar 7:74–82.

Delay, Cara. 2004. ‘The Devotional Revolution on the Local Level: Parish Life in Post-Famine Ireland’. U.S. Catholic Historian 22 (3): 41–60.

———. 2020. ‘Gender, Sexuality, and the Devotional Revolution in Ireland’. New Hibernia Review 24 (4): 98–121. https://doi.org/10.1353/nhr.2020.0047.

Fischer, Clara. 2016. ‘Gender, Nation, and the Politics of Shame’. Signs 41 (4): 821–43.

Flanagan, Maureen A. 2018. Constructing the Patriarchal City: Gender and the Built Environment of Dublin, London, Toronto, and Chicago 1870s into the 1940s. Temple University Press.

Flood, Donal T. 1974. ‘The Decay of Georgian Dublin’. Dublin Historical Record 27 (3): 78–100. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30105488.

Garvin, Tom. 1986. ‘The Anatomy of a Nationalist Revolution: Ireland, 1858-1928’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (3): 406–501.

Howell, Philip. 2003. ‘Venereal Disease and the Politics of Prostitution in the Irish Free State’. Irish Historical Studies 33 (131): 320–41.

Joyce, James. 1963. Ulysses. 3rd ed. London: The Bodley Head.

Kerr, Donal A. 2001. ‘The Church and Nation State in the 19th and 20th Centuries’. Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 14 (1): 96–111.

Larkin, Emmet. 2014. ‘The Beginnings of the Devotional Revolution in Ireland: The Parish Mission Movement, 1825–1846’. New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua 18 (1): 74–92.

Smith, James M. 2007. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries Ad the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

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[1] O’Donnell, K., S. Pembroke and C. McGettrick. (2013) “Oral History of Sarah”. Magdalene Institutions: Recording an Oral and Archival History. Government of Ireland Collaborative Research Project, Irish Research Council, pp.1- 35.page 15.[original emphasis]. Sarah is the pseudonym of the interviewee who chose to remain anonymous.

[2] For reasons of space, the 17th and 18th century background, especially English colonisation, the penal laws and their influence on religious life on the island cannot be discussed here. See for a first orientation Donal Kerr, who argued that ‘Penal Laws were enacted against the Catholic majority [after 1691]. Although the main thrust of the laws was to deprive Catholics of the land, they also restricted their civil, political and religious rights. They could not possess arms, were disfranchised and barred from public office. They could not own schools nor send their children abroad for education. Bishops, vicars-general and regular clergy were banished’ (Kerr 2001, 97).

[3] The term „devotional revolution“ was introduced 1972 by Emmett Larkin. Since then, work on the devotional revolution has grown substantially. For a first orientation, see (Larkin 2014; Delay 2004; 2020).

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