Historical Spaces of Confinement 2: Magdalene Laundries

Abstract

This chapter explores memories of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, which confined poor and ‘deviant’ young women. It draws on feminist history to explore the laundries as sites of gendered social control and analyses the reconstruction of these spaces in oral histories and the documentary Witness: Sex in a Cold Climate (Channel 4, 1998), and their portrayal in the films The Magdalene Sisters (Mullan, 2002) and Philomena (Frears, 2013). Concepts of memory, including forgetting and rediscovery – at individual, familial and national levels – are utilised.