Caroline ’s Reviews > The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence > Status Update

same vehement mantra: It was awful what the Church and State did to those women and their babies." [...] In fact, "No babies were born in Magdalene Laundries. There were no rows of cribs for infants, no children scuttling below everyone's knees. There were no pregnant women or [pregnant] girls there. I had also started out with this vague assumption, that these were ghoulish prisons for women and girls who had become pregnant outside marriage. It quickly became clear that the Laundries were something else entirely. If these women and girls were the fallen, it was only because for much of the twentieth century, almost anyone could fall."

Basically, the situation with the Laundries sounds similar to how, in the U.S. during that same time, women were locked away in insane asylums at the slightest hint of any psychiatric instability (or not). In these first 29 pages, the author explains that in Ireland it was for the slightest hint of "religious straying" or even just the potential for it (maybe at the least).

This is somber but fascinating.

Mr. James wrote: "This is somber but fascinating."

Definitely

Bone-chilling.

Morphing_kashi wrote: "Bone-chilling."

Yes. Already the stories leave me speechless. (She focuses on five [or maybe six?] women.)

Interesting. I look forward to your review.