Small Things Like These

The controversial act at the heart of Keegan’s novel takes place in a Magdalen laundry. Initially called Magdalen “asylums,” these sites were church-run facilities that forced girls and women who were out of societal favor into imprisonment and forced labor. Many of the inmates were young, unmarried mothers; their babies were taken away from them and, in some instances, put up for adoption in America and Australia. Girls who were from impoverished families or were simply deemed too flirtatious or bold were also interned there. The nomenclature of Magdalen psychiatric hospital owes its etymology to the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene, whom Catholic tradition views as a repentant sex worker (known then as “prostitutes”). This imbued the site with the notion that the women who worked there were in a state of repentance.

The first Magdalen Hospital for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes was opened in Whitechapel, London, in 1758 by a silk merchant named Robert Dingley, who enlisted “repentant” women to do labor for his business. The idea of reformatories that exploited the labor of so-called “fallen” women spread throughout British-colonized territories, including Ireland, and many of them were run by the Anglican Church. In Ireland, which was a British colony until 1922, the first Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Females was an Anglican facility that opened in Dublin in 1767 and admitted only Protestant women. However, the Catholic Church soon opened similar facilities and even received discreet maintenance grants from the Irish state. The psychiatric facilities lasted over 200 years, with the last one in Country Waterford not closing its doors until 1996. It is estimated that around 30,000 girls and women were interned in these facilities, although their patchy records make it difficult to determine an exact number.

In addition to forced unpaid labor, the abuses the women suffered in these facilities were horrific. The 2014 discovery of a mass grave in Tuam, County Galway, which included the remains of over 800 babies and children suggests that the nuns’ crimes extended to infanticide. Keegan shows an element of this cruelty in the character of Sarah Redmond, who is locked in a coal shed and whose baby is taken away from her to a location that remains undiscovered throughout the novel. This exemplifies the reality of a young woman whose life is stolen from her and manipulated beyond her control. Other details, such as the inmates’ shoeless state in the middle of the freezing winter or the fact that “one girl had an ugly stye in her eye, and another’s hair had been roughly cut, as though someone blind had taken to it with shears” (28), convey the laundries’ setting of punishment, squalor, and neglect. Writing from Furlong’s perspective, Keegan conveys the shock and disgust of an incidental visitor upon visiting the laundry and seeing the abused and neglected state of the women being held there.

When the psychiatric facilities became famous for their clothing laundering services, they began to be known as laundries. There were 10 Magdalen laundries at the time of Irish independence; one of these was in New Ross, the novel’s setting. Keegan writes that the convent-run laundry “had a good reputation” (26), indicating that people knew little about how it operated. In relating that “restaurants and guesthouses, the nursing home and the hospital and all the priests and well-off households sent their washing there” (26), she shows the wide spectrum of those who benefit from the girls’ unpaid labor. She thus demonstrates that the whole town is complicit in the girls’ misery, especially those in positions of institutional power.

Using an outsider protagonist whose unmarried mother might have ended up in one of these facilities, the novel questions the motives behind this state of incarceration and the societal forces that sustained it. The novel shows that the incarceration of wayward young women was neither “necessary nor natural” (Keegan, Claire. “My central character isn’t someone who says much. A longer novel would not have suited his personality.” The Booker Prizes, 2022) while demonstrating that people with scant economic means and institutional power, such as the bulk of New Ross’s Catholic residents, were dependent on the church and had to stay in its good graces. Details such as Eileen’s anxiety regarding whether Furlong thanked the nuns enough for their cash gift and Mrs. Kehoe’s warning that the same powers run the school the Furlongs’ daughters attend and the laundry highlight the complexities and risks inherent in openly denouncing and opposing the church’s crimes. Keegan sets the novel in 1985, when she would have been 17, to show that people who are alive today bear responsibility for a system that demonized and exploited part of the population. In an interview, she discusses her purposeful selection of a year far enough in the past that the Catholic Church still held institutional power in Ireland, yet not so far back that it, as she writes:

[W]as something of the distant past, not a society of my own generation’s making. If it was set in another time, it might not have allowed me to question and criticize the society we ourselves created, our current misogynies and fear, the cowardices and silences and perversities and survival tactics of my own generation (Keegan).

Keegan adds that while she “wasn’t deliberately setting out to write about misogyny or Catholic Ireland […] [she] did want to answer back to the question of why so many people said and did little or nothing knowing that girls and women were incarcerated and forced to labor in these institutions” (Keegan). Her questions are now being addressed on a national level: In March 2022, the Irish government announced that the National Centre for Research and Remembrance will be opened in Dublin on the site of the country’s final Magdalen laundry, and documents related to the laundries will be unsealed.