The Magdalen
How awful would it be to be an unwed mother in Ireland in the 1950s? According to Marita Conlon-McKenna, it would be awful indeed. Esther Doyle is the oldest daughter in a predictably large, poor, Catholic family in Connemara. She finds escape from her role as family nanny, cook, and maid through a romance that any avid reader could tell her would go wrong after the first kiss. Pregnant, abandoned by her lover, castigated by her family, she is sent to Dublin to work in the Magdalen laundry run by nuns, staffed by unwed pregnant women. The women in the laundry are treated as badly as its namesake, doing back-breaking work and constantly reminded by the nuns of their sins. The courtesy usually afforded to pregnant women certainly does not extend to them.
Esther is treated as a pariah by her family and labeled as an unfit mother by the nuns. Obviously, any woman who could use a wayback machine would not want to be in Esther’s shoes. Although Conlon-McKenna comes close to cliché—to be pregnant and unmarried in Catholic Ireland is a fate worse than death—the story rings true with the varying tales of the other women in the laundry and the struggle between their reality and their religion. I put this book down in a somber frame of mind, relieved to be living in the present and also sure that this had actually happened to countless women in Ireland.
