The Fallen

 The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence by Louise Brangan, 368 pages.

The Magdalene Laundries were the last stop for so-called "fallen" women in 20th century Ireland. Any number of things could get a woman committed to a Magdalene Laundry; the most common in the public imagination was becoming pregnant out of wedlock, but in practice many women were committed for cutting school too much, wearing skirts that were too short, aging out of state institutions, or just generally being too "high-spirited." Once a woman entered the laundry they were forced to do hard industrial labor for no wages under conditions that were intensely emotionally abusive, and was not allowed to leave until someone came to claim her or the nuns felt she was reformed. For many of these women, forgotten and hidden away, that time never came. And the Laundries were only one part of Ireland's carcel system, which even as it boasted about its low prison population held around 1% of its population institutionalized. 

After independence, Ireland started on the endeavor of nation building, and hung much of its modern national identity on the purity of its people, and especially its women and girls. This fear that girls could cause the corruption of the nation led to a culture of shame and silence, and droves of young women immigrating or being institutionalized. Brangan does and excellent job tracing not only the full history of the laundries, but also their context in both the past and present. She delves into a history of injustice  that had been intentionally repressed, and attempts to create a more complete record of the truth.

This is, overall, a very approachable work of nonfiction. It highlights several girls who spent time in the laundries through the decades, and uses this human element for both primary source material and a narrative that is easy to digest. Her dedication to context also means that the reader does not need much knowledge of Irish history at all to understand the information being presented. My only major complaint is that Brangan is often not very clear about when events are happening. She will transpose the stories of girls who were in the laundries decades apart on the same page, sometimes making it difficult to trace the evolution of the institution. That being said, I do consider this a very solid history of the Magdalene Laundries, and would recommend it for people interested in Irish history, or women's history.

This book will be published 5/5/2026.