Ireland's Magdalen laundries and the nation's architecture of containment / James M. Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smith, James M., 1966-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women--Institutional care--Ireland--History.

Women.

Prostitutes--Rehabilitation--Ireland--History.

Prostitutes.

Church work with prostitutes--Catholic Church.

Church work with prostitutes.

Unmarried mothers--Institutional care--Ireland--History.

Unmarried mothers.

Reformatories for women--Ireland--History.

Reformatories for women.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (297 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press, c2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The Magdalen laundries were workhouses in which many Irish women and girls were effectively imprisoned because they were perceived to be a threat to the moral fiber of society. Mandated by the Irish state beginning in the eighteenth century, they were operated by various orders of the Catholic Church until the last laundry closed in 1996. A few years earlier, in 1993, an order of nuns in Dublin sold part of their Magdalen convent to a real estate developer. The remains of 155 inmates, buried in unmarked graves on the property, were exhumed, cremated, and buried elsewhere in a mass grave. This triggered a public scandal in Ireland and since then the Magdalen laundries have become an important issue in Irish culture, especially with the 2002 release of the film "The Magdalene Sisters.".

Contents:

Introduction: the politics of sexual knowledge: the origins of Ireland's containment culture and the Carrigan Report (1931)

The Magdalen asylum and history: mining the archive

The Magdalen in nineteenth-century Ireland

The Magdalen asylum and the state in twentieth-century Ireland

The Magdalen Laundry in cultural representation: memory and storytelling in contemporary Ireland

Remembering Ireland's architecture of containment: "telling" stories on stage, Patricia Burke Brogan's Eclipsed and Stained glass at Samhain

(Ef)facing Ireland's Magdalen survivors: visual representations and documentary testimony

The Magdalene sisters: film, fact and fiction

Monuments, Magdalens, memorials: art installations and cultural memory

Conclusion: history, cultural representation, ... action?

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-260) and index.

ISBN:

0-268-09268-0

OCLC:

694144469