James M. Smith (1) (1966–)

James M. Smith is associate professor of English and Irish studies at Boston College. I am guessing that he is referring to the one in Massachusetts, not the one in England. In contrast to Frances Finnegan's Do Penance or Perish, Smith doesn't focus on the details on the laundries, although he discusses them. Most of the book is devoted to social responses to the revelations about the systems: documentaries, commercial movies, art installations and exstallations, etc. Philomena is not one of the films, having been made later than this book.

In the first section, after discussing the earlier history of the Laundries, Smith talks largely about the studies, commissions, and laws that guided the development of the Laundries in the twentieth century, a period in which he believes that they became more punitive and more repressive than they were in the nineteenth century. It is difficult to tell – although archives are available for the nineteenth century, most of the convents running the Laundries refuse to release the material for the twentieth century. Our knowledge is therefore based on survivor accounts. These have been disputed, often for trivial mistakes, but since the convents will not produce their own information, that is all we have. Many of the women said that they would have preferred to have been sent to prison; at least they would have had a release date. Like Finnegan, Smith feels no need to conceal his indignation at the treatment of women.

Smith believes that Irish independence led to a far more restrictive system, an architecture of containment, as he calls it. In the effort to create a new national identity, the ideal became citizens who modeled Catholic virtues. Women guilty of sexual immorality, or having anything to do with sexual immorality, such as being a rape victim, were locked away out of sight, although the state and church were publicly a bit cagy about what was going on. Most infuriatingly, the fathers of illegitimate children were never held accountable, although Smith says that most women wouldn't name the father; one wonders what was going on. The church asked to be paid to keep the sinners, at a rate similar to the cost of incarceration in prisons, but resisted any state inspections or regulation. The legal rights of many of the women were violated: girls who raised in industrial schools were illegally transferred to the Magdalen Laundries without any due process, girls were kept there for having been born illegitimate (like mother, like daughter); for being “mentally defective,” a vague category that seems to have included being naïve, behind their grade level in school work, and otherwise not suitable for release in the nuns' opinion; for being raped; for seeming in danger of “falling”, e.g., for having sat in the back seat of a car with a man.

Smith is anxious that the church not take all the blame. The state was overtly and covertly a full partner. Smith also points out that individual families were very unforgiving toward erring or abused daughters. They often reported them to the authorities and refused to allow them to come home, or to give them any assistance.

Among the documentaries discussed in the second half of the book are Washing Away the Stain (1993), Sex in a Cold Climate (1998); Les Blanchisseuses de Magdalen (1998); and a Sixty Minutes segment “The Magdalen Laundries” (1999). Although the Irish media has commissioned documentary films on a variety of social and historical issues, including the Industrial Schools, they have shied away from the Magdalen Laundries. In addition, Patricia Burke Brogan wrote a play Eclipsed, and Peter Mullan produced an award-winning 2002 film The Magdalen Sisters

Smith also reviews artistic reactions and monuments, including a bench with a memorial plaque in St. Stephen's Green, Dublin; the Glasnevin Cemetery Magdalen plot; Gerard Mannix Flynn's extallation State Meant: Call me by my name. He also reproduces the pieces from Diane Fenster's 2000 installation, Secrets of the Magdalen Laundries. The commentary leaves me a little cold, sometimes, as art commentary so often does. I would never have guessed that the portraits in Fenster's installation were supposed to be inspired by mug shots, or that Flynn's extallation was in a former red-light district, so many of the references and allusions would have completely passed me by.… (más)