Bad Girls do the Best Sheets
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There were also two Good Shepherd run Laundries in New Zealand, one called Mary Quest, Wellington and Mount Magdala, Christchurch Bad Girls do the Best Sheets
April 24 2003 Before the welfare net existed, religious orders used to catch orphans and unmarried mothers abandoned by their families. Alan Gill writes how girls suffered under the nuns' vale of tears. They were called "laundry slaves" - women and teenage girls employed in commercial laundries run by Catholic religious orders, the idea being to combine rehabilitation of supposed delinquents with the chance to earn a modest profit. In Ireland, where welfare of juveniles was generally in church hands, such laundries were commonplace, the girls often housed in so-called "magdalenes". In these large, often forbidding edifices they lived with prostitutes, unmarried mothers and others who were promiscuous, plain (ie, unmarriageable) or simple-minded. Some of them, incredibly, had been placed there by their own parents. Once incarcerated, their sentence could be long-term. The fact that girls were "hidden away" created an air of mystery, adding fuel to the prurient interest often shown in the redemption of "fallen women". An Anglo-Irish-Scottish feature film, The Magdalene Sisters, screening in Australia, purports to tell their story. Though they do not feature in the film, Australia, too, had its "laundry slaves", albeit a milder version of their Irish counterparts. They were teenagers considered not quite "fallen", but in moral danger, nevertheless, and whose lives and working conditions aroused interest and sectarian passions in the postwar years. In Australia in the 1950s there was a saying, "Bad girls do the best sheets." It referred to convent laundries established in Brisbane (Mitchelton), Sydney (Ashfield), Melbourne (Abbotsford), Adelaide (Plympton) and Perth (Leederville). The laundries were large, each employing about 50 people in washing, ironing and packing. The Australian laundries were run by the Good Shepherd Sisters, an
order of nuns. Many of the girls had been in children's homes run by the
Sisters of Mercy, a parallel order. Patterson, for instance, was raised
in the Mercy Sisters' orphanage (now the subject of considerable
notoriety) at Neerkol, Rockhampton. Dirty laundry was not airedAlan Gill is the author of Orphans of the Empire (Random House). |