The BBC1 drama series The Woman in the Wall recently cast light onto one of Ireland’s darkest chapters, telling the fictional story of Lorna Wilson, a troubled former inmate of a Magdalene laundry in Ireland who has a sleepwalking problem, and who wakes up one day to find the dead body of a woman in her house.

The idea of the ‘fallen woman’ traces its theological links back to the story of Eve in the garden of Eden.
The idea of the ‘fallen woman’ traces its theological links back to the story of Eve in the garden of Eden.

Magdalene (also Magdalen) laundries or asylums, named for the biblical Mary Magdalene and described by Irish taoiseach (prime minister) Enda O’Kenny in 2013 as ‘the nation’s shame’, provided a system of institutionalised control for what Ireland referred to as ‘fallen women’, dating back to the 18th century. The initial definition of a ‘fallen woman’ was a person who was engaged in prostitution, but the term was expanded across time to embrace any woman considered to have a moral deficiency, including unmarried mothers, the daughters of unmarried mothers (many of them of school age), sexual abuse and rape victims, girls deemed to be ‘flirtatious’, as well as women committing minor crimes or suffering from mental health issues. All were incarcerated as ‘penitent females’. Many were referred to the Magdalene laundries and asylums by judicial authorities, but some were sent to such institutions by their own parents, fearful of the judgement of wider society to them over their daughters’ actions.

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