1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910822198703321

Autore

Smith James M. <1966->

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

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

ISBN

0-268-09268-0

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (297 p.)

Disciplina

362.83/9

Soggetti

Women - Institutional care - Ireland - History

Prostitutes - Rehabilitation - Ireland - History

Church work with prostitutes - Catholic Church

Unmarried mothers - Institutional care - Ireland - History

Reformatories for women - Ireland - History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

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

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

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.".