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Nov. 7th, 2005 09:31 amLast night I watched The Magdalene Sisters. It was the most horrifyingly upsetting movie experience I've ever had.
Magdalene asylums were originally started in England in the 18th century as institutions where prostitutes could go to be redeemed. Eventually they came to house unwed mothers and women thought to be headed for a life of promiscuity or any kind of loose morals. Located primarily (although not exclusively) in Ireland, they came to function as commercial laundries staffed by the unpaid labour of the women incarcerated there, and run by nuns. The last one closed in 1996.
The movie, based on the documentary Sex in a Cold Climate which talked to women who had been sent to these institutions for various reasons, tells the story of three girls sent to a Magdalene asylum in 1964: Rose, who has a child out of wedlock; Margaret, who is raped by her cousin; and Bernadette, who is found flirting with boys through the gates of her orphanage.
The movie is excellent, but what all these women went through, and the fact that they were sent there in the first place -- it sickened and scared me. And then I watched the documentary, and was devastated all over again by seeing the pain that was still in these women who had been real-life Magdalenes, all these years later, and how it had affected the rest of their lives.
I hate people.
Magdalene asylums were originally started in England in the 18th century as institutions where prostitutes could go to be redeemed. Eventually they came to house unwed mothers and women thought to be headed for a life of promiscuity or any kind of loose morals. Located primarily (although not exclusively) in Ireland, they came to function as commercial laundries staffed by the unpaid labour of the women incarcerated there, and run by nuns. The last one closed in 1996.
The movie, based on the documentary Sex in a Cold Climate which talked to women who had been sent to these institutions for various reasons, tells the story of three girls sent to a Magdalene asylum in 1964: Rose, who has a child out of wedlock; Margaret, who is raped by her cousin; and Bernadette, who is found flirting with boys through the gates of her orphanage.
The movie is excellent, but what all these women went through, and the fact that they were sent there in the first place -- it sickened and scared me. And then I watched the documentary, and was devastated all over again by seeing the pain that was still in these women who had been real-life Magdalenes, all these years later, and how it had affected the rest of their lives.
I hate people.