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• Introduction: The politics of sexual knowledge : the origins of Ireland's containment culture and the Carrigan Report (1931)
• pt.
• 1. The Magdalen asylum and history : mining the archive. The Magdalen in nineteenth-century Ireland
• The Magdalen asylum and the state in twentieth-century Ireland
• pt.
• 2. 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 gtained 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?

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." Focusing on the ten Catholic Magdalen laundries operating between 1922 and 1996, "Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment" offers the first history of women entering these institutions in the twentieth century. Because the religious orders have not opened their archival records, Smith argues that Ireland's Magdalen institutions continue to exist in the public mind primarily at the level of story (cultural representation and survivor testimony) rather than history (archival history and documentation). Addressed to academic and general readers alike, James M. Smith's book accomplishes three primary objectives. First, it connects what history we have of the Magdalen laundries to Ireland's "architecture of containment" that made undesirable segments of the female population such as illegitimate children, single mothers, and sexually promiscuous women literally invisible. Second, it critically evaluates cultural representations in drama and visual art of the laundries that have, over the past fifteen years, brought them significant attention in Irish culture. Finally, Smith challenges the nation - church, state, and society - to acknowledge its complicity in Ireland's Magdalen scandal and to offer redress for victims and survivors alike.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Frances Finnegan traces the development of Ireland's Magdalen Asylums - homes that were founded in the mid-nineteenth century for the detention of prostitutes undergoing reform. The inmates of these asylums were discouraged - and many forcibly prevented - from leaving, and sometimes were detained for life. Put to work without pay in adjoining laundries, these women were subject to penance, harsh discipline, enforced silence, and prayer. As the numbers of prostitutes began to dwindle, the church looked elsewhere for this free labor, targeting other 'fallen' women such as unwed mothers and wayward or abused girls. Some were incarcerated simply for being 'too beautiful', and therefore in danger of sin. Others were mentally retarded. Most of them were brought to the asylums by their families or priests, and many were forcibly prevented from leaving. Unbelievably, the last of these asylums was closed only in 1996. Drawing on hitherto unpublished material, Finnegan presents case histories of individual women and their experiences in Magdalen homes, which claimed some 30,000 women in all. Do Penance or Perish is the first study of this shameful episode in Irish history.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)