Ireland's Magdalen laundries and the nation's architecture of containment

"Focusing on ten Catholic Magdalen laundries operating between 1922 and 1996, Smith presents us with the first history of women entering these institutions in the twentieth century. Magdalen laundries were workhouses in which the state incarcerated Irish women who were perceived to be a threat to the moral fibre of society, where inmates performing hard labour, received no official sentences, had no mandated release dates, and were forced to give up their individual identities and assume new names for the length of their incarceration." "Because the religious orders have not opened their archival records, Smith argues that Ireland's Magdalen institutions continue to exit in the public mind primarily at the level of story (cultural representation and survivor testimony) rather than history (archival history and documentation)."--Jacket.