The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland's Legacy of Silence

by Louise Brangan

A haunting and brilliantly researched history that interrogates the culture of shame in Ireland and tells the full story, for the first time, of the women confined within the walls of the Magdalene Laundries in the 20th century

Everyone familiar with Ireland’s history has heard of the Magdalene Laundries, places where “fallen” women were sent for reform, but few understand that the Laundries were part of a larger carceral system in Ireland. There were prisons and also asylums, industrial and reformatory schools, Mother and Baby Homes, and County Homes, each of which operated alongside the Magdalene Laundries. All together this system confined more than one percent of the Irish population, a staggering rate that outstrips the current rate of mass incarceration in the United States.

The Magdalene Laundries targeted women, and the actions that could necessitate a woman’s reform were vast: wearing a short skirt, smoking, defiance, or pregnancy out of wedlock. Women were taken off the street, admitted by their families, or sent by the state. Once a woman entered the system it was almost impossible to leave.

Louise Brangan pulls back the curtain on the insecurities of a young nation, showing that Ireland believed that if women could be controlled so could an entire populace. She shares the stories of the girls who were kept there: Eileen, born into a Mother and Baby Home; Carmel, forced to take a new name when she entered the Laundries; and Brigid, so broken by twenty-seven years of confinement that she discovered she was unsuited to life in everyday society after her release. These stories taken directly from the historical record restore the dignity of the women who were sent away and re-contextualize the decades that the Laundries acted as a de facto jail for Irish women.

This has remained one of the darkest and most misunderstood periods of recent history. The Fallen compels readers to not only confront this shameful past but to ask a deeper question: What do we choose to remember?

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Ireland, Feminism, Audiobook, Historical, Religion

345 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 30, 2026

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shortly after the 2024 screen adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, actor Cillian Murphy was quoted as saying that Ireland had been in the “Dark Ages” until fairly recently. In The Fallen, author Louise Brangan says Murphy’s strong words got a mixed response but that they weren’t wrong. Readers will heartily agree after reading her book. These “Dark Ages” of Ireland are its many years as a theocratic police state, a frightening set-up that didn’t just suck joy out of citizens’ lives but that held Ireland back from growing economically rich.

Brangan confronts a specific part of the theocratic police state: the Magdalene Laundries, which operated until 1996 (although by then far less robustly than in earlier decades) and were overseen by nuns. Calling the Laundries “residences” is euphemistic. They were prisons in essence, containing girls and women engaged in true slave labor. In their prime, many were scattered throughout Ireland, and they, along with other oppressive facilities, institutionalized a jaw-droppingly high percentage of the population. The Irish government spun the truth of these places positively so that the public didn’t only support them, often monetarily, but also scorned the “fallen” women inside.

Readers learn specifics via the profiles of six women who’d been imprisoned in various Laundries, with some entering as young children and others as adults (ages of those inside ranged from nine to eighty-nine). Contrary to widespread belief (and something Keegan gets wrong in Small Things Like These), the Laundries were not the same as Ireland’s Mother-and-Baby homes. Girls and women did not arrive pregnant. No babies lived there. Instead, these abysmal places were for “the fallen” of the title. So readers can fully appreciate the threat, Brangan describes what “the fallen” label encompasses. She highlights how it was generous to a ludicrous degree: Those who’d borne “illegitimate” children were sent there, but also trapped inside were girls who’d been sexually abused by a family member; or girls and women who’d caused some offense, even as minor as truancy; or, ridiculously, girls and women who merely had the potential to cause offense, based on some observation from somebody somewhere. In short, they were places to dump girls and women, usually for bringing shame upon a family by disrupting either the sexist status quo or the Catholic one.

The women have in common years of exhaustion washing and ironing the public’s textiles all day, every day. The nuns in this book have stone hearts and stunted consciences, at best. The six women, and others who’ve gone on record in other publications, tell of abject living conditions, restricted food, stunningly dehumanizing punishment, horrendous injuries, labor performed in silence, and no friendship or empathy from anyone inside the Laundry’s walls. Some survivors refer to the Laundries as “Ireland’s Auschwitz.” Many who successfully escaped found themselves homeless and poor, especially if they were admitted to a Laundry as a young child and were therefore under-educated.

Laundries, along with Mother-and-Baby homes, asylums, and industrial schools, were part of an institutional oppressive network founded and run by the Catholic church. (A noteworthy curiosity: The network was devoutly religious, but sexism influenced enforcement more than religious edicts did. Only girls and women were censured. Not counting major crimes like murder and theft, boys and men got a slap on the wrist, if that.) A parallel for what happened in Ireland is the phenomenon, in the U.S. and elsewhere, of admitting girls and women to asylums for weak or false reasons. The stories of the six women in The Fallen helpfully open the door to more, though—because understanding how the mass injustice could happen begins with understanding the Irish-Catholic social values of that time.

One of The Fallen’s crucial points is that, unlike how the asylum system worked in the U.S., Ireland’s network thrived for two peculiar reasons. The first was because church and state were united. The Irish were the “best Catholics in the world,” and that was precisely the problem. Priests and nuns were glorified, and although a not-insignificant percentage of the population emigrated, the millions of Irish who didn’t were oddly accepting of church-and-state enmeshment. It wasn’t until the two separated that Ireland transformed—impressively fast—from a poor country to a rich one. The country exists now as a brazen statement that strictly adhering to religiously tinged ideas of right and wrong hinders growth and realization of full potential.

The second reason the oppressive network thrived was because Ireland's culture of secrecy and silence was a powerful gatekeeper. Brangan calls readers’ attention to the poem “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” by Irishman Seamus Heaney. Silence was crucial to helping maintain a family’s respectability, and it was understood that if a girl or woman vanished, something shameful had happened and that asking about or commenting upon it was taboo. Given this, after the Laundries closed and the profiled women could reenter society, they were diminished people who fastidiously hid the fact that they’d slaved in one.

The Fallen is about the Laundries, but in teaching about these, Brangan is almost blasphemous: She denounces, as she puts it, the “fabulist ideal of Ireland.” An acknowledgement of how excessively Ireland (and Irishness) is romanticized is eons overdue. A fabulist ideal isn’t only strange but it can also feed a problem. It’s healthy, then, that Ireland’s reckoning with its horrors reminds the world that the country is a country like any other, not the “Emerald Isle,” magical land.

The book’s lesson is obvious but something that can’t be over-emphasized: Exaltation of any one person or group bars the checks and balances that help sustain a nation’s full, good health. Church and state should never become one. Many people, especially the Irish diaspora, are caught up in the romance and are blissfully ignorant of the ugliness in this part of Ireland’s history. They need to know it, at least out of respect to victims. Readers should pair The Fallen with Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland for a dimensional understanding of the country that’s grounded in reality.

NOTE: I received this as an Advance Reader Copy from LibraryThing in March 2026.

[Liralen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1951, when the Laundries were at their height, for every one hundred thousand males, twenty-seven were in prison[...] While for every one hundred thousand females, seventy were in a Laundry. These were not peripheral: They were Ireland's main carceral institution. (loc. 179*)

The Fallen traces the history of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, the last of which did not close until the mid-1990s. If you haven't heard of the Laundries, the short version is that they were just that—laundries—except run by nuns and staffed by women who had been consigned to the Laundries for infractions real and imagined.

Pregnancy outside marriage, yes, but mostly for being lively girls, abused and abandoned daughters, or because their families were pulled apart for not fitting the mold of what a family should be. (loc. 3247)

Brangan is careful to draw a distinction between the Laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes that also operated; there was certainly overlap between the women and girls who spent time in them and in the Laundries, but fundamentally the Mother and Baby Homes were there to hide women's pregnancies, and the Laundries were there to punish women and girls who had transgressed.

For Brigid, having played fast and loose with school rules, it was a life sentence. Adult men sentenced [for] murder in the twentieth century were rarely expected to serve more than seven years. Somehow, by the 1940s, the mildest transgression of girls and young women caused more outrage than the taking of a life. It was Brigid's mother who finally came to liberate her daughter. By that point, she was thirty-nine years old. (loc. 523)

I've read about the Laundries before, but everything I read adds something new. Brangan is determined to hold the nuns who ran the Laundries accountable in her words, but she's also clear that it's not just the nuns, or the church, who hold responsibility. The Laundries always reflected the mores of the society around them (loc. 2131). Take that and extend it a bit more broadly: the residential schools in Canada (and elsewhere); the troubled teen industry in the US; the way women have always been punished for stepping outside the lines.

I highlighted so many things in The Fallen—there's so much history wrapped up in how the Laundries came to be and how they evolved over time. At first I found the history a little dry, but then it became clear just how important it was to the overall picture. And then of course there are the personal stories, which Brangan pulls largely from existing testimonies, and the broader cultural context, and it's just...a lot of food for thought.

No one explained to Carmel what was happening. Nor did she ask. There were no rewards for curiosity in Catholic Ireland. (loc. 432)

Would recommend to anyone who has heard of the Magdalene Laundries and wants to know more, and also to people generally interested in the odder intersections of religion and women's history. And I'll leave you with this:

Some women at Sunday's Well were made to line up and repeat this after the nuns: "I am nobody, I am nobody, I am nobody." (loc. 1552)

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult to read in places, this account of the infamous Magdalene Laundries is complete as well as harrowing. Louise Brangan has carefully researched not only the history of these establishments, but also that of Ireland, its genesis and the forces that made such a cerceneal system possible. Beautifully written, she also includes personal histories from some of the women who found themselves, often without having committed any crime or misdemeanor, locked up and made to perform what is essentially slave labor. Should they gain access to the outside world, many are ill equipped to do so since they've had no guidance early in life. This would be classed as fictional if it weren't horribly true.

[Georgina Reads_Eats_Explores]

This is one of those books that leaves you angry long after you’ve turned the final page.

Recently I heard a young one refer to the Magdalene Laundries as being “from the olden days”. The last Laundry closed in 1996. I was a teenager. That’s how recent this history is.

In The Fallen, Louise Brangan examines the Magdalene Laundries through archival research, official records and, most importantly, the voices of the women who survived them. What emerges is a devastating account of a system built on shame, secrecy and control.

Many of the women sent to the Laundries had committed no crime. They were there because they were born outside marriage, because they became pregnant, because they were considered troublesome, because they had experienced abuse, or simply because somebody decided they had brought shame on a family.

One of the most striking points Brangan makes is that these institutions were officially described as “penitentiaries”. The women were expected to do penance for perceived sins rather than serve punishment for any offence. Yet the reality was incarceration, forced labour, loss of identity and, for many, lifelong trauma.

The heart of this book lies in the testimonies of six women who endured the Laundries. Their stories are extraordinarily powerful. Again and again we see young girls stripped of their names, their autonomy and their identities. Reading their accounts, what comes across most strongly is confusion. Many didn’t fully understand why they had been sent there. They simply found themselves abandoned, trapped and expected to accept it.

There were moments when I had to put the book down. Not because the writing is difficult, but because the cruelty is. Not dramatic cruelty. The everyday cruelty of people deciding that certain women deserved less freedom, less dignity and less compassion than everyone else.

What struck me most was how ordinary so many of these women were. The “fallen” of the title were often simply girls and women who failed to conform to impossible standards imposed by church and society.

Brangan writes with compassion, clarity and meticulous research. This never feels like a dry academic study. It feels human, urgent and necessary. More than anything, it restores voices that were ignored for far too long.

A difficult read at times, but an essential one. Because history doesn’t become less important simply because we’d rather look away from it.

Read it, do!

[Sierra · Rating 5 out of 5]

So so important to learn about parts of history that were swept under the rug like this. I really commend Louise Brangan for her courage to dive deeply into this subject and clear up the misconceptions.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. I read this via Whispersync and the narration was good.

[Danna · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Fallen sets out to document the history of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries. Importantly, Brogan differentiates between the laundries and, perhaps the more well-known, mother-and-baby homes of the mid- to late-1900s. Like many others, I had thought them one and the same prior to reading The Fallen.

In this case, The Fallen refers to the women sent to the laundries because they’ve fallen from societal grace. However, unlike the mother-and-baby homes, most of them were not sent there pregnant or because they were birthing illegitimate children. Instead, they have bent the rules of society in some way, maybe for something as unavoidable as being birthed to poor parents.

The Fallen starts with a more comprehensive history of Ireland’s landscape and why the laundries came to exist. Frankly, I was bored by this and, while I’ll admit it is important context, Brogan lost me in the first three chapters. The points are valid, but I also think it could have been summarized in a shorter introduction chapter. I picked this book up because of my interest in the women and their stories, which don’t start in earnest until about 25% in.

Overall, this book is well-researched, informative, and a bit dry. If you’re interested in the topic, you’ll likely enjoy it, but if you’re someone looking for nonfiction that reads like a story, you probably won’t. 2.5 stars rounded up.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give this six stars if I could--it's among the best nonfiction I've read this year, and it will go down as one of THE definitive accounts of the Magdalene Laundries. Dr. Louise Brangan is a serious academic, and compelling writer. She makes the case that in 20th Century Ireland--a conservative Catholic theocracy in the decades following the establishment of the Free State-- this was an intentional and systematic form of imprisonment, misogyny, and oppression.

In fact, I see that the Guardian reviewer and I copied down the exact same sentence: “In a regime distinguished by its excessive inhumanity, the Magdalene laundries were its deep end. In 1951, when the laundries were at their height, for every 100,000 males, 27 were in prison … [while] for every 100,000 females, 70 were in a laundry. These were not peripheral: they were Ireland’s main carceral institution.”

[Abbeigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel as though it would be wrong to call this a ‘review’. ‘𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧’ is a raw, hard hitting, eye opening truth about what happened to many woman and girls in 20th century Ireland in The Magdalene Laundries, into the years that followed there ‘closure’.

This book is a stark look at the dystopian views, politics and oppression of the time (and into present day). The unethical environment that these women and girls had to endure was monstrous; stripped of their names, rights and dignity, purely for existing in a place where censorship of the media and politics, by both church and state, meant their narrative was written for them.

𝐋𝐨𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐁𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐧 has immaculately researched, curated and given voice to a topic that has been in dire need of having the record put straight about what these Laundries really meant for the women & girls that were sent to them. She has helped give them a voice, where even as late to the present day, there are those that choose to look away and deny.

It’s impossible to put into words what Louise has so eloquently published, so all I can do is implore you to pick up a copy of this book yourself.

“𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙙𝙞𝙧𝙚𝙘𝙩 𝙙𝙚𝙨𝙘𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙖𝙣𝙩 𝙤𝙛 𝙘𝙤𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙨𝙞𝙡𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙞𝙨 𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙨 𝙘𝙤𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙜𝙚𝙩𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜.”

Thank you to Vintage Books for my early copy to read and review; these are all my honest thoughts and opinions.

[Isobel Nicklin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly well researched account of the Magdalene laundries. Harrowing to read the suffering that these women experienced

[Garvism · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louise Brangan’s The Fallen is a searing, lucid history that dismantles the myths surrounding Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and situates them within a broader carceral web—prisons, asylums, industrial and reformatory schools, Mother and Baby Homes. Brangan blends rigorous research with intimate, case-driven storytelling, giving names and textures to lives too often reduced to statistics. The book’s central argument—that control of women underwrote a fragile national project—lands with devastating clarity, as do the stark numbers and the reminders of how recently the last laundry closed.

What distinguishes this account is its moral precision. Brangan resists melodrama and easy absolution, tracing how church, state, and family colluded in everyday ways to make exit nearly impossible. The prose is measured yet thrumming with quiet anger; the testimonies restore dignity without smoothing over trauma. It’s both history and reckoning: a corrective to public memory and a mirror held up to institutional power.

Concise, compassionate, and unsparing, The Fallen is indispensable—an enraging, essential monument to the women Ireland tried to forget, and a warning about what silence permits.

[Paul M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written and researched.
Infuriating as expected.
Lots of interesting Irish history beyond the story of the Laundries and the horrendous behavior of the church and the society.

[Ciara · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There is no archive for quiet moments of compliance and inaction."

I remember reading about the Magdalene Laundries in college and I have never forgotten learning the shocking fact that the last Laundry closed in 1996. This was two years after I was born. The past suddenly felt closer and not at all distant.

In Louise Brangan's new book "The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries & Ireland's Legacy of Silence" the author makes the critical argument that what happened in the Laundries has not been neatly dealt with and tucked away into the history books. Rather, the legacy, and how we handle it, endures.

There is still much to be understood and I strongly believe Brangan has broken ground with her research into the Laundries, particularly by focusing on the voices of the women who survived them.

"They endured Ireland's stench and dirt, the stains that wanted removing, to be made pristine, and professionally transformed."

Carmel, Nora, Brigid, Catherine and Eileen are five different women with different routes into the Laundries but each share the same experience of being taken, hidden away, and silenced without explanation and completely against their will.

Brangan charts their story against the political background of Ireland, starting from the country's vulnerable beginnings in the wake of independence, the increasing reliance of the State on religious orders to take the "less fortunate" into their institutions, and the growing social pressure to look the other way and no matter what you see you "say nothing."

The Laundries were not just an inevitable outcome of a developing Catholic Ireland, systems were put in place at multiple levels that allowed the Laundries, alongside mother and baby homes, industrial schools and other institutions to operate. The Laundries even became an "official arm of the justice system."

"They washed, they scrubbed, they spun, and they pressed."

This book brings the misery and the mindless monotony of the Laundries starkly to life. It also emphasizes the mental torture experienced by these girls and women after being dropped into this vacant, empty and exhausting world, for no reason and with no end in sight.

Most cruelly, they worked, slept, and ate very closely together and yet they were forbidden to speak or build friendships and "they held their silence tightly, yet they emitted a loneliness that was palpable." They had their names and identity stolen from them as well as any chance at making much needed human connections. They were worked physically to the bone and mentally tortured under the control and abuse of the Nuns.

"How do you calculate the cost of a life not lived? How do we begin to remember a history like that, when it has not yet come to a conclusive end?"

Brangan makes the crucial point that the closing of the last laundry in 1996 did not mark the end of the Laundries or the fates of the women who had been imprisoned within their walls. They had been abandoned by the state for a long time after, with many living below the poverty line, and in poor health. Not to mention the women who were lost to the world of the Convent forever, those who struggled to rejoin the outside world due to institutionalisation and a cruel and judgemental Irish society.

I really appreciated the insights we get into Brangan's experience of researching and writing this book, what it was like to uncover devastating details of these women's lives and the grief involved in the process. I learned so much thanks to the work of this author and for that I am so grateful.

This is not only a powerful contribution to amplifying silenced voices, but also to how we remember them.

"There’s always something in my life that will remind me of my past life and that’s where I will never get closure, never will. I’ve moved on, yes, I’ve moved on a bit. But I’ll never heal.”

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

sometimes, non-fiction historical writing can come across as a bit dry but i never had that issue with this book, which closely examines the magdalene laundries that operated across the whole of ireland for many, many decades. there's a great deal of detail here and i felt like i learnt a lot, but it never felt like i was reading anything dull although it's certainly dreary in the bleak and depressing sense.

brangan takes a lot of care to ensure that her readers understand the difference between magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes, which is essentially the myth of cultural consciousness she's writing against within this. in the last few decades, as more information has become available about the laundries, the schools and the homes, brangan posits that to make history more understandable for those of us still alive we have to flatten out parts of it. to confront all of it would be too big, too scary, too disgusting. this book goes back through decades, discussing how ireland after partition started to become a much, much more regimented and very Conservative Catholic country. the statistics about institutionalisation throughout the irish population here were so fucking sad -- between the schools, the asylums, the laundries it was nearly 1% of the island. ireland had the highest rate of people in asylums in the world. more girls in industrial schools in ireland than in the whole of the uk. just absolutely awful things to think about and this really draws on the idea that the wider cultures inability to deal with any kind of "aberration" from the norm and its strict policing of others behaviours resulted in this.

obviously when you're dealing with such a huge scope, it becomes 'easier' to follow specifics. it makes it more human(e) and more understandable and brangan follows a number of specific women who spent time in the laundries. if you're at all au fait with anything about the laundries, i think you're not entirely surprised by the accounts of the conditions but it is still absolutely harrowing to think about. she does a really good job of tracing how the specific historical context created a culture which relied on these laundries and how the shame and humiliation silenced those who were often there.

this was devastating and it was educational. i learnt things here, certainly, and following these women's stories it's impossible not to feel moved and disgusted by what happened to them. brangan does write with a great deal of compassion, but i think it's also pretty brave to outright say that the conflation of the laundries legacy with mother and baby homes does a disservice to our collective sense of memory. the evil of both is undeniable and leans on and against each other but it's not the same thing. the hurt and the misogyny, the way these women were treated, the state collusion, the religious oversight, the way people can turn away from each other when times are particularly hard. it's all worth remembering. this is really sad, really engaging and really good! i enjoyed it, as much as you can say that you enjoy something like this.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I received an ARC via a Librarything giveaway.

In the new series ‘The Testaments’, there is a scene where a young woman who just had her first period has to tell her father. She does this publicly, kneeling before while a group of men, all old enough to be her father, watch. The point of the scene, besides highlighting who exactly is in power, is that a woman’s fertility -her ability or inability to reproduce isn’t her own there, despite the celebrations that the young woman in question had with her friends. This is not something that is new or surprising. Even today, in many parts of the world, including may parts of America, a woman really has not right to choice and is judged on her purity – however that term may be applied.

Brangan’s book details a time in Ireland, not very far removed, when women who were deemed impure or unfit, regardless of whether they had had sex, where sent to places where they could be easily controlled and monitored. She presents the laundries for what they were and separates them off slightly from the Mother and Baby homes. While she does take issue with inflation of numbers that some movies or reports use, Brangan’s book does not whitewash or hide what happened.

Brangan loosely follows the lives of some of the women that were forced into the laundries, each one for a different reason. Before she embarks on these personal journeys however, she details the start of the laundries, at least in regards to being used to police and control women. She also give the reader a tour of politics and the conservative “traditional” movement that lead to the emphasis on women in the home, among other things.

One does wonder if any of that was also a reaction to colonization.

When Brangan does follow the women the book really shines. The book’s chapters reflect the various stages of joining, living in, leaving, and dealing with memories of the laundries. Not all the women were told why, some of them were simply taken. Escape was not really an option because society itself was arranged against you.

The most interesting part of the book is the after, and how some how some of the women would talk about their experiences. Even when talking to family members who knew about the past, the past was hushed up and politely ignored. Fictions were maintained.

And those fictions also seemed to occur at the heart of government, where when there was an overhauling of various systems, the laundries were kept because of their ability to “deal” with women. It wasn’t just religion but also patriarchy using religion, as it so often does.

Brangan’s style is easy enough to read – personal but factual. She doesn’t shield the reader from the horrors but she also does not use the horrors to shock or titillate the reader. She gives a lenses that looks at all levels, including how the nuns themselves operated in terms of the rules that were laid out for them. One leaves the book not only with a sense of what happened but how it happened.

[Regan Slaughter · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars
The Magdalene Laundries were the last stop for so-called "fallen" women in 20th century Ireland. Any number of things could get a woman committed to a Magdalene Laundry; the most common in the public imagination was becoming pregnant out of wedlock, but in practice many women were committed for cutting school too much, wearing skirts that were too short, aging out of state institutions, or just generally being too "high-spirited." Once a woman entered the laundry they were forced to do hard industrial labor for no wages under conditions that were intensely emotionally abusive, and was not allowed to leave until someone came to claim her or the nuns felt she was reformed. For many of these women, forgotten and hidden away, that time never came. And the Laundries were only one part of Ireland's carcel system, which even as it boasted about its low prison population held around 1% of its population institutionalized.

After independence, Ireland started on the endeavor of nation building, and hung much of its modern national identity on the purity of its people, and especially its women and girls. This fear that girls could cause the corruption of the nation led to a culture of shame and silence, and droves of young women immigrating or being institutionalized. Brangan does and excellent job tracing not only the full history of the laundries, but also their context in both the past and present. She delves into a history of injustice that had been intentionally repressed, and attempts to create a more complete record of the truth.

This is, overall, a very approachable work of nonfiction. It highlights several girls who spent time in the laundries through the decades, and uses this human element for both primary source material and a narrative that is easy to digest. Her dedication to context also means that the reader does not need much knowledge of Irish history at all to understand the information being presented. My only major complaint is that Brangan is often not very clear about when events are happening. She will transpose the stories of girls who were in the laundries decades apart on the same page, sometimes making it difficult to trace the evolution of the institution. That being said, I do consider this a very solid history of the Magdalene Laundries, and would recommend it for people interested in Irish history, or women's history.

[Janine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such an eye opening book, exposing what a country when deducted to religion and morality can do to ensure that women are kept in their place - under the guise of protection - and erased from society. While many know of the Magdalene Laundries, many do not know other institutions used to incarcerate women or their history, cruelties and secrets. This book tells it all.

When Ireland was a new country in the early 20th C, it created laws to control women under the belief if women could be controlled, the rest of Irish society would be controlled as well. This thinking was based on the mythical view of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the purest form of womanhood. The government worked with the Catholic Church to make use of convent facilities as places to send young girls susceptible to the sins of the pagan world where they could be reformed. Besides the laundries, they used prisons, asylums, industrial and reformatory schools, Mother and Baby homes, and County homes for this purpose and legalized their use as part of its carceral system. At one time 1% of the Irish population was confined to these outstripping the “current rate of mass incarceration in America.”

The book presents stories of several women who were confined to these institutions and their horrific stories of what they endured. What was most cruel was how the nuns running these places strove to dehumanize the girls and women by changing their names, dressing them in rags, and forcing them to do dangerous work. The last home closed in 2013. By statistics reported in a recent Irish report, over 10,000 women died and were erased from memory.

This is a well researched and written book. It begs the mind of how such cruelty could be done by a government but in today’s America that is exactly what the white Christian nationalists want. White men who feel emasculated by women joyfully await this as I heard one young man stare recently. This is why a book such as this is so important. In today’s Ireland abortion is legal. Why? Because as history has shown you cannot enforce religion on the people.

Highly recommend.

I’d like to thank NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for allowing me to read this ARC.

[Denise Nolson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written, important, powerful & eye opening book on the history of the Magadalene Laundries in Ireland & the institutionalised abuse & slavery suffered by the women & girls who disappeared through their doors. It's not an easy read, nor should it be, I found myself at different times experiencing sadness, horror, despair & rage at the very deliberate & yet careless way both society, their families, & the religious orders judged, demonised, & discarded these W&G as worthless, while at the same time the laundries profitted from their ceaseless labours in terrifying & harmful working conditions

Louise Brangan's book provides important political & social context, which gives insight into how Irish society collectively closed it's eyes & allowed this cruelty to happen right in front of them, rightly without excusing it, because there is no rationale for throwing away generations of potential lives.

Am I judging with eyes from now people from the past? Yes. Because some things are intrinsically wrong, whenever in history they occur. Throwing your daughter away as sinful because your husband or son has abused her? Wrong. Snatching young girls in respectable jobs off the street because you judge they might not be 'moral', based on zero evidence? Wrong.

There is mention of comparison of the laundries, & the mother & baby homes, having similar effects to the Holocaust on thousands of Irish W&G, and this is not wrong, or an over statement. There are still unknown bodies in mass graves.

It's deeply shameful the Catholic church has never recognised it's own culpability & cruelty, let alone apologised or offered redress as requested by the Irish government.

A thought provoking, detailed and incredibly well researched book, would recommend to anyone interested in social history

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louise Brangan does an incredible job bringing to light the horrid injustices that were done to young Irish girls locked away in Magdalene Laundries between 1922 thru 1996. We have all heard about the disturbing history of Ireland and the church when it came to girls that found themselves with child, or in trouble with the law but I had no idea it was a place that housed girls that had been raped, abused, orphaned, deserted by their parents or just didn’t fit the mold of society. It was really a place to silence and hide the dirty parts of society. As one girl couldn’t understand why no one looked for her after she was basically kidnapped by a couple nuns while working at her place of business. These girls lost their childhood, teenage years and some even their adult years. And when they were finally released, some had such a hard time adapting that they voluntarily came back to the laundries. It is heartbreaking to hear these stories. What is most appalling is the interviews Brangan has with the nuns who worked with these girls. Many of them didn’t feel remorse for how they treated the girls because it was sanctioned by the church. The silence was so loud but nobody chose to intervene and stop it.

This is a must read for everyone to raise awareness that things like this do happen and when they do people need to stand up against such atrocities.

Thank you NetGalley, Louise Brangan, and Simon & Schuster for providing this eARC for review.

[Katie B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Simon and Schuster for sending me a free copy!

For much of the 20th century, Ireland was clinging to this dream of picture perfect Catholics. And as is often the case, girls and women were held to stricter standards than the male population. Facilities like Mother and Baby Homes, asylums, and industrial homes were some of the places these “nonconforming” individuals were sent, isolating them from society. This book explores the history of the Magdalene Laundries where “fallen” girls and women were housed and put to work doing laundry. The money earned going to the religious order in charge.

It’s important to note the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes are separate things although horrible treatment was the norm at both. Some of the unmarried women who gave birth ended up at the laundries but it was a small percentage. Most of the individuals at the laundries had been abandoned by their families or were victims of rape. (Back then they weren’t considered victims, instead they were viewed as seducers.) Others at these facilities might have physical or developmental disabilities.

It’s shameful places like these were operating under the guise of helping people. All they accomplished were removing those from society that didn’t fit that Irish Catholic ideal and then exploited them for labor. It was cruel and abusive, the girls and women were made to feel ashamed of themselves, like they had done something wrong and needed to repent. The laundries were in operation for decades with an estimated 30,000 women incaretated over the years. In 1993, unmarked graves of 155 women were uncovered on the grounds of one of the laundries. It’s only been in the last decade or so the Irish government has begun to acknowledge the atrocities committed at these laundries.

It’s such a sad history and unfortunately we will likely never know it all. The author did a good job though of piecing together what she could and sharing the stories of some of these women. One of the many things that broke my heart was how when first entering a laundry, they were given a new name or in some cases a number, essentially erasing their past. Some of the nuns claimed it was to protect their identity but all it did was strip them of one of the few things they could call their own. Their lives and free will were taken from them. It’s maddening.

Please read this book as their stories deserve to be heard.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had not heard of the Irish laundries before reading this book. The secrecy surrounding them is no surprise given the hiding and shuffling of the priests poor behavior within the Catholic Church. These girls were thrown away by society and the sisters reinforced the belief by repeatedly demeaning them and telling them that no one wanted them, going so far as to not using their given name and renaming them new, unflattering names. When these girls died within the walls of the laundries they were buried in mass graves with no mention of their names. For close to one hundred years the laundries were operating under the same old rules. Having gone to a Catholic orphanage and later to elementary and high schools, the treatment of these young girls and women by the “good sisters” of all orders is much too relatable. My heart breaks for these women who were lost to society and should have lived full and beautiful lives. This ARC was provided by Simon & Shuster publishing via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Simon J Alvey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant, and incredibly powerful book that is - to my mind - essential reading for anyone interested in the history of 20th century Ireland. The appalling stories that have been told of the Magdalene Laundries have held a grim fascination to me for at least 25 years. This book is successful in three distinct ways, firstly how well it places these abusive places into the stultifying context of post-independence Ireland, secondly its absolute focus on the truth, separating out the survivors of these institutions from the parallel abuses of the mother and baby homes whilst centering the testimony of survivors as evidence. Thirdly it very successfully makes the case for the importance of history and truth telling as a way of dealing with past traumas. The laundries have become a ghostly presence throughout Irish literature and culture in recent years, but it is this book that really gets to the brutal truth without the cheap sensationalism that can sometimes be present.

[Mary Cummins · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a first generation Irish - American whose mother immigrated from Ireland in the 1950s , I was aware of the Magdalen laundries but not much else.This author sheds a bright light on this terrible time in Ireland’s history when from the 1930s to their closure in 1996 , many Irish girls were sent to these laundries just because they were defiant, high-spirited, abused or maybe new mothers whose babies had already been adopted.At the laundries, they suffered brutal working and living conditions and some never left dying there.Much was hidden from the public about these laundries and became a dirty secret in Ireland’s history..The author tells the stories of six different girls who at different times and under different circumstances entered these laundries and describes their experiences.This was a very sad and haunting read.

[Sarah Linfoot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Very well written and researched. This book does a great job of providing a comprehensive view of what led to and reinforced the culture of silence that supported the existence of the Laundries. I have always romanticized Ireland (and still want to visit), but learning about its silent and often-overlooked past, and the complete abandonment of these fallen women, will linger with me for a long time.

“We may now speak about the Laundries, but how we remember them and all they represented matters, especially because the direct descendant of collective silence is sometimes collective forgetting.” (p. 280)

[Jami Chari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley, Louise Brangan, and the publisher for granting me access to this ARC.

What an eye opening, heart breaking read. I was unaware of the Irish Laundries and these types of facilities around the world. I had obviously heard of various countries placing women in asylums for no reason at all, and this was truly just the icing on the cake. I appreciate the narrative approach the author took to detailing the history here; rather than writing it textbook-style, they focused on the story through the eyes of women who lived through the Laundries in various ways. If you are interested in the development of women's rights, I recommend this one highly.

[Colleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brangan seeks to define the Magadelene Laundries on their own terms, separate from the current habit of linking them to the Mother and Baby Homes, as has become common in popular culture. They were different branches of the same tree, interconnected in multiple ways, but also very different. To conflate them into one smooths the edges into something more palatable and easier to understand.

Most of the focus of The Fallen is outside the laundries, as Brangan dissects the social and political cultures that made such places both possible and accepted. The early chapters examine the political actions of a newly independent Ireland and the drive for a pure culture. How easy it is, to point the finger at something you don't approve of, and gather enough force to create a society that finds the easiest solution to eliminate the problem.

I did find myself wanting more from this book. Brangan does a good job with the early days and the cultural impetuous for the laundries but she skims a bit once inside. She attempts to give as many women as possible their say, drawing on survivor's stories and oral histories. These are the strongest parts of the story but they are rather disjointed - Brangan tries to fit too much into a short book. This is a good starting point for a history of the laundries; hopefully it will become the launch pad for a deeper examination.

[Joann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult topic thoroughly researched by the author and well presented. Having been raised Catholic, I can only too readily understand the secretiveness and barricades around the laundries and the women confined therein. What caused me to catch my breath is the reminder of the complicity of the Irish government at agreeing to the dictates of the church. Purity above all else, even at the expense of lives of the innocent. There is, however, hope that the issue is understood to the degree of never being repeated, even in a minor fashion.

[Rik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book. Even with a rough idea of what went on it was still shocking. This is a very well written book that balances the cultural history with the facts and weaves personal testimony throughout. Has to be read to be believed, it's still stunning that this was happening so recently. This definately is a book with a view that pushes that view forcefully but is never preachy, just appropriately outraged.

[Alexis Berman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to LibraryThing for my Early Reviewer's Copy of this book.

I first read about the Magdalene Laundries years ago and was horrified. Over the years I have read other books that either focus on the topic or that include it in a historical context or side story. This is the most well written, comprehensive account of The Laundry and the abuses they inflicted on women of all ages, simply in the name of moral superiority. Well structured and easy to read, 4.5 stars rounded up.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've seen movies about the so-called Magdalene Laundries, but this look at the actual institutions and how they were really not "mother and baby" places but forced labor for women (there were horrible places for unwed mothers, but not the laundries). And the ways girls got sent there, identities erased, with no hope for escape because these were not rehabilitation or correctional facilities, is just horrific.

They were not some product of "long ago!" That's the even more horrific part, that they were around as recently as the 1990s. It's also unclear if there will ever be true reconciliation for what the women went through, or punishment for the nuns who oversaw the laundries (several of whom were truly sadistic... was that because of who they really were or was it because of where they were? doesn't really matter in the end).

eARC provided by publisher via Edelweiss.