Magdalene Sisters (2002), The

Journal of Adult Protection, The, Dec 2004 by Kennedy, Margaret

The Magdalene Sisters (2002)

Director: Peter Mullen

Screenplay: Peter Mullen

Producer: Frances Higson.

Certificate 15

'You are not a man of God, you are not a man of God, you are not a man of God, you are not a man of God, you are not a man of God, you are not a man of God.'

At an open air Mass, Crispina, a 'Maggie', screams 27 times at the priest who sexually abused her. He is urgently divesting himself of his vestments and underclothes as he tries to deal with a virulent itch caused by poison ivy planted in the washing machine that had cleaned his clothes. Crispina had found her voice; you knew she would be punished, but she had only found her voice by completely going over the edge. For me this was a defining moment. You saw in this moment the cruel, patriarchal culture that had incarcerated the four girls featured in this film, set in a Magdalene laundry, a deranged regime of servitude and ungodly brutality.

As Crispina becomes more agitated and angry, another 'Maggie' grins in satisfaction. She it was who put the poison ivy in the washing machine, the only justice portrayed in these 119 minutes of sheer, unadulterated awfulness. It was washing machines that were ultimately to liberate these Magdalene women. For only when they became a household purchase did the necessity of laundries diminish. It was a poignant irony.

Many have said that the film lacks a context. For this reason I shall put a little of the theological and political perspective.

Magdalen asylums or laundries were originally not an 'Irish' nor exclusively a Catholic phenomenon. The name comes from Mary of Magdala in the Gospels who was supposed to be a prostitute (she was not). There were laundries in France, England, Scotland, North and South America and Australia.

The first English refuge for the reception of the penitent 'fallen' (prostitutes) was the Magdalen Hospital, opened in Whitechapel, London, in 1758. The first Irish asylum was a Protestant one, opened in Dublin in 1767. In Cork a Catholic asylum was opened in 1809 and a Protestant one in 1810.

In England the most prominent 'Magdalenist' of the period was William Gladstone, who as an undergraduate made a lifetime commitment to the rescue of fallen women. The language used of such women at the time is shocking: 'Instead of devils they will become Christians'; 'Foul vampires! Patented villains, they have fellowship with the devils!'; 'The woman who's breath is the pestilence of hell!' (Finnegan, 2001).

This film is set much later, for Irish laundries lasted into the 1990s, the last one closing only in 1996. (The last UK Magdalene closed in 1970.) The film is not set in the dark ages but in 1964, a time when the Beatles were in full flow, when contraception became a liberator for women and when feminism was particularly active. As well as being agencies of moral control of women (there were no such places for men) the laundries were great money-spinners for convents. The nuns needed more and more girls and women to bolster the coffers. Hence the movement grew and extended from rescuing 'fallen' women to catching in their nets any woman who had a sexual history (or was in clanger of) and who was not married. This included girls sexually abused by fathers, brothers, cousins and neighbours!

In Ireland of the thirties and forties Fr John Charles McQuaid was asserting himself. The government of the time was staunchly conservative and busy setting up independent Ireland. They left social policy to the Church. McQuaid became Archbishop of Dublin in 1940. He riled against women. Of women athletes he was to say: 'They are carrying out Satan's programme' (Cooney 1999). He wanted girls separated from boys in education. He saw co-education as 'the enemy of Christian upbringing' and tried to get the Legion of Mary to promote 'modesty in dress'. He was to become the driving force of sexual repression and the oppression of women. This was a man who would regularly read specialist manuals on sexology, including works that would have been considered deviant and pornographic. Most were in Latin or French. McQuaid felt justified in doing this so he could talk to Catholic doctors. (Cooney, 1999). He actually lived beside the convent I was taught in. He confirmed me. We had a rule, 'I must not put my feet above my head', in case we showed our knickers. Only years later did I learn that the Archbishop had a telescope in the turret of his castle next door, ostensibly to watch the boats in the bay beyond the convent and bishop's house. I now wonder whether the enlightened nuns who taught me knew something.

These girls came from situations where conservative 'bog' Catholicism was rife, the sort of Catholicism that reeked of sexual repression, perversion and absolute power; where Working class' meant sub-human in the eyes of many and poverty struck. Poverty could not buy education in a land where there was no free secondary education until 1967; where the rule of the Church, of the priest, was sacrosanct; where McQuaid set the conservative anti-women Catholic ethos ruthlessly; where no-one felt able to resist or challenge the priest, a 'God' in his own right, or the Church; a people enslaved.