I've an idea at some point in the future, should anyone care to do any probing, we're going to discover this was not just the Magdelene's. This has got me thinking about something a friend of mine once mentioned to me when I was much younger, I guess this must have been about 30 years ago now. We were no older than twenty and he was working part time in a local 'home' for the mentally challenged, I dare say they called it a mental asylum then, or, less pc, 'the looney bin'. He told me, just in passing, about an old lady inmate he used to chat to, of about seventy-ish, who'd spent almost her entire life there and had been incarcerated at fifteen years old for having an 'illegitimate' baby. In other words, she'd been given what amounted to a life sentence, (or several if you count 15 years as the average LS for murder) at fifteen, for having a baby out of wedlock. Apparently, she wasn't there for being a 'loony'. He didn't say the inmates were necessarily badly treated or abused, at least for the time he worked there, but this was not a Catholic home or institution, this was a state run home in the UK, somewhere in Buckinghamshire if I remember correctly.
Of course, she must have been born around 1910, which now almost seems like pre-history, and the thinking was different then, though not much it can sometimes seem. We all know of the shame and calumny young women (never the fathers) had to bear for such things in those days. And I remember being horrified and outraged on her behalf, though my young friend treated my reaction with some bemusement; well, she wasn?t the only one, he said. I expect she had become so institutionalised she couldn?t have coped in the outside world anyway. Perhaps she was even happy there, by that time, with company and some sort of security and order. Outside she?d possibly have been left, alone and friendless, as are many of our seniors, to our shame.
But I do hope that perhaps this appalling Magdalene story, being current in the news, though by no means unknown about or new, might bring to light many more instances of the injustice meted out to women, incarcerated simply because it was expedient or for ?crimes? against society, for which they were never tried or convicted. What is most appalling about the Magdalene Laundries is that we?re not talking Dickens here ? this was still going on, and being allowed to go on, so recently; under our noses.
I?d better stop here, this was only meant to be a quick post, and I feel a rant about a load of other social injustices coming on.