‘We could have done without a meal, all we wanted was a bit of love’: Eating in Ireland’s Magdalene institutions and industrial schools
Mulhearn Williams, Alice
Mulhearn Williams, Alice
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Identifiers
https://hdl.handle.net/10379/18496
https://doi.org/10.13025/29290
https://doi.org/10.13025/29290
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Publication Date
2025-01-21
Type
doctoral thesis
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Abstract
This thesis examines the history of food within two Catholic-run institutions in Ireland: the Magdalene laundries and industrial schools. From the 1870s to the closure of the final Magdalene laundry in 1996, these institutions collectively housed tens of thousands of women and children as part of what James Smith has termed, Ireland’s ‘architecture of containment’. It was because of this institutional web, which sought to confine citizens deemed to challenge society’s moral proscriptions, that approximately 7.8 percent of the women contained in Magdalene laundries were transferred there from an industrial or reformatory school. Recent scholarship has largely focused on the injustice of this containment during the twentieth century, supported by the accounts of chronic abuse and neglect that have continued to surface ever since the realities of these residential settings came to light in the 1990s. While the Magdalene laundries and industrial schools are widely considered punitive and disciplinary sites, there has been no scholarship on the significance of diet and the experience of food within these institutional settings, despite it being a constant element of a tightly regulated regime. This thesis shows that the food eaten in these institutions carries historical significance, both as an indicator of their general management, and of the attitudes of the church and state towards the worth of the women and children contained within them. Importantly, it also illustrates how food can be used as a lens within historical analysis to elucidate the experience of being within these closed institutions. As historical sites shrouded in archival silences, the sensing body of survivors is one of the few avenues to understanding the Magdalene laundries and industrial schools, and their significance in modern Irish history. By using memories of food as a point of access to the subjectivities of survivors, this thesis reveals the affective imprint of institutional power on embodied experience.
Publisher
University of Galway
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International