Throughout the nineteenth century, the British government enacted several laws to ensure workers’ safety. These laws were intended to protect workers from harm and overwork, while still enabling the advancement of industrial enterprise. In 1895, Herbert Asquith introduced a new factory and workshop bill. This bill would ensure that all laundries, including Magdalene laundries, would have to reach certain safety criteria set by the state and be subject to routine inspection.Footnote 1 However, these plans faced strong opposition from a number of Irish nationalist politicians, who felt state inspection was an insult to women religious who operated Magdalene asylums. Attempts to introduce inspection were debated in parliament in 1895, and again in 1901, 1902, 1905 and 1907.Footnote 2
Research into the history of Irish Magdalene asylums has been motivated in large part by the public scandals surrounding these institutions. As a result, several historians have framed Magdalene asylums as a means of social control, and have linked them with a broader culture of containment in Ireland, particularly in the twentieth century.Footnote 3 Others have tried to examine the social issues which helped promote their longevity. For instance, Maria Luddy's Prostitution and Irish society showed that in the nineteenth century, the majority of residents entered asylums voluntarily and argued that by offering women the possibility of ‘reform’, these asylums served a valuable function in Irish society.Footnote 4 Jacinta Prunty has added further nuance by focusing on the particularities of one congregation, and showed that the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity were directed by their charism (corporate identity), which developed in seventeenth-century France.Footnote 5 However, despite the popular and academic interest in Magdalene asylums, surprisingly few works have considered the political attempts to legislate for these institutions. Rebecca Lea McCarthy noted the importance of the factory and workshop acts in ensuring that convents stayed free from state interference, but did not investigate how this exception was created.Footnote 6 Historians such as Luddy and Brian Titley have only briefly addressed the legislative attempts to introduce inspection but have not interrogated the reasons these efforts failed.Footnote 7
The most vocal opposition to regulation came from a small number of Irish M.P.s, all of whom were Catholic and involved in the constitutional nationalist movement. As such, it is essential to understand their viewpoints in order to appreciate the legal position Magdalene refuges came to hold. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, Irish constitutional nationalists were closely aligned with Catholicism. Sporadic moral panics about convents fostered by anti-Catholic polemicists led to a situation where Irish M.P.s were accustomed to arguing for nuns’ right to privacy, and equated convents and their surrounding institutions with the feminised notion of the private sphere.Footnote 8 Additionally, as more middle-class Catholic women entered religious congregations, family and social ties bonded women religious and the Catholic political class, many of whom were constitutional nationalists. Meanwhile, the rise of institutions and concern for the socially vulnerable, including so-called ‘fallen women’, meant that reformatories were universally accepted as a public service. These factors coalesced into a situation where Irish nationalist M.P.s argued simultaneously that Magdalene asylums served the state, but that the state had no right to monitor or influence their work.
Factory and workshop legislation created a legal exception for convent laundries, exempting them from the full investigative powers of the state. This started a trend which continued well into the twentieth century, allowing Magdalene asylums to operate in relative secrecy. Without a precedent of treating charitable laundries as inherently different from other sites of labour, the history of Magdalene asylums would likely be far different.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw an acceleration of institutionalisation. A wide variety of institutions, such as prisons, mental hospitals and reformatories, opened across the country, with the combined goals of reforming residents and preventing moral contamination of the public at large.Footnote 9 Many of the social ills that needed to be reformed were gendered in nature, and there was particular interest in the working-class home as a potential locus of moral corruption.Footnote 10 Conor Reidy has demonstrated that the public had a particular interest in containing women who undermined Victorian ideas of femininity, including alcoholics, criminals and the sexually active.Footnote 11 In particular, he noted that while far more Irish men were imprisoned in the 1890s than women, there was a moral panic around female incarceration rates. Women were also far more likely to be arrested for offences related to children, such as cruelty and neglect, showing a desire to regulate women's role as mothers.Footnote 12 Women religious were important in facilitating and promoting this trend, running numerous orphanages, refuges and Magdalene asylums across the country.Footnote 13 In so doing, they both helped to regulate women's behaviour and framed themselves as exemplary models of respectable womanhood.
Female religious congregations were a central part of the philanthropic network of the nineteenth century. The numbers of nuns in Ireland exploded, from 122 in 1800 to 1,500 in 1850 and 8,000 by 1900.Footnote 14 Over 90 per cent joined active congregations, those which did not observe enclosure and provided spiritual and secular support to the public.Footnote 15 The work which religious congregations undertook was informed by the rule of that congregation. The Sisters of Mercy, for example, took a vow of perpetual service to the poor.Footnote 16 Others, such as the Brigidine Sisters, had no set apostolate and responded to the needs of the local area.Footnote 17 While Caitriona Clear proposed that congregations’ autonomy was frequently undermined by their male superiors, Mary Peckham Magray has demonstrated that clerical influence was extremely variable. Some local bishops carefully directed the work of congregations, but others remained uninterested; still more were carefully manipulated by shrewd mothers superior. Various congregational histories detail the care women religious put into maintaining their ability to direct their own charitable projects.Footnote 18
As noted above, one of the major societal roles women religious played was in the regulation of working-class women and children's behaviour. As well as residential institutions, nuns often operated schools. These trained children to manifest markers of middle-class respectability and often undermined the roles of parents as the primary influence in their children's lives. The government openly supported these projects, providing funding for many industrial and reformatory schools, as well as convent schools that operated within the national school system.Footnote 19
Magdalene asylums were examples of philanthropic industry which aimed to rehabilitate ‘fallen women’. Such women represented a subversion of the standards of middle-class sexuality and morality.Footnote 20 While this category included sex workers, Maria Luddy has argued that most residents were unwed mothers and other women who had been abandoned by their partners. Asylum managers believed these would be easier to reform than ‘hardened prostitutes’.Footnote 21 Though not every asylum operated a laundry, the two institutions gradually became associated with one another. Laundry work provided a respectable and low-skilled occupation, while the act of laundering had a symbolic aspect as women were seen as purifying themselves through cleaning.Footnote 22 As most Magdalene asylums did not receive government funding, operating a laundry allowed these institutions to remain financially afloat.Footnote 23
The first Irish Magdalene asylum opened on Leeson Street in Dublin in 1767 and was modelled on a similar institution that opened in London several years previously.Footnote 24 At first, these asylums were typically run by lay groups, but over time religious congregations opened their own refuges and took over the operation of others. The dominance of female religious orders in this activity was so great that no lay Catholic asylums opened in Ireland after 1845. The congregations most involved in Magdalene reform were the Sisters of Mercy, Religious Sisters of Charity, Sisters of the Good Shepherd and Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge.Footnote 25 Of these, the last two were international orders who came to Ireland with the specific intention of operating asylums, while the first-mentioned two originated in Ireland and engaged in reform work as part of a broad array of social duties to the poor.Footnote 26
By the turn of the century, there were numerous charitable laundries across Britain and Ireland. Several of these were staffed by the residents of Magdalene asylums, of which many, but not all, were convent-run. Standards in these workplaces, as with all factories and workshops at the time, were variable.Footnote 27 Prior to 1895, there was no government oversight for any laundry that was not part of cloth production.Footnote 28 Inadequate ventilation could lead to hot, humid conditions and it was not unheard of for laundry staff to work for up to eighty-five hours a week. Laundry work became more mechanised in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which introduced new hazards and increased the potential for serious injury.Footnote 29
The number of charitable laundries operating in the United Kingdom in 1902Footnote 30
Convents were a locus for anti-Catholic fears throughout the nineteenth century. Female congregations represented a challenge to Victorian family structures, as they presented an alternative to marriage and childbirth, and enabled women to live away from the authority of their male relatives. The Protestant public's lack of awareness about convent life also helped to fuel suspicion, and practices such as religious enclosure suggested a degree of secrecy. Books such as The awful disclosures of Maria Monk and Caught in the toils warned readers of sexual immorality and imprisonments occurring behind closed doors.Footnote 31 Public lectures warned listeners about alleged past and present abuses performed by and on women religious.Footnote 32 News stories and tours from ‘escaped nuns’ also helped to heighten Protestant anxiety.Footnote 33
Concern for the safety and freedom of women religious periodically spilled into parliamentary debate. In 1851 the M.P. for Bodmin, Henry Lacy, first suggested in parliament that state inspectors should be sent to convents.Footnote 34 His proposal coincided with the ‘Papal Aggression’, when the pope issued a decree restoring the English ecclesiastical hierarchy leading to a rise in anti-Catholic sentiment.Footnote 35 He argued that not all women religious could be happily living in convents and used anecdotal evidence to suggest that women found it extremely difficult to escape once they had entered religious life. He called for convents to be subject to quarterly magisterial inspection, in order to ensure that all nuns were safe and free to leave. However, a second reading of Lacy's bill was shelved for six months, before it was ultimately abandoned.Footnote 36 In 1853, the Liberal M.P. Thomas Chambers introduced ‘A bill to facilitate the recovery of personal liberty in certain cases’, proposing that specially-appointed commissioners be empowered to enter any premises and interview the female occupants, to ascertain whether any woman was being held against their will.Footnote 37 Although the bill itself did not reference women religious, Chambers made clear in parliament that its intended use was the investigation of convents.Footnote 38 The proposal was referred to a select committee, to which members were never assigned.Footnote 39 In 1870, Charles Newdegate introduced a bill to form a select committee to investigate the finances and legality of English convents and monasteries. His bill passed a test vote but faced pressure from Catholics throughout Britain and Ireland, who saw it as insulting and a governmental intrusion into the private sphere of Catholic women's homes. The then prime minister, William Gladstone, restricted the committee's remit to appease them, preventing any serious inspection into the interior lives of religious institutions.Footnote 40
These attempts to introduce inspection faced public opposition from throughout Ireland. In 1853, for instance, several hundred Catholics ‘from all classes’, including several M.P.s, attended a meeting in Dublin to protest against Chambers's bill. Several speakers at this assembly framed convent inspection as a misdeed ‘against the people of Ireland’, revealing nationalist as well as religious concerns.Footnote 41 Similarly, politicians opposed Newdegate's select committee both in and out of parliament. The M.P. for Kildare, William Cogan, attempted to have the bill discharged, describing the proposed measures as ‘an inquisition’ against Catholic women.Footnote 42 Limerick Corporation also publicly denounced the proposed legislation and organised a petition against it, claiming that inspection of any form would be tantamount to ‘prying into the sanctity of private life’.Footnote 43
The Catholic Church held a great deal of influence over Irish constitutional nationalist M.P.s. The Irish Parliamentary Party (I.P.P.), the main parliamentary force for Irish nationalism, formed an alliance with the Catholic hierarchy while it was headed by the Protestant Charles Stewart Parnell, and when the party reformed after Parnell's adultery scandal in 1890, it resumed its collaboration with the church. The influence of the Catholic Church on the I.P.P. was by no means absolute and it often opposed the church on issues such as land reform. However, typically, they were willing to demure to the hierarchy on social issues in which the church was heavily involved, such as education and health.Footnote 44 Tellingly, the four most powerful members of the party from 1900 ― John Redmond, John Dillon, Joseph Devlin and T.P. O'Connor ― were all Roman Catholic.Footnote 45
In 1895, the home secretary, Herbert Asquith introduced the Factory and Workshop Bill.Footnote 46 Legislation improving factory conditions had been introduced in a piecemeal and haphazard fashion over several decades, as part of a wider movement to improve workers’ rights. This bill was intended to consolidate the existing laws and to extend their remit.Footnote 47 As part of his proposal, Asquith suggested that laundries should be included in the bill and, therefore, be subject to inspection and regulation. However, due to what he later described as overwhelming pressure from the Irish members while the bill was with the Standing Committee on Trade, he ultimately exempted smaller family-run laundries and charitable laundries.Footnote 48
In 1901, the home secretary, Charles Ritchie, again raised the issue with his own factory and workshop bill. Like Asquith, he argued that all laundries should be subject to the same regulations, as the laws existed to ensure that labourers were safe and were not overworked. The ultimate purpose of the industry, to his mind, ought not to have a bearing on how the work was carried out.Footnote 49 The I.P.P. opposed the bill and insisted that charitable laundries should not be subject to inspection. The I.P.P. continued to oppose inspection until they found a compromise in 1907 when the Factory and Workshop Act set safety standards for every laundry. Workplaces had to be ventilated, machinery had to be fenced off and the flooring could not hold water. However, charitable laundries could apply for exemptions from the state-mandated working hours. They could also apply to install their own medical officer to operate as their inspector, rather than allowing external personnel into their buildings.Footnote 50
II
At first glance, the issue of laundry inspection appears to have very little to do with religion. Parliament had introduced dozens of regulations on workplaces throughout the nineteenth century, and no proposed legislation distinguished between religious and charitable laundries.Footnote 51 The fact that both Herbert Asquith and Charles Ritchie campaigned for convent laundry inspection as part of wider reforms suggests that they were not motivated by suspicion of Catholicism.Footnote 52 In 1901, Ritchie stated that he intended to do whatever he could to ensure that his bill would not interfere with the running of charitable laundries, provided that they still met its provisions.Footnote 53
Magdalene laundries were not exclusively an Irish or Catholic phenomenon. For instance, the Anglican sisterhood, the Clewer Sisters, operated a successful penitentiary for ‘fallen women’ in Berkshire England.Footnote 54 In 1895, the Protestant group, the Church Penetentiaries Association, which financed Clewer, wrote to sympathetic M.P.s to ask them to create an exemption in factory and workshop legislation for charitable laundries, although they supported inspection in 1901.Footnote 55 Furthermore, the most notorious scandal relating to charitable laundries was in a home for alcoholics, which was not run by a religious congregation of any denomination. In the early 1890s the press became interested in St James's Home for Female Inebriates, an ostensibly charitable reformatory in London which overworked its residents in order to boost its money-making capabilities. Conditions in the home were extremely bad and its owners, Charles and Wilhemina Zierenberg, were tried for perjury in 1894.Footnote 56 The M.P. for Battersea and Cheltenham, John Burns, and the M.P. for the Forest of Dean, Charles Dilke, both referenced the Zierenberg case during the 1901 parliamentary debates.Footnote 57 By using an example of mismanagement not associated with the Catholic church (the popular press hypothesised that the couple were Jewish), these politicians indicated that religion was of minor importance to the political debate.Footnote 58
The Catholic politicians who opposed inspection also attempted to de-emphasise the role of religion in their decision-making process. In 1901, the leader of the I.P.P., John Redmond, stated ‘[w]e are not putting forward a claim simply on behalf of Catholics or convents’ but for all charitable laundries.Footnote 59 However, on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the Irish M.P.s' concern was for convent-run Magdalene refuges. While the minority of charitable laundries in the United Kingdom were run by convents, in Ireland thirty-two of the forty such laundries in operation in 1902 were Roman Catholic.Footnote 60 Thus, though it was not necessarily a denominational issue when taking the whole of the U.K. into account, in Ireland most of the institutions affected were Catholic.
The Sisters of the Good Shepherd actively courted the support of Irish politicians in and out of parliament. The order was heavily involved in Magdalene reform and had many asylums across Britain and Ireland. Their refuges and reformatories tended to be large: for example, their community in Limerick consisted in 1901 of seventy-nine women religious (including novices and postulants) and 101 residents.Footnote 61 As a result, they were particularly interested in factory and workshop legislation, and represented a significant force within the city. The Limerick foundation conducted a letter-writing campaign to Irish M.P.s in 1895, asking them to oppose the bill.Footnote 62 They also sent a petition to the M.P.s in the House of Commons which was published in the constitutional nationalist newspaper, the Freeman's Journal. The petition argued that residents needed privacy and security while they reformed. It refuted the claim that the laundries were run for profit, claiming that the work was intended to ‘meet … the expenses of the homes and their numerous inmates’, and to provide residents with training in a new skill.Footnote 63 The Good Shepherd Sisters’ actions showed immediate results. In response to their plea, Limerick Corporation held a special meeting to discuss the sisters’ concerns. Led by the mayor of Limerick, they put together their own petition to oppose convent inspection.Footnote 64 In this manner, the congregation were able to enlist more politicians to come to their defence.
However, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd were an exception. For the most part, the voices of women religious were conspicuously absent from these debates.Footnote 65 This is striking, as congregations were typically proactive in engaging with their local communities.Footnote 66 However, nuns were also silent in previous attempts to bring in convent inspection. Caitriona Clear has noted that during the 1853 nunneries debate, politicians on both sides framed women religious as in need of their chivalry and protection, while at once limiting their agency.Footnote 67 This pattern repeated in the 1870s, suggesting that most women religious either did not think it appropriate to advocate for themselves politically or did not feel empowered to do so.
Many protestors expressly called on nationalist M.P.s to oppose inspection, assuming that they would take on the plight of the Catholic church. Limerick Corporation's petition was specifically addressed to Irish M.P.s. In the meeting where they prepared the petition, one attendee explained that most nationalist politicians were Catholic and therefore ‘directly interested in the religious welfare of the country’. On this basis he was certain that nationalist M.P.s would oppose the bill.Footnote 68 In a speech to parliament, Redmond stated that the exemption was for the good of all charities, but then discussed the Sisters of the Good Shepherd at length and in glowing terms, to the exclusion of any lay charities.Footnote 69 The M.P. for Waterford, Patrick Power, also expressly mentioned the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.Footnote 70
Redmond's correspondence also reveals that the Catholic church guided his decisions. Throughout 1901, he regularly discussed political issues with the archbishop of Dublin, William Walsh.Footnote 71 In 1907, a national synod of bishops considered the issue of convent laundry inspection. They decided that inspection would be acceptable provided that the visitors could not interview residents without the prior consent of the managers and then passed on their conclusions to Redmond.Footnote 72 Therefore, despite their claims to the contrary, the I.P.P.'s official policy on inspection was driven by loyalty to both the members and the institutions of the Catholic church.
Additionally, as already noted, some of the pressure for convent laundry inspection grew from anti-Catholic sentiments. Convent inspection had been periodically debated throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and anti-Catholic polemicists routinely hypothesised that any number of crimes could be taking place behind the closed doors of the convent. In 1889, the Convent Enquiry Society, a lay Anglican organisation, was formed with the aim of investigating and publicising alleged abuses within convents and Anglican sisterhoods. Initially, they lobbied for inspection of convents (rather than convent-run laundries), attempted to compile a list of all nuns resident in Britain and warned Protestant parents against sending their daughters to convent schools. In the 1890s they changed tack and crusaded for government inspection of Magdalene laundries, hoping that factory inspection would serve as a more palatable means of gaining entry into convents. The group's membership included a small number of M.P.s, including its president, T. Myles Sandys, and the society also sent letters to every M.P. in 1901, asking them to support inspection. Some of their arguments, such as the financial advantages of running a charitable business (discussed below) and their insistence of poor working conditions in Magdalene laundries, ended up as central points of debate.Footnote 73 While the Convent Enquiry Society was a relatively minor player in the convent laundry inspection debate, it illustrates that the anti-Catholic element to calls for convent inspection had not yet fully disappeared.
III
Opponents to inspection argued their case on two fronts. The first was that inspection was not needed as there was no evidence of convents falling short of government standards. While there were signs that not all congregations maintained high safety standards in their laundries, nationalist politicians framed religious institutions as domestic dwellings. Using that model, they argued that inspection should only be carried out if there was clear evidence of a problem. Their second argument was that inspection would interfere with the efficacy of reform work. Implicit in this was the assumption that Magdalene asylums served the public good and that the state ought to help them operate as efficiently as possible.
Irish M.P.s demonstrated concern for the effect inspection would have on discipline in Magdalene asylums. John Dillon explicitly argued that external inspectors would undermine the authority of the nuns in charge. He was particularly concerned that female inspectors, who were suggested as a way to preserve the modesty of residents, would have a detrimental effect on discipline as they would provide an alternative source of female authority.Footnote 74 Other politicians were less direct. They instead emphasised the value of Magdalene asylums, leaving it implied that the work would be harmed if a system of inspection was introduced. Edmund Leamy, for instance, described Magdalene asylums as ‘a beautiful and holy charity’, while Redmond characterised them as ‘the noblest [form of charity] that the wit of man can conceive’.Footnote 75
This argument relied upon the assumption that Magdalene asylums provided a public service. Strikingly, this was accepted by both sides of the debate.Footnote 76 Charles Ritchie compared asylums to prisons, acknowledging their reformatory nature and their need to maintain discipline. He suggested that Magdalene asylums could set their own working hours to ensure that the residents were not idle.Footnote 77 In 1907, the earl of Lytton echoed Ritchie's sentiments by comparing Magdalene asylums with workhouses and orphanages. He accepted that they all provided a similar public service and suggested that, as such, should all be subject to state inspection.Footnote 78
Proponents of inspection instead argued on the grounds of commercial competition. When the 1895 Factory and Workshop Act was enacted, it limited working hours in most commercial laundries to fourteen hours per day.Footnote 79 Businesses also had to ensure that they met the government's specifications with regard to safety and ventilation. These restrictions represented a cost which domestic and charitable laundries did not face. Magdalene laundries had even fewer expenses, as asylum managers did not pay wages to the residents. One of Ritchie's main arguments for introducing his 1901 bill was to deal with what he saw as unfair competition. He insisted that charitable laundries ‘ought not to be worked on conditions other than those imposed on ordinary laundries with which they may be competing’.Footnote 80 Several other politicians shared his concerns, including the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson.Footnote 81
Framing convent laundries as providers of a public service offered an answer to the issue of competition. Irish M.P.s argued that comparing commercial laundries to charitable ones was nonsensical, as they served different purposes. Profit was irrelevant to Magdalene asylums because their only purpose was reform. Redmond argued that they were ‘not in the ordinary sense of the word a real factory at all’ and, thus, should not be included in factory legislation.Footnote 82 By emphasising the charitable aspect of Magdalene asylums, nationalist politicians were able to sidestep this issue.
The parliamentary debates skirted the issue being defended ― namely, the ability of the nuns to maintain absolute authority. The 1907 bill enabled them to maintain distance from the government and retain their control. As well as exceptions about inspection, convents did not need to put up notices outlining working hours and days. Even during voluntary inspections, inspectors struggled to gain candid information from residents, as private interviews could only take place with managers’ consent.Footnote 83 It is notable that as those in Magdalene laundries faced public derision for their status as ‘fallen women’, it would have been reasonable for opponents of convent laundry inspection to argue that they deserved privacy. Asylums themselves acknowledged the importance of total anonymity, giving residents new names upon arrival to obscure their true identities.Footnote 84 Given that they were exclusively female spaces, one could expect that refuges would fall into the private sphere and, therefore, have a right to be free from state interference, except in exceptional circumstances. This argument would have mirrored those used against Newdegate's committee in 1870. However, few commentators mentioned the effect the bill would have on the residents themselves. Instead, as discussed below, they focused on the reputation of women religious. This suggests that the politicians opposing inspection did not regard them as part of the private sphere in so far as it represented the residents’ domestic space.
The second argument which Irish M.P.s employed was that that there was simply no need for convent laundries to be examined. In 1901, Redmond argued that parliament deliberated on the issue in 1895 and no new issues had come to light since then. However, he was unable to verify this statement. When Charles Dilke, the M.P. for the Forest of Dean, referred to a case of mismanagement in a London laundry attached to a charity which helped people recover from drunkenness (presumably St James's Home), Redmond explained that he was only referring to Magdalene laundries.Footnote 85 The M.P. for Berkshire, Harold Tennant, referenced a story reported in the Sheffield Independent about two women who allegedly escaped from a Good Shepherd asylum. The women claimed that they had been starved and overworked. The police had not investigated their claims, so when Tennant referenced the story both Redmond and Dillon accused him of slander.Footnote 86
Tied up in their defence of convent laundries was a fierce loyalty to women religious. M.P.s were quick to defend the efficacy and reputation of convents and took great offence at the implication that convent laundries had ever been mismanaged. For instance, Dillon responded to Tennant's accusations of misconduct by retorting ‘in all my experience, I have never listened to a more cruel, a more wounding or a more unjustifiable charge … against comparatively defenceless ladies’.Footnote 87 These arguments emphasised the importance of gendered domestic privacy, but framed the inhabitants of that private sphere as the nuns, rather than the women in their care. Some appealed to their Catholic identity, asserting that they had privileged knowledge about religious institutions. Dillon claimed that ‘I know something, and my friends around me know something of the lives led by these convent ladies’.Footnote 88 Leamy insisted that ‘there was hardly one of the Nationalist Members who had not a relative a nun’ and that their female relatives were regular visitors to convents. He argued that if Magdalene laundries were mismanaged, it would be a matter of common knowledge amongst the Irish Catholic population.Footnote 89
This viewpoint was influenced by previous attempts to introduce convent inspection. In the 1870s, part of what had been debated in parliament was Catholic morality as a whole. Stories emerged suggesting that women religious were kept as prisoners in convents. Charles Newdegate used one such story as a way of illustrating the need for inspection. He claimed that a religious congregation sent a new entrant, a sixteen-year-old Protestant convert, to France without her consent. The girl was not allowed to tell her parents, but after some time she managed to smuggle a letter to them asking for their help in escaping.Footnote 90 His account was anonymised and so could not be easily verified, but was typical of the types of situation Protestant campaigners were afraid of.
In response, Catholic politicians had compared religious houses to other aspects of the private sphere. They voiced outrage at the idea of government inspectors having a right to information on the domestic lives of women religious. The M.P. for Kildare, William Cogan, argued that commissioners would be able to investigate ‘all the affairs of [women religious’] private life.’Footnote 91 At a Limerick Corporation meeting, Alderman McSweeney announced that the committee would lead to ‘prying into the sanctity of private life, and in dragging before the gaze of a corrupt world those who have specially dedicated themselves to the service of the maker’.Footnote 92 Emphasising the place of convents in the private sphere and framing inspection as a violation helped to lay the groundwork for later opposition to factory and workshop legislation.
Another influence on many Irish nationalists during the debates was the connection between women religious and the rest of middle and upper-class society. As a result of the dramatic increase in the number of nuns between 1850 and 1900 both their work and visible presence in the community helped to catalyse the emergence of middle-class Catholic culture.Footnote 93 There has not been a comprehensive survey of the class background of women religious, but the common consensus was that most women religious were from better-off backgrounds.Footnote 94 Nuns were also the primary providers of elite Catholic education. In the second half of the nineteenth century, congregations such as the Sisters of the Sacred Heart settled in Ireland, in the hope of recruiting more English-speaking members who would be valuable on foreign missions. They established boarding and fee-paying day schools, which attracted girls from a range of middle-class backgrounds.Footnote 95 Many politicians had sisters and daughters who grew up in convent schools and had close relationships with women religious. Some of their female relations themselves had entered religious congregations. For instance, Redmond's niece was a Dominican nun.Footnote 96
For those nationalist politicians who were also Catholic, the paternalist rhetoric adopted by politicians had a clear purpose. It demonstrated that, as in traditional families, the men were there to vouch for the respectability and safety of the women present, and the state did not need to provide verification. This viewpoint had been tested in the debates on convent inspection of the 1870s, so when in the 1890s a new debate emerged which questioned whether nuns could be trusted to govern their own institutions, it is unsurprising that this paternalistic sentiment arose again.
Opponents to inspection also used family metaphors to explain the relationship between nuns and residents. Leamy claimed that the asylums needed to be kind to their residents, because they would immediately leave if ever mistreated. He explained that the nuns felt a holy duty to protect the residents from sin. As a result they treated them as ‘members of one and the same family’.Footnote 97 John Dillon asserted that asylums maintained ‘the discipline of a private family’, using kindness to urge women to stay.Footnote 98 It is also noteworthy that the 1895 act exempted both laundries run by charities and by families.Footnote 99 Comparing asylums and family homes further stressed the right to privacy, while framing asylum residents as children de-emphasised their autonomy. It also implicitly suggested that residents were not employed by the convent and were, therefore, not subject to the bill's protection.
As the issue dragged on, more evidence came to light about conditions in convent laundries. When the Factory and Workshops Act of 1901 passed without a provision for convent laundries, the chief inspector offered to visit the exempted premises. He hoped that some institutions would appreciate the chance to get free advice on how to improve their operations.Footnote 100 Throughout Britain and Ireland, 117 charitable laundries accepted this initial invitation and only thirty-seven refused.Footnote 101 In 1905, the principal lady inspector, Adelaide Anderson, headed an extensive programme of visitation of exempted laundries in Britain and Ireland. The inspectors assessed fifty laundries in Ireland and a further twenty-three in England. They not only visited laundries that invited inspectors, but also several that had previously declined.Footnote 102 They found that many charitable laundries did not meet the safety requirements set for commercial operations. Anderson suggested that conditions were likely worse than her findings showed, as although charitable laundries very rarely turned away inspectors, they seldom immediately allowed entry, giving them time to get their workshops in order.Footnote 103 She also complained that she had no way to incentivise improvements when the inspections had no legal weight.Footnote 104 In her conclusion, she stated that ‘The enquiry has impressed on us the value of a minimum standard, and the necessity of bringing in public opinion in a judicial capacity’.Footnote 105 Once it was conclusively proven that many convent laundries were of a lower standard than commercial laundries, arguments that inspection would damage their efficacy became harder to support.
IV
During the factory and workshop debates of 1895–1907, all sides accepted and supported the charity and reform work carried out by female religious congregations (although a small number harboured distrust of their intentions). Those defending convents at once attempted to demonstrate the public good done in Magdalene asylums and to ignore their residents’ desire for anonymity, while also arguing that women religious had an inherent right to privacy even when carrying out work in the public's interest.
In 1907, these two ideas of female religious life combined to ensure that Magdalene laundries held a privileged position in the law. Charitable laundries remained legally separate from commercial laundries, and the policy of allowing charities to choose their own inspector made it easier for convents to evade government interference and maintain low standards.Footnote 106 Although the new legislation was not exclusive to Catholic convents, it was created specifically to suit them. The initial impact of this change was limited – indeed Frances Finnegan notes that in the wake of the debates and greater public scrutiny, some asylums did improve in the short term.Footnote 107 Maria Luddy has recorded that reports on Magdalene asylums that did allow government inspection were largely, though not exclusively, positive.Footnote 108
However, the ultimate outcome was that Magdalene laundries were able to operate as both public institutions and private homes at once. The British state acknowledged their utility, while also viewing their work as inherently different to those in commercial laundries. The reputation of women religious and their identities as women meant that parliament deemed that they could be trusted to run factories and workshops with ‘the discipline of a private family’ and minimal oversight. This ultimately influenced how the Irish state interacted with female religious institutions in the twentieth century, increasing the authority and longevity of Magdalene asylums and associated projects. Inspection was discontinued post-independence and while Magdalene asylums largely disappeared from Great Britain in the early years of the twentieth century, the last in Ireland closed as recently as 1996.Footnote 109 The Irish state worked with Magdalene asylums from its foundation, often facilitating women's incarceration against their will. Despite never becoming state-run institutions, courts often sent women to Magdalene refuges for a variety of crimes.Footnote 110 This collusion between the state and Magdalene asylums had roots in the factory and workshop debates.Footnote 111
