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Rie Croll - Shaped by Silence: Stories from the Inmates of the Good Shepherd Laundries and Reformatories

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We were like human animals in one of the old-style zoos.

Shaped by Silence brings together the powerful stories of five women from Ireland, Canada, and Australia whose lives were shaped by forced confinement in Magdalene laundries and other institutions operated by the Roman Catholic Order of Sisters of the Good Shepherd. Their narratives include one teenagers experience in a Good Shepherd training school in Canada; another story of a child who was born in a Canadian Good Shepherd laundry; and three accounts of adolescent girls held in Good Shepherd Magdalene laundries in Ireland and Australia. In these institutions, women and girls became a coerced workforce. Hard, unpaid and relentless physical toil, isolation, enforced silence, and prayer constituted the nuns strategy for converting their fallen charges into the Christian image of pure womanhood. Within this regime, girls and women suffered physical, psychological, and emotional abuse. While intimately capturing the dark and enduring after-effects of ill-treatment, the stories recounted in Shaped by Silence also describe survivors efforts to heal and rebuild their lives. This important book shines a light on a pervasive and systemic pattern of cruelty and exploitation. It reveals the unwarranted confinement of generations of girls and women in Good Shepherd institutions around the world and constitutes a call for full acknowledgement of their suffering.

RIE CROLL is an associate professor of sociology in the social/ cultural studies programme at Memorial University, Grenfell Campus, and a former therapist who worked with abused girls and women.

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To the survivors of the Good Shepherd laundries and reformatories and to all - photo 1
To the survivors of the Good Shepherd laundries and reformatories and to all - photo 2
To the survivors of the Good Shepherd laundries and reformatories, and to all who still bear the painful legacy of these and similar institutions.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Rachael Romero, Janice Konstantinidis, Maureen Sullivan, Chaparral Bowman, and Autumn for your trust in me and for your courage in dredging up many disturbing memories. Thank you for your countless insights and your patience over the long haul.
Thank you to Karen Riggs and Clara for adding your invaluable intergenerational perspectives to this work.
Thank you to Kate Reid for bringing your New Zealand experience with the Good Shepherds forward.
Thank you to Claire McGettrick for taking the time to speak with me about your vital work with Justice for Magdalenes. Thank you too for the connections you created for me and for the many insights you offered.
Thank you to Patrick Galvin and Mary Johnson for hosting me with open arms in Ireland. The outrage that you carried over Patricksand othersbrutal childhood experiences of institutionalization as a Raggy Boy and your unrelenting work toward politicizing such conditions, brought me to attention. Although departed, you are both unforgettable to me.
Thank you to Kristin Harris Walsh for your eyes, your ears, your optimism, and for your editorial expertise.
Thank you to the ISER Books team who so attentively helped me to bring this sensitive material to light. Thank you especially to Alison Carr, Fiona Polack, and Iona Bulgin.
Thank you to Brian Titley for your interest in this project and for your generously detailed answers to my questions.
Thank you to James Croll and Karon Croll for your ongoing and genuine interest in this work.
Thank you to Marta Croll-Baehre and Emma Croll-Baehre, two ideologically untamed beings who in another time or place might well have found yourselves inside one of these institutions.
Thank you to Patrick Monaghan and Caroline Sawyer for continuing to ask how it was going, long after most had stopped.
Thank you to Ann Millar for your untiring reinforcement.
Thank you to Rainer Baehre for your patience, your practical and emotional support, your enduring belief in the importance of this research, and for your sage advice.
INTRODUCTION
My mother was sent to the Monastery of the Good Shepherd in Halifax [Nova Scotia], somewhere around 1930 for what she was told was an infinite sentence. Can you believe that? There was no end date on it ... She was renamed Cecilia by the nuns and forced to work in the laundry, in silence. When she arrived, she was still so small that they had to give her something to stand on so that she could reach the laundry equipment.
(Clara, interview, 2016)
Shaped by Silence brings together five stories of women from Ireland, Canada, and Australia whose lives were shaped by forced confinement in Magdalene laundries and related reform schools operated by the Roman Catholic Order of Sisters of the Good Shepherd. Their narratives include one teens experience in a Good Shepherd training school in Toronto, Canada; one story of a child born into a Canadian Good Shepherd laundry; and three accounts of adolescent girls who were incarcerated in Good Shepherd Magdalene laundries in Ireland and Australia. In the following for these stories of twentieth-century female confinement, a starting point for understanding the complex and conflicted purpose of these institutions and the Roman Catholic Churchs immense influence in defining the character of the girls and women who were committed to them. My introduction briefly traces as well how these institutions moved from relative obscurity to become a ripe political issue in Ireland and, increasingly, elsewhere. As a result, some of the surviving former inmates have come forward to protest the Churchs unjust characterization of them and to document the harsh and sometimes brutal conditions of their confinement. These womengenerally referred to as penitents by the nuns and inmates by the stateprovide insight into these conditions.
All the women who agreed to speak with me about their incarceration experiences had been Good Shepherd inmates.girls and women, who, have fallen into licentiousness (Sisters 1890, 60). In the Good Shepherd reform institutions, supposedly convertible souls became a coerced workforce, performing hard, unpaid, and relentless physical toil. Physical labour, isolation from unseemly forces, and prayer were a large part of the nuns strategy for converting their charges into the Christian image of pure womanhood. This is an objective that Good Shepherd nuns were plainly reminded of by their founder in her instructions: On your part, you pledged yourself to labour in a special manner for the conversion of sinners, and the salvation of those poor sinful Magdalens who, under you, become penitent Magdalens (Conference 1907, 10). The nuns of this Order, committed to a mission of religious conversion, regarded their all-female inmates as sinful, incorrigible, and in need of moral protection and reform. As we will see, these directives were repeatedly emphasized to the penitents. Moral protection involved the strict regulation and restriction of their sexuality. Therein, it was the nuns duty to bring their penitents from the most shameful disorders to a chaste life (Sisters 1890, 60).
The women who shared their experiences with me were inmates between the 1930s and the late 1960s in institutions that were variously designated as reformatories, laundries, homes, asylums, training schools, convents, refuges, and monasteries. These institutions acquired different names, forms, and purposes, depending on when and where they were located. In England, for example, they were initially sustained mostly as privately funded halfway houses, but in former British colonies, where womens rights were more limited, they became places of forced labour (McCarthy 2010, 23). By the twentieth century, they had become part of what James Smith (2007a, 46) dubbed an architecture of containment, a network of reform that rendered invisible the women and children who fell afoul of societys moral proscriptions. In Ireland, as well as in Canada and Australia, the Church assumed responsibility for a variety of these institutions, thereby bringing many aspects of social life under clerical surveillance and a disciplinary regime that emphasised spirituality, frugality and sexual restraint (Titley 2006, 2). These laundry reformatories flourished throughout Europe, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and the United States before the last laundry closed in Dublin in 1996.
While historians have yet no evidence to say with certainty that in the nineteenth century womens stays in these asylums were anything but voluntary, the twentieth-century accounts that follow attest to forced confinement under punitive conditions (Smith 2007a, 4243). OSullivan and ODonnell (2007, 44) further observe that, while in twentieth-century Ireland the stated emphasis was on reform as opposed to punishment, the regime in some of the industrial or reformatory schools, district mental hospitals, county homes and Magdalen homes in the middle of the 20th century was more austere than many prisons of the 21st century. With enforced stays and unpaid labour, the laundry operations in these longerterm Catholic reformatories also became more profitable.
The Magdalene homes are widely believed by the public to have only housed unwed mothers and so-called incorrigible girls, or any females who transgressed or threatened the Churchs moral authority (McCarthy 2010, 8); however, the term incorrigible was often carelessly applied. Inmates alleged wrongdoings also included being unwanted, stolen,
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