Publisher's Synopsis
Behind the foreboding walls of Ireland's Magdalene institutions, generations of marginalized women and girls suffered horrific abuse, exploitation and enslavement by Church and State from the 18th to late 20th century. What began as Protestant reformatories soon expanded into a sprawling network of Catholic-run for-profit laundries extracting unpaid convict labor from thousands of socially-outcast women.
In IRELAND'S FALLEN WOMEN, Daily Source exposes the brutal inner workings and oppressive history behind these Church-run workhouses that destroyed so many lives for over 130 years with little accountability. Through extensive archival research and heart-wrenching survivor accounts, Daily Source traces the roots enabling this inhumane system to flourish at the intersection of morality, gender and greed - from Ireland's sociocultural stigmas around female sexuality to the immense wealth amassed on the backs of magdalene slaves forced into convent labor.
This powerful exposé sheds necessary light on the widespread complicity that allowed outrageous human rights violations and exploitation to persist widely into modern day society.