Molly M.Footnote 1 appears in newspaper reports of Irish District Court cases a dozen or so times between 1936 and 1941.Footnote 2 One day in November 1939, she was arrested on a bus in County Tipperary, wearing new wellingtons and a new raincoat. She had tidied her hair with a new comb, and there were sweets and two kinds of English cigarettes in her pockets. The breakfast she had purchased earlier was almost forgotten. All these things she bought that same day, with money taken from the nurse's room of the mother and baby institution at Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea. Finding the money missing, the nuns telephoned the police, who mounted an immediate search. When the police caught up with her, she was less than twenty miles from the Abbey. The District Justice heard Molly had six previous convictions and had been imprisoned several times. Molly was a thief, especially of bicycles; the papers called her a “joy-rider” and a “bandit.” Her widowed father, a rural farmer, appears sometimes in newspaper reports; by turns “respectable” and “broken-hearted.” In 1939, the District Justice told Molly he could imprison her again for six months, but asked if she would go, instead, to Limerick's Good Shepherd convent for two years. She agreed. This was surprising; Molly had generally preferred prison to convents in the past. At her previous court appearance, a few months earlier, the prosecuting policeman “pleaded” with her to enter the convent for “training.” When she refused, he said there must be something “mentally wrong with her.” Convents, the exasperated judge explained on that occasion, were “soft” alternatives to prison for those capable of “improvement.” In November 1939 it may have seemed Molly M. was finally willing to reform. But days later, she absconded. Some defiant spark remained in her, and she appeared in court again in the years before her early death from tuberculosis. The first time Molly was ever imprisoned, she stole from a cousin who employed her but did not pay her properly. She bought cosmetics and a coat. Prosecuted for theft, Molly wore that same coat to her hearing. On her very first appearance in court, aged about eighteen, she was charged with malicious damage. She was a good girl, her father said, and only meant it as a joke. She had daubed a slogan in black paint on the village dispensary's noticeboard; “Up with the brave,” it read. “Up with the brave at any cost.”
Institutions like the convent to which Molly M. was sent existed worldwide. In Ireland they are called “Magdalene laundries”; “Magdalene,” for their association with gendered penitence, and “laundry” for women's unpaid work in their commercial laundries and sewing rooms. They “rescued” young women who transgressed Catholic sexual norms or were considered likely to do so in future. Today, Irish feminists understand them as places of containment and punishmentFootnote 3 for women and girls who would or could not conform to Ireland's patriarchal order. They are synonymous with forced labor, unlawful detention, family separation and physical and mental distress.Footnote 4 Drawing on newspaper coverage of minor English and Irish courts’ approaches to women's and girl's property offences,Footnote 5 I present an abolition feminist analysis of courts’ use of Catholic convent institutions between 1930 and 1959. Newspaper reports are amongst the only contemporary published narratives explaining specific individuals’ detention in convent institutions. Coverage of minor local hearings offers access to everyday cases, where boundaries between moral and legal transgression were blurred. This article is the first sustained analysis of such cases in either Ireland or England.Footnote 6
I begin by outlining an abolition feminist approach to convent institutions’ legal history. I then explain the value of discussing these English and Irish cases together. Next, I map the shared legal principles applied in both jurisdictions. Then, focusing on women and girls prosecuted for property offences, I explore three interlocking themes in newspaper reports. First, those the courts sent to convents were punished, at least in part, for breaching prevailing gendered moral norms. Second, judges represented convents as sites of moral reform; justifying convent detention by reinforcing gendered notions of damaged female agency. Finally, judges sent women and girls to convents even when they publicly resisted. In these ways, courts reinforced reliance on convents for gendered “moral reclamation.” In the conclusion, I explore these arguments’ implications for recent state reckonings with historical abuses in institutions like Ireland's Magdalene laundries.
Unsettling Criminal Law, De-Exceptionalizing Ireland
This article works with digitized newspaper reports.Footnote 7 Newspapers typically presented women and girls sent to convents as deviants because most were defendants in criminal cases. Feminists recognize that criminalization is a gendered practice and acts, alongside other social institutions, to punish some gendered behaviors while supporting others.Footnote 8 It reinforces assumed connections between female transgression and moral deficiency.Footnote 9 It disqualifies certain forms of knowledge, including women's understanding of their own law-breaking.Footnote 10 Some feminist analyses of convent cases might consider whether the law was misapplied to female defendants; whether, for instance, they were punished more harshly than men and boys who committed similar offences,Footnote 11 or were incarcerated without strict legal justification.Footnote 12 I proceed differently, drawing on abolition feminism to critique incarceration for property offences, irrespective of its legality. Abolition here, is associated with penal abolition but is increasingly invoked to challenge all social systems normalizing incarceration.Footnote 13 Abolition feminism understands incarceration as expulsion or incapacitation; excluding “surplus” people from full participation in society.Footnote 14 From this perspective, incarceration is an inherently violent practice, whether legally justified or not.Footnote 15 For Liat Ben-Moshe, abolition is a “dis-epistemology”;Footnote 16 a letting go of attachment to violent carceral ways of knowing. In engaging with carceral archives, abolition feminists seek to transgress and thereby expose and disrupt their oppressive logics.Footnote 17 If archives stigmatize incarcerated women and girls, abolition feminists emphasize their often-fragmentary expressions of dissent.Footnote 18 For instance, Saidiya Hartman's histories of “wayward” Black American women use carceral archives to “recover the insurgent ground of these lives; to exhume open rebellion from the case file.”Footnote 19 Along these lines, I aim to unsettle women's and girls’ simple categorization as “criminals” in cases involving convent detention. As Ann Laura Stoler writes, archives are sites of both “command and countermand.”Footnote 20 Historical records, even of powerful institutions, can disclose evidence of defiance and disruption.
Why discuss England alongside Ireland? Scholars rarely engage with Catholic convent institutions in twentieth-century England. Comparative study of English and Irish convent institutions is difficult. Relevant religious congregations rarely permit researchers to access their twentieth-century records.Footnote 21 Relevant state-produced records in the UK National Archives concentrate on convents’ role as children's homes after 1948.Footnote 22 Archives of English probation committees, assorted inspectorates, courts, police forces and charities contain fragments illuminating local admission patterns. Equivalent Irish records, where they exist, are often inaccessible.Footnote 23 Oral history has been essential to deepening knowledge of conditions in Irish Magdalene laundries.Footnote 24 There has been no equivalent gathering of English testimony. However, the jurisdictions are similar in crucial ways. The same religious congregations ran convent institutions in both jurisdictions; primarily, the Good Shepherds and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge (OLC).Footnote 25 Similar legal frameworks legitimated convent detention in both jurisdictions. Indeed, Irish courts’ reliance on convent institutions was partly inherited from England.Footnote 26 Statutory paths into convents were established before Irish independence and both jurisdictions largely retained them afterwards. Finally, newspaper reporting provides comparable discussion of how those frameworks operated. Discussing both jurisdictions together allows us to avoid needlessly exceptionalizing Irish experiences.Footnote 27 Comparison with England also enriches the Irish literature on women's legal history, which typically emphasizes distinctive laws passed after independence,Footnote 28 rather than colonial “durabilities.”Footnote 29
I use newspapers digitized by the British Newspaper ArchiveFootnote 30 and the Irish News Archives.Footnote 31 Typically local publications, they discuss individuals asked to enter convents run by the Good Shepherds or the OLC; sixty individuals in England and over one hundred in Ireland. Unless the convent involved was clearly run by either congregation, I excluded the report from consideration. This meant excluding reports which simply referred to “Catholic convents” or “convent homes.”Footnote 32 I constructed searches using names and locations of known institutions and associated congregations, together with relevant keywords such as “court,” “magistrates,” and “probation.” I did not confine searches to any region of either country. Given difficulties in accessing local court archives tracing individual admissions to convent institutions,Footnote 33 I cannot say whether courts in some English or Irish regions made more use of convents than those in others.
Court to Convent
Adult women sent to convents were convicted of some crime. Generally unmarried, rarely older than twenty-five, they were often domestic servants, factory workers or shop assistants. Those brought before English courts were mostly British-born, but some were Irish immigrants.Footnote 34 Lynsey Black shows that Irish convents held women convicted of serious offences, particularly homicides.Footnote 35 This also happened in England.Footnote 36 More often, convents were used to address minor property offences. Irish convents almost monopolized women's and girls’ detention. In this period, there was no state-run “secure accommodation” for girls, no borstal,Footnote 37 and no state-managed girls’ reformatories or industrial schools.Footnote 38 In England, Catholics were a smaller proportion of the population, and various other religious and non-denominational charities ran residential institutions which served similar purposes to the convents discussed in this article.Footnote 39 This partly explains why I found fewer English than Irish newspaper reports.
Irish cases were heard by male lawyers; a District Justice or Circuit judge sitting alone.Footnote 40 English cases were often heard by volunteer lay magistrates in benches of two or three or, less often, by paid stipendiary magistrates and recorders sitting alone.Footnote 41 Women served as magistrates from the 1920s. Women recorders began sitting in the 1940s.Footnote 42 Women police were increasingly common in Britain, but no Irish equivalents were appointed until the 1950s. The Probation of Offenders Act 1907 and the Criminal Justice Administration Act 1914 applied in both jurisdictions. The latter introduced residence conditions,Footnote 43 which could be used to require the defendant to live in a convent for a time. Irish judges might also suspend or adjourn a prison sentence,Footnote 44 provided the defendant “bound herself” to enter a convent.Footnote 45 By agreeing to convent placements, defendants avoided prison,Footnote 46 provided that the convent was willing to accept them.Footnote 47 However, probation came with strings attached. Absconding in breach of a probation order was an arrestable offence.Footnote 48 A probationer committing a new crime could be punished for both the new and original offence. Although probation orders were time-limited, they sometimes inaugurated long periods of convent detention.Footnote 49 Expired probation orders might be extended, and in Ireland, women were sometimes encouraged to remain in convents “voluntarily” after their probation had ended.Footnote 50
Probation officers, police,Footnote 51 priests,Footnote 52 and social workersFootnote 53 arranged convent placements. In both jurisdictions, probation officers often straddled boundaries between religious and secular systems of social control. In Ireland, religious volunteers were used as probation officers into the 1960s.Footnote 54 As is well known, England's probation service originated with Anglican police court missionaries. Between the wars, voluntary police court missionaries (paid by religious organizations) were gradually replaced by state-employed probation officers.Footnote 55 However, many of these same probation officers were former police court missionaries. In Ireland and in many English cities, probation officers served distinct religious communities.Footnote 56 In Manchester and Liverpool, nuns from non-cloistered congregations occasionally served as Catholic probation officers.Footnote 57 In Cornwall, an Irish nun attached to the Saltash Good Shepherds represented the congregation in court.Footnote 58 Thus, in both countries, probation practice was deeply shaped by religious commitments.Footnote 59
The statutory basis for sending individual teenage girls to convent institutions is not always clear from newspaper reports. Broadly speaking, there were two routes;Footnote 60 the criminal law, the primary focus of this article, and the child protection system. In both jurisdictions, these routes were governed by similar statutory frameworks. The key Irish legislation was the Children Act 1908, which was retained for decades after independence with minor amendments; a decision which, perhaps, says less about the independent state's attachment to the British regulatory model than about its lack of commitment to child welfare.Footnote 61 In England, the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 replaced the 1908 Act; modifying the residential school system and associated judicial powers. Again, Irish cases were heard by men sitting alone, while in England there was always one woman on the magistrates’ bench. Girls could be sent to convents on remand while awaiting trial or removal elsewhere.Footnote 62 Girls were placed on probation with a condition of residence under much the same statutory powers used for adult women.Footnote 63 Some Good Shepherd convents contained residential schools,Footnote 64 to which girls were committed where probation was deemed inappropriate. In Ireland, these were called “industrial schools”Footnote 65 and “reformatories.”Footnote 66 In England, after the 1933 Act, they shed that terminology, becoming “approved schools.”Footnote 67 Girls committed to English approved schools could be supervised by a probation officer.Footnote 68
Courts also sent girls to convent residential schoolsFootnote 69 for their “care and protection.”Footnote 70 Again, girls sent to English approved schools for this purpose could also be placed under a probation officer's supervision.Footnote 71 This power originated with the 1908 Act, which allowed girls under fourteenFootnote 72 who had committed no offence to be sent to industrial school if they were begging,Footnote 73 wandering,Footnote 74 destitute;Footnote 75 if they were persistently truanting from school;Footnote 76 if their parents were deemed unfit to have care of them because they were alcoholics or involved in crime;Footnote 77 if they were sexually abused by their fathers,Footnote 78 or if they were deemed at risk of becoming involved in theft or sex work.Footnote 79 England's 1933 Act expanded approved schools’ “protective” jurisdiction,Footnote 80 opening them up to girls under seventeen whose parents were deceased, absent, “unfit,” or not exercising “proper care or guardianship” and who, as a result, were “falling into bad associations,” “exposed to moral danger”Footnote 81 or “beyond control.”Footnote 82 Both the 1908 and 1933 Acts also allowed parents to apply to have their daughters committed to residential schools.Footnote 83 Girls seeking control of their time, bodies, or money challenged a conservative family contract; courts could restore it.Footnote 84 Sometimes parentsFootnote 85 who had not themselves initiated an application supported courts’ decisions to institutionalize their daughters.Footnote 86
I found few newspaper reports of pure “care and protection” cases. One example is from 1939,Footnote 87 when Liverpool Juvenile Court sent an unnamed Irish teenager to the Good Shepherds. On arrival in Liverpool, a welfare worker put her back on the Dublin boat,Footnote 88 but she returned soon after, and found work. She was brought to court when she lost this job. Her parents in Ireland were deemed unable to exercise proper care and guardianship. The magistrates said a probation officer would eventually return her to Ireland. In 1943, Evesham Magistrates sent a girl to the OLC Convent at Northfield outside Birmingham “for her own protection.” Her family had collapsed after her mother's death and she was “wandering” and living in “hovels.”Footnote 89 In criminal cases, newspapers commonly discussed the defendant's upbringing. So, boundaries between “neglect” and “delinquency” blurred under welfarist approaches which focused less on offences, and more on institutionalization's perceived benefits.Footnote 90
Larger convents like the Good Shepherd houses at Limerick, Cork, Bristol, and Newcastle held more than one type of institution; for instance, an age-limited residential school and a “refuge” receiving women and girls of all ages. So, the distinction between time in a convent on probation and time in its residential school should not be overstated. Moreover, a girl committed to a convent residential school could later be transferred to another part of the convent complex, or to a convent elsewhere.Footnote 91 Thus, although the law envisaged multiple routes to convents, the boundaries between them were often more fluid than statute suggests.
Punishing Resistance?
Courts were not the main gatekeepers to convent detention in either country.Footnote 92 Convent detention is much older, for example, than probation. The Good Shepherds and the OLC originated in Normandy in 1641. The OLC were founded first. The Good Shepherds branched off from them in 1835.Footnote 93 By the end of the nineteenth century, both were international organizations. As well as institutions in Europe, Britain, and Ireland, both had presences in the United States,Footnote 94 Canada,Footnote 95 and Latin America.Footnote 96 The Good Shepherds also established bases in AustraliaFootnote 97 and New ZealandFootnote 98 as well as in Africa and South Asia. International connections were further maintained by correspondenceFootnote 99 and occasional in-person visits. The rule and constitutions of the OLC and Good Shepherd congregations, and the vows taken by sisters across the world were broadly the same.Footnote 100 Traditionally, their convents focused on “fallen women”; essentially, those who had sex outside of marriage. By the twentieth century, the convents were admitting single women and girls who had formed (or merely explored) intimate relationships outside of marriage, whether or not they had become pregnant, or whose disability exposed them to possible sexual exploitation. Convents generally accepted “voluntary” admissions at the behest of families, acting alone or on the advice of priests.Footnote 101 Other religious organizationsFootnote 102 also referred women and girls to the convents. Later, local authorities used them too.Footnote 103 “Voluntary” here describes admissions not directly compelled by law.Footnote 104 “Voluntary” admissions could be short-term, or effectively permanent.Footnote 105 The McAleese Report on the Irish state's involvement with the Magdalen laundries gives examples of “voluntary” admissions documented in convent registers. Irish familial admissionsFootnote 106 included women with physical, intellectual and psychosocial disabilities,Footnote 107 women who gave birth outside of marriage,Footnote 108 and girls who had been sexually abused within the family.Footnote 109 “Self-referrals” included women who were destitute, ill, widowed, or estranged from their families.Footnote 110 As is clear from these examples, voluntariness here is not synonymous with autonomy.Footnote 111
Those the courts sent to convents joined others entering “voluntarily.” They often worked together in the same laundries, slept in shared dormitories and ate in shared refectories.Footnote 112 In using convents, therefore, courts affirmed their wider social and familial role in containing marginalized women. Court personnel often publicly identified with wider gendered projects of social control, sometimes expressing that commitment in religious terms.Footnote 113 They were intensely interested in working class women's and girls’ “moral welfare.”Footnote 114 Certainly, there were differences between England and Ireland. English law offered some freedoms unavailable in Ireland, especially around contraception and divorce.Footnote 115 Some Irish judges prohibited girls from emigrating to England rather than enter an Irish convent, apparently believing that English moral standards could not be trusted.Footnote 116 In 1951 an Irish District Justice interrogated a girl charged with theft. He was considering sending her to a convent. She was, he said “like something you would read about in the Liverpool Gazette.”Footnote 117 “Are you a Catholic?,” he asked. “Do you know what the seventh Commandment is?” “Does she go to dances?”Footnote 118 His language is striking, but English courts also encountered simmering tensions around young women's and girls’ income, mobility, status, dress, friendships, and sexuality.Footnote 119
We might imagine that convents’ moral uses were clearest in “protection” cases, concerning girls whose activities, though not necessarily illegal, involved some “danger.” However, gendered moral expectations also underpinned punishment of property-related offences. Discussing Black women's disobedience in the twentieth-century United States as “open rebellion and beautiful experiment,” Saidiya Hartman reframes minor crimes as “the practice of the social otherwise.”Footnote 120 Some cases discussed in this article concerned subsistence theft. But others dealt with girls’ and women's demands to move about freely, love as they pleased, and access the enjoymentFootnote 121 that others—wealthier women or their own male relatives—took for granted.Footnote 122 They stole goods essential to middle-class respectability and attractiveness.Footnote 123 Besides bicycles,Footnote 124 they took jewellery,Footnote 125 clothing,Footnote 126 handbags,Footnote 127 silver,Footnote 128 money for good suede shoes and stockings to go with them.Footnote 129 Some stole money for the cinema, the seaside or other entertainments.Footnote 130 They were “living above their station in life.”Footnote 131 Janie C. took her mother's quilt and sold it, spending the proceeds on having a fashionable permanent wave put in her hair. “Imagine,” sputtered the prosecuting policeman, “a girl of her age having a perm.” The District Court Justice warned she was headed for prison and encouraged her to enter a Good Shepherd convent.Footnote 132 There is an ambivalence to her treatment; the perm supposedly indicated foolishness, but her rejection of parental authority signalled criminality. English newspapers were often more direct in presenting minor thefts as evidence of the desire to be attractive to men; a particular danger in wartime.Footnote 133 In 1941 a teenage girl was sent to Liverpool's Good Shepherds, having stolen clothes. Her late father was a policeman. Her former teacher told Boston Police Court she had taken on “rather loose ways of living, associating with soldiers of the town.”Footnote 134 Jessica Calvanico insists girlhood becomes “carceral” when girls’ social behavior is incessantly surveilled, under threat of captivity.Footnote 135 Courts relied on, and affirmed, such surveillance. In 1933, Nora M. was charged with receiving stolen goods for her boyfriend.Footnote 136 Reported discussion in the Tipperary District Court concerned their relationship; perhaps transgressive for his Belfast Protestantism as much as for his theft. The local sergeant said they lived together without being married.Footnote 137 The District Justice tried unsuccessfully to broker a marriage proposal. He asked Nora to go to the Good Shepherds and, when she refused, jailed her for a month.
Courts sometimes interpreted theft as defiant refusal to be content with work's meagre rewards.Footnote 138 In 1931, Vera O'B. took desirable things from her Devon employer's household; colored beads, a wool suit, a tortoiseshell cigarette case, a blue frock, and money for chocolate. She later took two rings, naively showing them to the cook, who told their employer. Vera was ultimately sent to the Saltash Good Shepherds.Footnote 139 Early in 1939, Mina D. was charged with stealing clothes and other items. She was wearing these clothes when arrested in Tralee before Christmas.Footnote 140 The District Justice sent her to Limerick's Good Shepherds for 12 months. The prosecuting policeman said she had left a good job “for reasons best known to herself.” The job meant long hours cooking, minding a farmer's children, feeding twenty-five pigs. Perhaps Mina rejected the drudgery the policeman considered good enough for her.Footnote 141
Defendants were sometimes found “wandering” or “sleeping out.”Footnote 142 Hartman argues that laws punishing these activities inhibited “free movement and errant paths.”Footnote 143 Some convent cases may disclose similar efforts to live differently. In 1946, Waterford District Court heard an unusual “wandering” case. The defendant appeared “in most approved masculine attire”; a fact so surprising to the reporter that they itemized the outfit:
a man's suit; complete with coat, vest, shirt and trousers… a pair of men's shoes, and her hair was closely cropped and arranged in such a manner as to give the impression that she was really a member of the opposite sex.Footnote 144
Someone else owned this clothing; amongst the charges were thefts of a “gent's silver watch, a suit of clothes, a pair of brown shoes and a gent's hat.” Questioned by two detectives, the defendant used the name “John.” The police did not immediately notice the “deception.” It was only later that “her identity was revealed.” The District Justice said the case concerned a girl “going around the country without supervision.” He asked the defendant to choose between jail and the Good Shepherds. Although the judge promised the nuns would be kind, the defendant's freedom was at stake; they were incarcerated “for an indefinite period.”
Destructive property offences can also be read in resistant terms. Calvanico, writing about teenage arsonists, suggests crime can be an attempt to assert control within an oppressive society.Footnote 145 Alice C. set fires at the Tipperary farm where she was a maid.Footnote 146 The first was accidental; started when she dropped the cigarette butt she was secretly smoking. The others were deliberate:
I burned it because Mrs. [Employer] was always finding fault with me all the morning….I burned [Employer's] other cow house too …because the two [Employers] were always finding fault with me…They were always fighting about the bad potatoes that were put down for the dinner every day…A couple of evenings ago I threw the bad potatoes or whatever they were out of the mill window into the mill race or whatever—I do not know what they call it. I threw out all the big ones that was in it because the [Employers] were always complaining how big and bad they were on the table.
The employers’ signatures on their statements are fluent. Alice's is halting. Maybe she burned their property to protest how meanly they treated her. The judge ended her rebellion; sending her to Limerick's Good Shepherds for a year.
Resistance was rarely romantic.Footnote 147 Yet, even where trauma lurked at the edges of women's stories, courts often treated them as stubbornly disobedient. In 1930, a District Justice wanted Jennie G. to “go into a home.” The newspaper reported she was travelling around the country, wandering from one short-term job to another, stealing from respectable people. Years earlier, the same newspaper covered a compensation hearing involving Jennie G. During Ireland's War of Independence, two masked men abducted her at midnight in a punishment attack and cropped her hair to her scalp.Footnote 148 She told that court she planned to go to America. Perhaps she never left Ireland. The 1930 newspaper report says little about her, except that “her people did not look after her.”Footnote 149 Such accounts buttressed expected familial boundaries, without asking why daughters transgressed them. Judicial decision-making reinforced wider discourses of feminine disobedience, affirming demands for social control.
Convents and Promises of Reform
Courts were often convents’ advocates, presenting them as benevolent transformative institutions, superior to prisons. The practical differences should not be overstated. Those sent to convents could not leave of their own accord, and absconders could be recaptured and punished.Footnote 150 The length of time spent in a convent could be longer than a prison sentence.Footnote 151 In 1937 Cork, 12 months with the Good Shepherds was substituted for four months’ imprisonment.Footnote 152 A Cornish girl was sent to a convent for six months in 1942 in place of two months in prison.Footnote 153 In 1959, the Limerick Circuit Court sent a seventeen-year-old arsonist to the Good Shepherds until she turned twenty-one, in place of eighteen months’ imprisonment.Footnote 154
Imprisonment was stigmatized, and this may explain why longer convent detentions were substituted for shorter prison sentences. In 1931 Tilly W. “flatly” declined to go to the Staplehurst convent, preferring prison. The magistrates, their clerk and the probation officer questioned her reasoning at length until she relented. “[T]he stain of prison or Borstal,” said one magistrate, “would not be nice in after years.”Footnote 155 The Daily Mirror's account of Ellen M. is typical; she was “saved from the degradation of prison by the pleading of a woman magistrate,” who insisted she go to the Liverpool Good Shepherds. Imprisonment would “be the breaking point…and a career of crime would follow.”Footnote 156 In 1946, a Galway District Justice said that at a convent the defendant would learn to make a living and would associate with “the better class of girl.”Footnote 157 In 1952, another District Justice assured a girl that the convent was a “hospital.” By going, she would avoid the “stain” of prison.Footnote 158 Convents could “steady” a “giddy” girl.Footnote 159 For English courts too, convents could “try to pull the girl up to become a responsible citizen.”Footnote 160 Irish judges sometimes promised younger girls a good convent education.Footnote 161
Convents were considered especially suitable for women and girls who were too difficult to supervise in the community.Footnote 162 As Barton writes, semi-penal institutions combined formal and informal methods of control and surveillance to “feminize” recalcitrant women.Footnote 163 Convent regimes emphasized manual domestic labor, bringing women's and girls’ behavior into line with desired values of obedience and productivity.Footnote 164 Nuns were considered well-placed to train their wayward counterparts in femininity's demands.Footnote 165 Convents’ single-sex environment ensured double separation from the world. Where women's or girls’ sexuality was in issue,Footnote 166 a convent could teach them how to “properly inhabit relationships, homes and families.”Footnote 167 Convents could correct their behavior, returning them to society as potential wives and mothers.Footnote 168 Failing return, a longer confinement extinguished their potential for motherhood. This was particularly important in Ireland, where access to contraception was heavily restricted.Footnote 169 When a girl's misbehavior was attributed to familial failings,Footnote 170 a convent could recover her inherent innocence by “resetting her intimate ties.”Footnote 171 A 1934 Irish case illustrates this point. A Donegal District Justice wanted to send Joan K. to Derry's Good Shepherds, for stealing a purse. He berated Joan's father for raising “a pagan.” She must go to a “Catholic Home where…she would be brought up as a good christian.” Joan was “living a vagabond and criminal life… She had probably been baptised but she seemed to know nothing about Christianity… [I]t was absolutely essential that the girl to be saved should be placed in receipt of instruction and under discipline.” When Joan refused the convent, the judge instructed police to remove her younger siblings because her parents were “incapable of discharging their duties.”Footnote 172
Some judges’ confidence in convents held steady even when sentencing defendants who had been institutionalized previously.Footnote 173 In 1947, a Waterford District Justice sent Norah F. to the New Ross Good Shepherds for 12 months.Footnote 174 After a row with her mother, she stole a bicycle and pedalled seventy-five miles to Cork. For weeks, she slept rough by the Marina, earning food by “darning socks” for sailors. When one rejected her, she reportedly tried to drown herself at Victoria Quay. Police returned her to Waterford, where the judge said she was “gone beyond the beyonds” but promised the nuns would “give her life a different turn altogether.”Footnote 175 That turn never came. Norah appeared before him three more times at least. In 1948, she was charged with theft. She fled and was found in Birkenhead, having stowed away on a steamship.Footnote 176 In the same year, a probation officer reported that Jean P. was “unable to deal with life or earn her living,” despite time spent at Saltash convent. The probation officer insisted the convent had “made a difference.” So, Jean returned to learn shorthand and receive “training in character” for another year.Footnote 177 Women could spend their lives cycling between prisons and convents. Aged 17 in 1938, Joan A.'s smiling photograph appeared in the Sunday Mirror; her mother was searching for her.Footnote 178 Between then and 1953, she was imprisoned three times, and was sent to the OLC convent at Waterlooville on probation at least once. In 1951, she went to a convent again as her “last chance.”Footnote 179 Seven years later, Portsmouth magistrates sent her again to a convent on probation. She had been in court over twenty times.Footnote 180 For some courts at least, convents occupied a blind-spot, and could be used whether they “worked” or not. Courts, therefore, helped define a role for convents in the criminal justice system, and supported them to maintain it.
Refusing Judicial Mercy
English and Irish courts affirmed demands for female discipline; offering convent detention as a mechanism of social control, even when defendants openly resisted. Resistance is likely to have been deemed unreasonable by default because judges and newspapers understood convent detention not as a punishment but as a mercy. Time in a convent could be a “Godsend.”Footnote 181 Doreen S. was sent to the Finchley Good Shepherds around Christmas 1930 in an act of “seasonal leniency.”Footnote 182 In 1939, a Tipperary judge told Agnes B. he would send her to the Good Shepherds because she was “more unfortunate than anything else.”Footnote 183 Apparent mercy is a feature of judicial power.Footnote 184 It is a performance of civility by the one offering it, to one much less powerful.Footnote 185 Crucially, this performance enables the judge to appear humane while enforcing inhumane policies.Footnote 186 Karen Brennan argues that judicial compassion preserved existing patriarchal structures.Footnote 187 Hugh Ryan for his part writes that women's carceral institutions “hide every social problem we refuse to deal with.”Footnote 188 In a sobering English case from 1939,Footnote 189 a senior judge was confronted with Edward C. who came home from Canada and fell in love with his sister Freda on their first meeting. They were charged with incest. Edward returned to Canada, and when Freda offered to go to the OLC Bartestree convent, the judge said, perhaps relieved, “Ah that is the solution.” Edward and two of his brothers first went to Canada as child migrants, in an organized transfer from Birmingham's Fr. Hudson's Home. The answer to problems generated by family separation and institutionalization was further exile and confinement. Judicial mercy did not disrupt broader structural injustices.Footnote 190 Offers of “mercy” always came backed by a sanction.Footnote 191
In principle, defendants consented to probation orders.Footnote 192 Many made no reported protest.Footnote 193 When Patricia B. was arrested at the Finchley convent in 1938, she reportedly insisted on remaining there. The probation officer said she needed “to withdraw from ordinary life.”Footnote 194 Voluntariness, however, was not the absence of pressure. In both England and Ireland, women and girls sometimes openly preferred prison.Footnote 195 In 1941 Skibbereen, Mary W. refused to go to a convent. Her grandfather said “[s]he had gone beyond him.” The District Justice said Mary would be “made to go.” “You will have no choice in the matter.”Footnote 196 In Westmeath in 1952, a District Justice told another girl he would “force her” into a convent.Footnote 197 Often women and girls were unrepresented,Footnote 198 but sometimes, relatives resisted on their behalf. An Irishwoman in Sussex, Anna R. stole from her employers. Her father and sister wanted her to return to Ireland,Footnote 199 but the magistrates insisted she go to Staplehurst's Good Shepherds.Footnote 200 Hilda P.'s mother, “a little woman in respectable black,” asked that her daughter not be sent to an English convent, offering a letter from “some person in authority” describing her family circumstances. She was ignored.Footnote 201
Often, resistance meant verbal retort or physical struggle.Footnote 202 Sometimes it meant abscondingFootnote 203 from courtrooms or convents.Footnote 204 Eileen B. was sent to borstal following her sixth escape from Bristol's Good Shepherds in 1935.Footnote 205 A girl escaping from Cork's Good Shepherds in winter 1933 attempted suicide by jumping into the freezing River Lee.Footnote 206 Others went to convents but, once there, became so “troublesome” or “disruptive” the nuns refused to keep them.Footnote 207 Maura D. “broke everything that came in her way” and had to be removed from an Irish convent.Footnote 208 Her probation officer said she needed more training. Resistors may have been institutionalized earlier in life—“voluntarily” or otherwise—and refused the convent based on their experiences.Footnote 209 Madge F. escaped from the English convent where she had been ordered to reside for two years. She told magistrates she had “been locked up too long and did not want to go away.”Footnote 210 In 1956, a young Irishwoman knelt before Eastbourne's magistrates, begging them not to send her to a convent “training school.” The probation officer persuaded her to go. Her brother said she had spent most of her childhood in an Irish convent where the nuns were “rather rough with her.”Footnote 211
Reported tears, Daniel Grey suggests, may reflect journalists’ desire to produce “morality tales” for eager readers.Footnote 212 Charlotte Wildman shows newspapers amplifying accounts of resistance to satisfy readers’ interest in threats to the social order.Footnote 213 At the same time, as Tamara Myers and Joan Sangster argue, resistance in the moment of punishment is not always a spontaneous and undirected reflex. It may be an attempt to “salvage autonomy and self-respect.”Footnote 214 Tears and screams, Hartman writes, “make manifest the latent rebellion simmering beneath the surface of things.”Footnote 215 Tears could be met with disdain. “Don't be going on with any of your blubbering,” said one Irish District Justice to the crying girl before him.Footnote 216 Some people were better able to perceive what might lie beneath the surface. In 1937, Wendy O. was stealing bottles of milk from doorsteps. She was hungry, homeless and estranged from her parents. A woman called to give evidence against her, wept and said she could not testify against “a girl like that.” Wendy was sent to Bristol's Good Shepherds. At this, she “burst into tears and another person in the well of the court also began to cry.”Footnote 217 This story suggests knowledge about institutionalization circulated among women, but courts did not recognize it.
Some judges characterized resistance as simple defiance. Croom-Johnson J. was a senior judge, but his attitude is instructive. In 1939 he dealt with Moira K. who refused to stay in a Liverpool Good Shepherd convent on probation. She had “indulged in bouts of screaming” and, a probation officer reported, had been “prepared to fight her way out.”Footnote 218 She came to court head bowed and sobbing. Sending her to borstal, the judge berated her: “You appear to have treated the obligation you entered into as waste paper. You appear to have set the court at defiance. You appear to have determined to go to perdition in your own way…There were circumstances which made me think that yours was a case in which an effort to reclaim you from the vicious course upon which you embarked might be made. I wish people who talk so much about trying to reform people who come into the committal court had some appreciation of the difficulty of the task.”
This article cannot establish what individual judges knew of conditions in the convent institutions to which they sometimes sent women and girls despite their protests. What is clear is that courts paid limited heed to women's and girls’ voices, or to their experiences of institutionalization, preferring discourses of reform and mercy which turned resistance into irrationality.
Conclusion
Some judges presented convent detention as an everyday practice of mercy. This attitude was not uniquely Irish; it was also compatible with liberal English welfarist approaches to “child protection” and “youth justice.” What does this mean for state efforts to address histories of abuse in religious institutions once part of the criminal justice system? I concentrate on Ireland since successive Irish governments have, in some respects, recognized convent detention as a grave wrong. Some Irish judges’ statements indicate enthusiasm for the convent system. Others may have been indifferent to or wilfully ignorant of its realities, or believed their role was to enforce the law, rather than to resist incarceration. For now, I set aside the question of their personal responsibility.Footnote 219 I share concerns, echoed in the transitional justice literature, around states’ framing of individual guilt.Footnote 220 In particular, Irish state-commissioned histories often recognize it only where bad agents departed radically from the domestic legal “standards of the time.”Footnote 221 Fidelity to past standards is assumed to ensure fairness to alleged perpetrators and their institutional successors; shielding them from anachronistic blame. However, as Scott Veitch argues, a focus on compliance with law preserves law itself; installing it as the sole arbiter of wrong-doing absolves it of violent associations.Footnote 222 Downplaying the role of the legal system except to criticise discrete acts of illegality forecloses any exploration of law's wider role in repression.Footnote 223 In turn, this approach distracts from ordinary women's and girls’ experience of oppressive legal processes, from their resistance and its punishment.
Ireland's McAleese report takes this approach, emphasizing that most women and girls came to convents by “non-state” routes; sent by families, charities or religious agents, without judicial oversight.Footnote 224 McAleese does not criticize judges:Footnote 225 in sending women and girls to convent institutions they adhered to the standards of their time. The McAleese Committee reports that no woman sent to a Magdalene laundry by the criminal courts participated in its research process.Footnote 226 It matters then, that early in the report, readers are reminded that criminalized women and girls sent by the courts, like Molly M., were a minority. McAleese says it would be “an unforgivable injustice” to overlook the distinction between them and the majority of women and girls who committed no offence.Footnote 227 The authors’ intention here may have been to honour the majority of women sent to Ireland's Magdalene laundries. However, this reference to criminality implicitly immunizes law from any criticism; certain women's and girls’ detention was legal and therefore legitimate, even if their subsequent suffering was not. It also means that some women and girls sent to Magdalene laundries still carry criminalization's stigma; one reinforced by comparison with the state's preferred survivors, who did not break its laws.Footnote 228
Whereas mainstream transitional justice mechanisms like the McAleese inquiry assess past harm by foregrounding individual transgression, abolition, and critical transitional justice scholars demand “transformative justice,” which decenters individual perpetrators, focusing instead on the unequal power structures within which they operated.Footnote 229 That means attending to structural harms overlooked or legitimated at the time they took place, including harms of gendered subordination within legal processes.Footnote 230 Such analysis may disturb some Irish judges’ reputational prestige. However, transformative justice always requires some disturbing encounter with those harmed by past abuse.Footnote 231 This means that transformative justice requires critical legal history. Critical legal history, as Christopher Tomlins writes, extracts historical objects from their past places and anchors them to the present, reconstructing them in terms of contemporary understandings, and emphasizing injustices which were once unrecognizable.Footnote 232 This article draws on abolition feminism to offer such a critical legal history. It shows that courts used convent detention to punish moral as well as legal transgression, and that they offered crucial support to convent institutions. In court, resistance to convent detention was pathologized or overlooked. Courts were entangled in wider gendered moral structures sustaining convent detention. In remembering these structures, this article attempts some justice to the memory of Molly M. and those like her; difficult and stubborn, immune to parental heartache, a mystery to policemen, unwilling to respect laws keeping wealth and pleasure out of their hands, resourceful, determined and often brave.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the anonymous reviewers, to Ana Lavos, Karen McAuliffe, and Chris Thornhill, to the National Archives (Ireland and London) and to the Tameside Local Studies Centre. This article was presented at the Law School, Queen's University Belfast, at the University of Edinburgh's Modern Irish History Seminar and at Connolly House, Boston College. Underpinning research was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.
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