Ep. 73: People of Ireland's Magdalen Asylums

This week's episode tells the stories of six survivors of Ireland's Magdalen laundries and orphanages. Learn what their typical work day was like, what punishments they experienced, and what the long-term consequences were of incarceration at the laundries.

My main sources for this episode include the 1998 documentary Sex in a Cold Climate and a 2013 BBC article entitled, "Magdalene Laundries: Survivor Stories." All sources will be listed at the end of the episode transcript.

Follow the show on Instagram: @behindthewallspod

Support the show on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/behindthewallspodcast

Support the show on Beacons: https://beacons.ai/behindthewallspodcast

Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you are listening!

Transcript

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to Behind the Walls of the World’s Psychiatric Hospitals! I’m your host, Dr. Sarah Gallup, and today we’re going back to Ireland to hear survivor stories from the Magdalen Asylums. I got a lot of good feedback from the survivor stories from Goodna Mental Hospital, so I will do my best to search for more of these types of stories. As I’ve mentioned before, their stories are extremely important to hear, even though they are difficult.

This episode will have similar themes, so trigger warnings for physical, psychological, sexual, and religious abuse.

Sources for this episode include the 1998 documentary Sex in a Cold Climate and a 2013 BBC article. All sources will be listed at the end of the episode transcript.

For now, come on in and get comfortable as we go behind the walls of Ireland’s Magdalen Asylums…

I want to begin by recounting the stories of four women in the 1998 documentary Sex in a Cold Climate. I encourage you to watch this and listen to them tell their stories for themselves. You can watch it in its entirety on YouTube. But I do want to summarize their tales as best as I can here, as well.

The first story is about Brigid Young, who was born in 1939, in Ennistymon, County Clare. She was raised in a Catholic orphanage in Limerick that was attached to a Magdalen Laundry. She recounted that orphans weren’t allowed to interact with the Magdalens at all – not speak to them, not even look at them. This had to be difficult, since some of the women in the laundry were mothers to the children living in the orphanage, but they couldn’t see or interact with them at all. They were strangers.

Brigid pointed out that once she and the other girls started to develop during puberty, the nuns told them they couldn’t show their breasts, not even through clothing, so they made the girls wear binders across their chests to stay flat.

Every Saturday night, Brigid said, the nuns would have the girls line up and strip naked. They would laugh at them and make comments about their bodies. If someone had a larger body, they’d get extra verbal abuse. Brigid believed the nuns got a special enjoyment out of this.

One of Brigid’s jobs at the orphanage was to help move dirty linens to the laundry. There was a bit of a routine. She would gather all the heavy linens into a cart and drive it up to the gate, where one of the Magdalen women would retrieve it – in silence, of course. But one day, Brigid and another orphan tag-teamed the job. At the gate, one of the women asked if there was a child by blah-blah-blah name. Brigid said there was, and the woman said that she was her child, but she hadn’t seen her since her daughter was a year old. The woman worked up a plan to have Brigid and her friend bring her daughter to a nearby place where she could at least see her and see what she looks like now. But the plans were intercepted. A nun caught both girls and forced them inside. The nun went and grabbed a leather belt, a pair of scissors, and a razor. She shaved both of the girls’ heads and then wrapped the belt around her hand and beat them afterward. With blood running down their faces, the nun forced Brigid and her friend to look at themselves in the mirror – heads shaved, faces swollen. “You’re not so pretty now, are you?” Brigid remembers the nun telling them. 

Occasionally, she recalled, a priest was brought to bless the girls. In one instance, she remembers sitting in a chair across from the priest. They talked for a little while, but he soon scooted his chair close to hers. I’ll spare the details, but suffice it to say that he completed on this young girl. And she recalled that she knew nothing of sex or of men’s bodies that she didn’t even know what was happening. She didn’t want to tell anyone because she was afraid of being sent over to the laundry and becoming a Magdalen – one of the devil’s children! Besides, she couldn’t even explain what was actually happening to her. She had no words for it. She said it happened another three times after this first incident. She knew it was wrong, but she was so afraid to say anything.

Brigid left the orphanage in 1956 at age 17. She had not been sent to the Magdalen laundry, but she didn’t escape the systemic abuse caused by the people in charge of the laundry and orphanage. She didn’t see the nuns and priests as Christly, just as bullies. So when she left the orphanage, she left Catholicism behind, too.

Ten years later, she got married, but she said she struggled with the sexual component of marriage. The abuse she had experienced at the orphanage continued to haunt her, and took a toll on her marriage.

I wasn’t able to find a record of Brigid Young today. If she is still alive, she would be 85 years old.

The second story in the documentary is the story of Phyllis Valentine, who was born in 1940, in Seafield, County Clare. Like Brigid, Phyllis also grew up in an orphanage. She also recalls being forced to wear binders to stay flat-chested. She recalls that if a girl had nice hair or long hair, it was cut to keep them from becoming vain. If a girl who was going through puberty looked at her body in a way that someone else would notice, she was taken aside and reprimanded sharply for being vain and was told that it was a sin to look at her body.

When Phyllis was 15 years old, she was told that the Church had found a job for her at a laundry. So she went to work at the Sisters of Mercy asylum in Galway. After the first week of work, she asked for her pay; the nuns merely laughed at her. They said, “You’ll be here until someone comes to fetch you.” That couldn’t have been comforting for someone who didn’t have family.

It wouldn’t be until years later that Phyllis would find out the real reason she was sent to the laundry: because she was too attractive. The nuns told her that she was “as pretty as a picture,” and they sent her to the laundry because they were afraid she would “fall away” and end up as an unwed mother with just another mouth for them to feed. By keeping her at the laundry, she would be able to, ahem, stay out of trouble.

Punishment at the laundry included beatings with a leather belt wrapped around the nun’s hand. She said they would hit hard, too.

When Phyllis was around 21 or 22 years old, she recalled, she realized that she could be stuck at the laundry forever. So she started avoiding her work. She missed mass and dinner. She let her hair grow long.

One day a nun noticed that her hair had gotten long, and she was going to have someone cut it. Phyllis resisted and, in her words, “made a big stink” by punching a door. That seemed to have done the trick. The nun left her alone.

In 1964, at age 24, Phyllis was released from the Magdalen asylum, after 8 years of incarceration. She left Galway for Dublin but immediately felt self-conscious. After all, she’d been raised her entire life to think that she was bad and inherently sinful. She felt like she was always looking over her shoulder and that people were looking at her, as if they knew who she was and what she had done. It took her a while to realize that no one knew who she was – she had just been taught that she was bad.

She met her husband the following year, when she was 25. Like Brigid, Phyllis didn’t like the sexual part of marriage. She had been taught that sex was bad and having a man touch you was wrong. She said her husband had been very patient with her. They had children but ended up separating.

Phyllis also said that after she left the laundry, she stopped going to church and stopped praying. She said she never “forced religion on her children.” In her mind, as she says, “If there really was a god in heaven, we wouldn’t have suffered like that.”

If Phyllis is still alive today, she would be 84 years old.

The shortest story in the documentary relates to a topic we discussed in last week’s episode. One of the tragedies of the Magdalen laundries was that sometimes women who experienced abuse were sent away, which only served to compound their trauma. That is true for Martha Cooney, who was born in 1927 in Athlone, County Roscommon. 

When Martha was 14, she was sent to a cousin to help out on his farm. One day he took her to the farm fair, got drunk, and, in her words, “indecently assaulted” her. Martha did the right thing; she reported the abuse to another family member. But that family member did what was generally done in those days: he shut her up by sending her away. They couldn’t have people talking about it and bringing disgrace to the family, could they? And like I mentioned in the last episode, I can’t imagine what this would have been like for these young girls. In Martha’s case, not only was she victimized by a family member, she was punished for it! Certainly, the cousin who committed the offense didn’t see any sort of punishment. It’s just not fair.

Martha was taken to the Magdalen laundry and her clothes were taken away from her. She was given an ugly, drab, and shapeless uniform that she said was intended to make everyone look as unattractive as possible. She was put to work in the laundry, where she said she developed varicose veins in her legs by age 15 due to the long hours of standing in one place. In response, she was told that laundry work was a privileged job.

In 1945, at 18 years old, Martha was rescued by a cousin, Jim. I assume this was a different cousin than the one who had violated her years earlier. She said once Jim came and got her, she finally felt free.

All Martha wanted to do when she left the laundry was get a job and be independent. She said she never wanted to marry or be committed to anyone because she never again wanted someone to have power over her or chain her. I cannot blame her for that.

The last story is the one that gripped me the most. The strength with which this woman tells her story is particularly compelling. It’s the story of Christina Mulcahy, who was born in 1918, in Carrigan, County Galway.

When she was 22 in 1940, Christina went out with a soldier. She didn’t know anything about the facts of life, she said, but the guy said he loved her. He pressured her into sex, even though she didn’t want to, saying that that is what people in love do. She doesn’t directly say this in the documentary, but I get the sense that it happened once, and she felt uncomfortable and tried to say no again, but he pressured her into it a second time. He said something like, “You did it before, why not now?” It was during this second encounter that she got pregnant.

Of course, in those days, being an unwed mother was a source of shame for a family – and for the whole town. Christina was sent away to have the baby at a Catholic-run mother and baby home. While she was there, she gave birth to her new son and dreamed of marrying his father. He came to visit when the baby was born and agreed to have his name put on the birth certificate. She wrote him letter after letter, but it soon became clear that the letters to and from him were being intercepted by the nuns. She was no longer allowed to have contact with him. “I would have married him,” she said. “I loved him.”

When the baby was 10 months old, he was abruptly taken away from Christina. She didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye; she was told that a car was waiting to take her home. She couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t even say goodbye.

The car took her back to her hometown. She showed up at her family’s house. She was met at the gate by her father and siblings. “What do you think you want?” Her father asked her. I’m sure she must have been surprised by that greeting. “I want to come home,” she said. “You’re not coming into this house. You’ve distressed us. You’re not right in the head. You can’t be right in the head to bring your child into the world, and you deserve punishment.” Instead of welcoming her home, Christina’s family sent her to the Sisters of Mercy Magdalen home in Galway.

Once she got there, she had her clothes taken away, and she was given a uniform made of brown, coarse material and sent to work in the laundry. Christina had thought that she might work for six months or so and then go be with her baby. But one day, one of the other gals working with her in the laundry said, “Once you come here, you won’t be going out.”

A while later, Christina met a girl who worked at a mother and baby home who knew her son. She said he was doing well but added that he was going to be boarded out soon. Christina lost it, and understandably so. She recalled that when some women heard similar news, they sometimes screamed and cried and kicked machinery and broke windows in their distress. I certainly can’t blame them. And then they’d be punished afterward for their behavior.

Christina worried that her son would either be placed in a foster home or sent to a boys’ home where he wouldn’t be treated well. She hated the thought. So she stopped working and went and sat in the recreation room. A nun asked her to leave, but she wouldn’t. Eventually, Christina left, and the room was locked behind her. She went and sat on the staircase, still refusing to continue working. The nun left and returned with what looked like a belt wrapped around her hand with something dangling beneath it. Christina looked up at her as the nun approached and said, “If you lay a hand on me, I will kill you.” And she meant it. She was ready to act on it, and the nun must have seen it because she backed off. 

Since she had defied a nun’s authority, Christina was compelled to give her confession to a priest and seek further absolution. The priest called her around to discuss the subject more, and when she walked over to him, she saw that he was completely exposed. She knew it would be his word against hers. Still, she left and told one of the sisters, who hissed at her to be quiet and keep her mouth shut. When Christina went back and confronted the priest, he denied his actions. “You are not a man of God; you really are not,” she snapped back at him.

Understandably, she didn’t want to go to confession or church anymore. As further punishment, her hair was cut off. “Your life isn’t worth living now,” she was told by the nuns. “You fell from grace. Your respectability is gone.” And this made Christina determined to leave the laundry once and for all.

Escaping from the laundries often required planning and sometimes just required good timing. One day while the cows were being let in, Christina slipped out the side gate and ran to a friend’s house. As soon as she got there, the bells of the laundry started ringing – a signal that someone had escaped. She knew that she couldn’t go back to her family’s house because they would send her right back. And the police would be looking for her soon. 

Christina ended up running away to Northern Ireland. She had successfully escaped after three years at the Sisters of Mercy laundry. She went on to become a nurse, get married, and have kids. But she never told anyone about her first-born son – not until six months before she was interviewed for the documentary. For fifty years she had kept her past a secret. And finally, with the help of her family, she was reunited with her long-lost son.

Christina Mulcahy died in February 1997. She was 78 years old. 

The stories of the women in the documentary Sex in a Cold Climate are heartbreaking, but they aren’t unique. There are tens of thousands of similar stories – but not everyone made it out of the laundries alive. A 2015 article from the Irish Times estimates that up to 1,663 women may have died in the Irish Magdalen laundries between 1922 and 1996 (“Over 1,600 women…”).

The public seems to be equally fascinated and horrified by the stories of women who were incarcerated in Magdalen laundries – probably because they were a mystery for so long. A 2013 BBC article briefly tells the stories of two laundry survivors, Marina Gambold and Maureen Sullivan. These summaries are taken from that article: 

Marina Gambold was orphaned when she was eight years old after both her parents died. She lived with her grandmother for several years, but when she was 16, she found she had nowhere to go. A priest took her to a Magdalen laundry.

“I walked up the steps that day, and the nun came out and said your name is changed, you are Fidelma. I went in and I was told I had to keep my silence,” she said.

“I was working in the laundry from eight in the morning until about six in the evening. I was starving with the hunger. I was given bread and dripping for my breakfast every morning.

“We had to scrub corridors, I used to cry with sore knees, housemaids’ knees. I used to work all day in the laundry, doing the white coats and the pleating.”

Ms. Gambold also spoke of what happened on a day when she broke a cup. The nun said, “I will teach you to be careful.” “She got a thick string and she tied it around my neck for three days and three nights and I had to eat off the floor every morning. Then I had to get down on my knees and I had to say, ‘I beg almighty God’s pardon, Our Lady’s pardon, my companion’s pardon for the bad example I have shown.’”

Ms. Gambold also spoke of a time when a nun locked her out in the cold overnight.  “Another thing I will never forget is the evening I ran out on the balcony, which was all glass on a winter’s night. She locked me out there for two nights and two others girls and I nearly died of the the cold.” 

Ms. Gambold was in the laundries for about three years. She left when she was 19 and left Ireland. “When I came out of the convent, I was determined to get out of Ireland. I was 19 years of age then and had a nervous breakdown. I lived in England for almost 30 years before I moved back with my husband. Most of the time I have cried bitter tears, especially when I had nobody. Pain never goes away.”

Maureen Sullivan was sent to a Magdalen laundry in New Ross, County Wexford, at the age of 12. Maureen’s mother had remarried after her father died, and Maureen claims she was abused by her stepfather. The nuns noticed, called in a priest and convinced her mother that Maureen would be going to a “lovely school.”

Maureen said she never saw her school books again, was forced to work night and day, seven days a week, and was given a new name, Frances.

“What an evil thing to do,” she recalled. “I never did anything wrong. I was an innocent child and a nun told me I could trust her to tell her my story. I trusted her and what a fool I was. I mean, when you look back now.

“You were brought up then to think you could trust a nun or a priest, but they did a lot of wrong by me and very many other people.”

Maureen said her day began at six in the morning and finished at nine at night. She would have to scrub and polish the floors, work in the laundry, and then make rosary beads and Aran sweaters. “Everything was taken from me: my name, my rights as a child to go out and play with other children, my rights to communicate with other people.

Maureen spent two years in New Ross, then further periods in a laundry in Athy, County Kildare, and another in Dublin. She said she had virtually no contact with her mother – just four visits in five years.

“I was coming up on 16, and my mother came up and said, ‘Maureen, do you not think it’s time you should be getting paid now?’ So I said it to the reverend mother, and the next morning my case was packed, and I was left at Heuston station with five pounds in my hand. Back to the town that I was abused in. And nobody cared about me or what happened to me.”

Maureen said she left the laundries unable to communicate properly, with low self-esteem and virtually no education. Widowed twice, she said she found it hard to trust people.

The article end there, but I’m left thinking, How could either of the women mentioned in this piece learn to trust people? Both of them were taken from their families and forced to work without pay in abhorrent conditions.

How any of these women in this episode were able to survive and move on is truly remarkable. Especially when we think about how this was a time when mental health was highly stigmatized. The effects of trauma hadn’t really been studied or even recognized. People were expected to just move on as if nothing had happened.

I often hear people say that young people have gone soft – and they mean it in a derogatory way. But I personally am thankful for that softness. What so many people in previous generations endured in silence was more than they should have gone through, especially on their own. We need to be telling our stories because we’ll find that we have so many more similarities than we realized. We’ll recognize that we have similar hurts and fears, and similar hopes and dreams.

I hope you enjoyed this short series on the Magdalen laundries in Ireland. I know they were new to me, and I learned a lot. As I mentioned last week, there’s a new movie coming out at the beginning of November 2024 called “Small things like these,” which is based upon a Magdalen laundry. It looks like it will be a good one to see. Also, I encourage you to check out the documentary, Sex in a Cold Climate, and hear the survivors’ stories in their own words. Again, you can find that on YouTube.

As always, thank you so much for listening! Your one listen makes a world of difference, and I appreciate it so much! If you haven’t done so already, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you are listening, but especially if that’s on Apple Podcasts. That helps other people find and listen to the show.

You can also support my little show by becoming a member on Patreon and getting some of that bonus content. I have some new bonus recordings coming out soon, so be sure to head over there and subscribe for $5/month. I would be curious to know what other exclusive Patreon content you would be interested in getting. Right now, I have funny or noteworthy newspaper entries from ye olden times, as well as extras from the books I’ve been reading. I have a bunch of short stories by New Zealand author Janet Frame, as well as a staff member’s story from Goodna Girls about Goodna Mental Hospital in Queensland. So be sure to go check those out. 

If $5/month sounds like a bit too much, you can support the show on Buzzsprout for $3/month. And if you’d like to support the show in other ways, you can do so by leaving a rating and review. That really does help a lot – more than you may realize. And, of course, you’re supporting the show just by listening. I appreciate it.

I’ll be off next week, so I’ll be back in two weeks with a new hospital. So stay tuned. Where in the world will we go next?

As always, remember the words of Maya Angelou: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Until next time…

“Magdalene Laundries: Survivor Stories.” BBC, 5 Feb. 2013. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21345995

“Over 1,600 women died in Magdalene laundries – over double figure cited by McAleese report.” Irish Examiner, 12 Jan. 2015. https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20306470.html#:~:text=In%20the%20lengthy%20critique%20of,cited%20in%20the%20McAleese%20Report.

Sex in a Cold Climate. Directed by Steve Humphries. Testimony Films, 1998. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12xTQAJdvdE