Speaker 1: Welcome to You're Wrong about the name of the podcast?
Speaker 2: Wow, oh my god. That was amazing.
Speaker 1: It's cool people did cool stuff. And my guest today
Speaker 1: is Sarah Marshall from the podcast You're Wrong About Hello.
Speaker 3: I'm so happy. Does this mean I'm a cool people
Speaker 3: or do I guess observe cool people?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I don't think.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether any of us are actually cool.
Speaker 1: We're just talking about cool people.
Speaker 2: I mean, all I can say is that intro. Margaret,
Speaker 2: you are good?
Speaker 3: Well, thank you, thank you?
Speaker 2: Did you get my second? Did you get my second?
Speaker 4: Took so?
Speaker 3: I didn't get it at all. I'm not very sharp.
Speaker 3: It's August. Everyone is just barely holding it together. That
Speaker 3: was beautiful. Sophie, thank you so much. So you are
Speaker 3: good now? That okay.
Speaker 1: So Sophie is the other voice. Sophie is the producer
Speaker 1: of this show. If anyone's curious as to why I
Speaker 1: introduce Sophie every single time, it's because sometimes I've listened
Speaker 1: to another show that Sophie's on, and it took me
Speaker 1: like six months to be like, why the fuck are
Speaker 1: these men not introducing the woman on the show? And
Speaker 1: I got so annoyed that because.
Speaker 3: In the machine.
Speaker 5: My presence is known. Why do I need introducing? Because
Speaker 5: it could be anybody's first episode? You know, all so funny,
Speaker 5: Sara Marshall, what's your podcast? I have a podcast called
Speaker 5: You Wrong About, which is a title that people find
Speaker 5: it remarkably hard to remember. I've heard of people's parents
Speaker 5: calling it what is wrong with You, which is a
Speaker 5: much more aggressive title than what I was going for,
Speaker 5: But I do love it. And I have a podcast
Speaker 5: called You Are Good and You're wrong About?
Speaker 3: Is about what You're good? That's why I made the joke.
Speaker 3: But you know that I am good and I know
Speaker 3: that you are good. Yeah, you are good? Is quote
Speaker 3: a feelings podcast about movies. I host it with Alex
Speaker 3: Deed and you should come on it, and we every
Speaker 3: episode have a guest on and are like because you know,
Speaker 3: there's like twenty billion podcasts and half of them are
Speaker 3: about movies. But we try to distinguish ourselves by talking
Speaker 3: about how does the wedding singer make us feel? We
Speaker 3: haven't done the wedding singer yet, and like, how does
Speaker 3: help us learn about codependency? Which I'm honestly sure it
Speaker 3: could and that kind of thing, And you're wrong about
Speaker 3: is about history and really about the human tendency to
Speaker 3: love moral panics and how we can't remember anything. We
Speaker 3: remember nothing that I feel like this show is about
Speaker 3: that too.
Speaker 1: Well, then you're the perfect guest for this episode, because
Speaker 1: well actually were, because I mean I picked you specifically
Speaker 1: for this episode because I actually you covered something very
Speaker 1: similar to what we're going to be talking about, and
Speaker 1: I'm really excited your take on this today. Oh, I
Speaker 1: forgot to do the rest of the introductions. We all
Speaker 1: have to say hi to Ian.
Speaker 3: Who's Hi?
Speaker 4: Ian? Hi?
Speaker 1: Am Oh, Sarah, you would love Ian.
Speaker 2: You guys would get along so well.
Speaker 4: I Ian Ian's and Ian's in the state of California,
Speaker 4: m h.
Speaker 1: And audience can create a parasocial relationship with Ian based
Speaker 1: solely on his name, if you would like, because you
Speaker 1: don't have other information about him. And our theme music
Speaker 1: was written for us by unwoman. And today we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about this one's going to be kind of
Speaker 1: funny because it's gonna it's not a reverse cool people.
Speaker 1: We are going to talk about some cool people, but
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about a lot of bad ship today.
Speaker 1: And I'm very sorry because you're talking about the theocracy
Speaker 1: that took over Ireland after their sort of independence in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty two, and we're going to talk about some
Speaker 1: of the people who fought against that theocracy. Because I
Speaker 1: was thinking to myself, how do I talk about Shannado
Speaker 1: O'Connor without just like doing an episode solely on Shnado O'Connor.
Speaker 1: Since for that, I would recommend people check out this
Speaker 1: great pop podcast called You're Wrong About It's pretty good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is not an episode about Shnado O'Connor.
Speaker 3: She'll show up.
Speaker 1: It's a story about all the people who survived and
Speaker 1: fought against and escaped the Magdalen Laundries. What do you
Speaker 1: know about the Magdalen Laundries?
Speaker 3: I feel like I, like a lot of people mainly
Speaker 3: know what I saw in I think the movie was
Speaker 3: called The Magdalen Sisters came out like fifteen twenty years ago, yeah,
Speaker 3: which is about girls being sent to basically be detained
Speaker 3: by nuns because they looked at a boy or a
Speaker 3: boy looked at them, or they were sexually assaulted, or
Speaker 3: they had a baby, and then basically toil under abuse
Speaker 3: of nuns in a prison like setting until they escape
Speaker 3: or their family takes them out or they simply don't
Speaker 3: make it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good short version of what we're going
Speaker 1: to be talking about today.
Speaker 3: Hooray.
Speaker 1: They you know, these girls end up spending their entire
Speaker 1: sometimes not always, but sometimes they end up spending their
Speaker 1: entire life doing unpaid labor. Usually, as the name implies,
Speaker 1: they are doing laundry. And these laundries ran for hundreds
Speaker 1: of years. The last one closed its doors in fucking
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six. So the cool people we're talking about today,
Speaker 1: a lot of them are just the survivors, because the
Speaker 1: cool thing that people do sometimes is survive.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: These laundries are often considered the darkest, one of the
Speaker 1: darkest parts of Iish history, and they deserve that reputation.
Speaker 1: They're also talked about as one of the worst examples
Speaker 1: of what the Catholic Church has done to the world,
Speaker 1: and the Catholic Church deserves that reputation too. But the
Speaker 1: Magdalene laundries they they start in England, they were started
Speaker 1: by Protestants, and the relationship to religion and colonization is
Speaker 1: more complicated than anyone talks about.
Speaker 3: Hmm, this is going to be very interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I hope so I fell down a lot of
Speaker 1: rabbit I guess every week. I'm like, I fell down
Speaker 1: a lot of rabbit holes. But my job is to
Speaker 1: be obsessed with something for approximately four or five days
Speaker 1: and then when people messaged me about the details three
Speaker 1: weeks from now, I have no idea what they're talking about.
Speaker 1: Just absolutely no.
Speaker 2: It's called podcast.
Speaker 3: Space for a new one. Huh.
Speaker 4: It's called podcast brain. And once you say it, you
Speaker 4: no longer remember it.
Speaker 3: It's okay. I had not That happens to me all
Speaker 3: the time, and I didn't know there was a term
Speaker 3: for it, but of course there is.
Speaker 2: It's so great podcast brain.
Speaker 1: I have heard Sarah Marshall talking about Shannad O'Connor more
Speaker 1: recently than Sarah Marshall has heard Sarah Marshall talking about
Speaker 1: Shnad O'Connor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there's a thing too. I don't
Speaker 3: know if you guys agree with this, but like, because
Speaker 3: there was I saw that there's this phenomenon where people
Speaker 3: are going to the Aras tour and then can't remember
Speaker 3: the concert because they're in such a heightened state of
Speaker 3: emotion that it's like harder for them to form memories. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So Taylor Swift is like breaking their brains and that
Speaker 3: I feel like when you're concentrating, there's also something like
Speaker 3: that where if you're kind of if I'm concentrating on
Speaker 3: what to say next, then like like right now, or
Speaker 3: like when I'm getting really you know, forty percent more
Speaker 3: like zeroed in on something, then like I'm focusing so
Speaker 3: hard on how to communicate what I'm thinking that like,
Speaker 3: once I'm done, I'm just gonna like I'll have let
Speaker 3: go of it completely. Does that resonate?
Speaker 1: Yeah, the night after I finished recording these, I'm on
Speaker 1: the East Coast, so I'm like I record later than
Speaker 1: most of my guests.
Speaker 2: Yeah, why do we always have dress coasters?
Speaker 3: I don't know podcasts coast East Coasters.
Speaker 2: Why don't you want to come on our show?
Speaker 1: Because people who get paid to do podcasts live on
Speaker 1: the West Coast, which is foolish because it's so easy
Speaker 1: to live off of this small amount of money that
Speaker 1: is available to podcasters when you live.
Speaker 3: Places that are cheap, like yeah, the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1: So the Magdalen Laundries, which are named after Mary Magdalene,
Speaker 1: the sex worker that Jesus hangs out with like a
Speaker 1: lot of the oppression of women. These started with the
Speaker 1: oppression of sex workers. Also, like a lot of oppression
Speaker 1: started in England. And like a lot of oppression, at
Speaker 1: least some of the people who got involved in the
Speaker 1: early days got involved with the best of intentions. Eighteenth
Speaker 1: century Whitechapel, England. I always have to look up these places.
Speaker 1: White Chapel is not its own city. It's part of London,
Speaker 1: but they treat it like it's its own city. It's
Speaker 1: in the East End. There's a bunch of richest fuck
Speaker 1: dudes who wear powdered wigs and all the portraits of
Speaker 1: themselves and they're all remembered as philanthropists. And they got
Speaker 1: themselves together and I'm not even bother with their names.
Speaker 3: Fuck them.
Speaker 1: They got themselves together in seventeen fifty eight and they
Speaker 1: opened the Magdalen Hospital for the reception of penitent prostitutes.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, but you gotta be penitent.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah. If you sprain an ankle and you're like,
Speaker 3: I like sucking that dick, then they won't give you medicine.
Speaker 3: Nobish people talk, Yes, it was perfect.
Speaker 2: I no not ites.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: They probably have a different word for every verb and noun.
Speaker 1: In that sentence. But yeah, spot you, dick, mister. I
Speaker 1: gotta make light of things while I can, because I
Speaker 1: sensed that.
Speaker 3: That moment where the canoe the dark shadow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And this was opened with the support from the queen
Speaker 1: who was not the queen, Regent Reagan whatever wasn't ruling
Speaker 1: m And this was a workhouse. It was a for
Speaker 1: profit institution where quote unquote fallen women worked at various
Speaker 1: jobs and were given a tiny portion of the money
Speaker 1: they brought in, which actually makes it way better than
Speaker 1: what we'll talk about later. It was also a tourist attraction,
Speaker 1: come see the wild horrors in captivity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, of course we cannot romanticize the past, because, oh
Speaker 3: my god, in heaven they.
Speaker 1: Speaking of you could buy a ticket to go to
Speaker 1: mass led by not led by, but singing for you
Speaker 1: in the choir are these fallen women. And they had
Speaker 1: to sell tickets because there were so many people who
Speaker 1: wanted to come pay that they were like, we have
Speaker 1: to sell tickets ahead of time.
Speaker 3: Was this like, what was this market? It is like
Speaker 3: a family attraction. Were you supposed to like take your
Speaker 3: kids to see the fallen women to like scare them
Speaker 3: or anything? Was it because for.
Speaker 1: Finally, I'm not sure it ties into this larger thing
Speaker 1: where a bunch of the other institutions at the time,
Speaker 1: including the Bethlam Royal Hospital aka the asylum so bad
Speaker 1: that patient it's patient, It was so bad to its
Speaker 1: patients that we have the word Bedlam as a result
Speaker 1: of the Bethelm Royal Hospital. You could also go be
Speaker 1: a tourist there if you wanted at this time.
Speaker 3: That kind of makes more sense to me in a
Speaker 3: weird way, because you know, scared straight or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 3: because like anything can happen in Bedlam famously, whereas just
Speaker 3: like going to church led by captive sex workers, like
Speaker 3: they probably just sing hymns.
Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty much, and uh as as is the case
Speaker 1: going to be the case throughout all of the hundreds
Speaker 1: of years of this. Even though these are like laws
Speaker 1: and stuff that are specifically around sex work, most of
Speaker 1: the women in the Penitent Prostitute Asylum are not sex workers.
Speaker 3: Even at the beginning.
Speaker 1: I would argue that the same as like sis, women
Speaker 1: are caught up in the trans panic for like looking
Speaker 1: too masculine or whatever. Patriarchy oppresses with a very broad brush,
Speaker 1: right right, And so the answer isn't to be like,
Speaker 1: I'm not a sex worker, fuck you. The answer is
Speaker 1: to be like, no one should be treated this way,
Speaker 1: you know. So started off voluntary women applied for asylum.
Speaker 1: Usually they weren't actually sex workers. They were maybe people
Speaker 1: who are trying to avoid falling into survival sex work
Speaker 1: because they'd been kicked out of their house for like
Speaker 1: surviving sexual assault from within the home or having had
Speaker 1: premarital sex. You know. And but even this version, the
Speaker 1: voluntary version, it was profitable to the quote unquote charity
Speaker 1: and on the wall all over the place, in every
Speaker 1: word or whatever was written, tell your story to no one,
Speaker 1: because women weren't supposed to talk to each other about
Speaker 1: their experiences. Later this is going to turn into you
Speaker 1: just literally can't talk to each other. You got to
Speaker 1: spend your entire fucking day, slash life in silence. Most
Speaker 1: women stayed for a couple of years and then were
Speaker 1: discharged once their family was like, oh okay, I forgive
Speaker 1: you for your heinous and of having been sexualized by
Speaker 1: someone and took them back. This idea was very popular.
Speaker 1: This spread all over the UK. By the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: there's more than three hundred of these in the UK,
Speaker 1: which in this case includes England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
Speaker 1: They're really bad. They're for profit prisons. Most of them
Speaker 1: are laundries, and there's like no due process. A lot
Speaker 1: of women who get sent there because become less voluntary
Speaker 1: very shortly. There's a lot of like blurriness. Each one
Speaker 1: of these institutions actually did have a pretty different vibe,
Speaker 1: so it's a little bit hard to paint with a broadbrush,
Speaker 1: but that's what I'm going to do anyway. And girls
Speaker 1: and women who were sent there, the average age of
Speaker 1: these first ones was like mid twenties, late twenties, so
Speaker 1: I think also it was a lot of like how
Speaker 1: dare you not get married yet?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: You haven't like left the home. We're gonna get fucking
Speaker 1: rid of you, you know.
Speaker 3: And so even spinster Dum is like sexually dangerous and
Speaker 3: an interesting way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. The history of spinster Dum is something I
Speaker 1: want to do so much work on because it's like
Speaker 1: some of that's about lesbianism and some of it's not.
Speaker 1: Some of it's about asexuality and some of it's not,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 3: Anyway, I was talking to a friend earlier and described
Speaker 3: myself as a spinster, and she was like, well, that's
Speaker 3: I wouldn't call you a spinster at this age. And
Speaker 3: I was like, it's a vibe, it's a lifestyle.
Speaker 1: Oh at this point if you're like twenty five and
Speaker 1: you're not. Actually, yes, medieval people got married way later
Speaker 1: than modern people.
Speaker 2: So I accept your label as a spinster.
Speaker 3: Oh thank you you. Yeah, you know it, since I
Speaker 3: have all the accessory you do. Pretend to be a cat, right,
Speaker 3: it's all about bun placement. But wait, but do medieval
Speaker 3: people get married later than people do today?
Speaker 1: Maybe not like today today, but like twenty years ago
Speaker 1: when everyone get married young and gat. There's this whole
Speaker 1: weird thing where like the medieval world isn't what we
Speaker 1: think it is. The nobles and shit got married late young.
Speaker 1: Sorry nobles and shit got married young because it's all
Speaker 1: political or whatever, but like, actually peasants and stuff got married.
Speaker 3: This is not part of the topic at all. Oh
Speaker 3: you know, but I do. I do love that fact though,
Speaker 3: And it's as I think is depicted in Blackadder, where like, yeah,
Speaker 3: of course you're going to marry people before they reach
Speaker 3: sexual maturity. If you're just consolidating, you know, principal. But yeah,
Speaker 3: if you have nothing to offer except some fabric, then
Speaker 3: you're you know, going to wait until you're ready.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So in these laundries, a lot of women aren't
Speaker 1: told how long they're going to be there. So it's
Speaker 1: actually like in some ways some ways, you're like better
Speaker 1: off in a prison, right because in a prison they're
Speaker 1: like this is your sentence. Here you're just like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're just here, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the one flow over the cuckoo's nest style totally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's I mean, they were called asylums for
Speaker 1: and that was usually in their official name. They're remembered
Speaker 1: as the Magdalen laundries, but some actually focused on rehabilitation
Speaker 1: and didn't hold women too long. And some were run
Speaker 1: by nuns. Okay now when I'm doing the conflation, actually
Speaker 1: most of them weren't run by the Catholic Church at all.
Speaker 1: But like nuns are like the famous image of it, right,
Speaker 1: so some of the pep scarier than a nun, I know,
Speaker 1: which is funny because the nun in my family was
Speaker 1: like one of the most wonderful people in one of
Speaker 1: the role models that I like carry to this day
Speaker 1: about how you can be Catholic and not be a
Speaker 1: terrible person.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And every nune I've met has been
Speaker 3: pretty action amazing humanitarian. But in fiction, no, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, it was like, my dad
Speaker 1: didn't send me to Catholic school because he got sent
Speaker 1: to Catholic school and he didn't want that for any
Speaker 1: of his kids, you know. So some of these nuns
Speaker 1: actually or people looking after they actually looked after the
Speaker 1: well being of their charges. This was the minority of cases,
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, and most of these
Speaker 1: places were cruel, nightmare places where nuns or other caretakers
Speaker 1: hit people with wind rosaries, kept them locked in their
Speaker 1: cells at night. Changed their names against their will was
Speaker 1: a big part of it. Sometimes they would change their
Speaker 1: name to the name of the nun who imprisoned them.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that was like a thing or
Speaker 1: a coincidence that I read about. Sometimes they changed their
Speaker 1: names to male names, and I think this was like
Speaker 1: not a cool, fun like gender thing, but like well,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, whatever, weird fucking thing. Sometimes they
Speaker 1: would just be named with numbers like Penn four or whatever.
Speaker 1: For penitence Good is obviously the origin of that famed
Speaker 1: secret society in middle schools everywhere, the pen fifteen Club fifteen,
Speaker 1: it's so historical, started by the fifteenth penitent one of
Speaker 1: these laundries, and take the Freemasons, yeah, exactly. Many of
Speaker 1: the penitents were sexually abused or kept like by the
Speaker 1: institutions or kept enslaved for their entire lives and buried
Speaker 1: nameless in unmarked graves. Many of the letters to their
Speaker 1: families were never sent, which is awful and part because
Speaker 1: like forgiveness from the families one of the main ways
Speaker 1: you get out right. They were regularly denied visits. Religious
Speaker 1: institutions were exempted from the UK's nineteen oh one Factory
Speaker 1: Act that limited working hours for teenage girls to only
Speaker 1: twelve hours a day, which is just ridiculous that that
Speaker 1: was progress at that point. Magdalen's regularly worked fifteen hours,
Speaker 1: six to seven days a week. These places are bad
Speaker 1: enough that at one point Charles Dickens, who haven't done
Speaker 1: enough research about to decide whether he's cool people or
Speaker 1: not cool people. I don't fucking know. Someone's gonna whatever.
Speaker 1: Charles Dickens got together with the richest woman in England
Speaker 1: besides Queen Victoria, whose name was Angela Burdeck Coats. And
Speaker 1: they were like, let's do what this is supposed to do,
Speaker 1: but not evil. So they opened a non prison asylum
Speaker 1: for survival sex workers where they could have a place
Speaker 1: to stay and actually learn. And it was called Urania
Speaker 1: Cottage and it was completely voluntary. You could leave at
Speaker 1: any point you want. This model did not take off
Speaker 1: because it wasn't profitable and it wasn't a weird tourist attraction.
Speaker 1: So wow, once the original founders retired, this Urania Cottage
Speaker 1: fell apart.
Speaker 3: Basically, Wow. Good for Charles Dickens though, and it really
Speaker 3: goes to show that human rights are not profitable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and if they suddenly are somehow profitable, you're probably
Speaker 1: actually running a weird laundry enslavement.
Speaker 3: Thing where you know you're gonna get coney. I don't
Speaker 3: know what that means. Oh the what was it?
Speaker 6: I understood it? So, yeah, what I saw, I assume
Speaker 6: it was a thing that was free coney. But that's
Speaker 6: not it. They wanted the opposite of that. Yeah, is
Speaker 6: this about the gorilla that died?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 3: No, this was about this like extremely viral YouTube video
Speaker 3: like ten years ago or something that was like long ago. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so one hundred years ago. It was like, we have
Speaker 3: to take down this African warlord and kind of in
Speaker 3: a way that shocked the guy. I feel really guilty
Speaker 3: about that. There's something else was.
Speaker 2: It was in twenty twelve. It was so long ago.
Speaker 4: There was like a documentary film thing it was.
Speaker 2: It was Cony twenty twelve.
Speaker 3: Coney twenty twelve, and it went like unbelievably viral. It
Speaker 3: was like, yes, we can all band together and take
Speaker 3: down this one terrible guy. But then the guy who
Speaker 3: launched the campaign like the attention it was all too much,
Speaker 3: and he ended up jerking off in the street. It's
Speaker 3: a real it's a real media story for our time.
Speaker 3: You're welcome. I don't know if we ever got some
Speaker 3: how completely missed this. When it happened, it was all
Speaker 3: I thought about that year. I think I was living
Speaker 3: in a minivan. There's a limit to how many warlords
Speaker 3: you can try to take down from a minivan, although
Speaker 3: you can just run him over. I guess you were
Speaker 3: in the best shape to do it.
Speaker 1: That's true. I like to think that I would have
Speaker 1: been equipped to do such a thing and if you
Speaker 1: want to become equipped to take down warlords. That is
Speaker 1: why we are sponsored by medieval weaponry.
Speaker 3: Cool.
Speaker 1: We are sponsored by maces. We are sponsored by swords,
Speaker 1: but like I mean, every whe sponsored by swords these days. True,
Speaker 1: we're sponsored by flails, which may or may not have
Speaker 1: been actually historically accurate weapons. You know, they like spiky
Speaker 1: ball on a stick.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I never knew that was what they were called.
Speaker 3: I always thought they were called spikey ball on a stick. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they're called flavulus. And we are sponsored by what other
Speaker 3: medieval weapons response, So I.
Speaker 2: Just want to point out all union made.
Speaker 1: That's true because anytime that scabs try and come in,
Speaker 1: there's a peasant uprising and it murders all of them
Speaker 1: because the peasants are very well armed when they work
Speaker 1: in medieval weapon factories, which is weird because they they're
Speaker 1: called medieval weapon factories even though they're made by medieval.
Speaker 3: Well they're from the medieval region of France, you know.
Speaker 3: Otherwise they're guess carbonated weapons.
Speaker 1: And that's the only sponsors. If you hear any other sponsors,
Speaker 1: then there's a mistake. And I need you to write
Speaker 1: immediately to the director of iHeartRadio, who is on Twitter
Speaker 1: at I write, okay, and.
Speaker 4: I feel like you're just accused my business partner of
Speaker 4: crimes not legally actionably.
Speaker 2: Fair enough maybe.
Speaker 3: And we're back so let's see.
Speaker 1: Okay, these laundries they're in the US too, and people
Speaker 1: are always like, oh, yeah, that backwards country Ireland, like
Speaker 1: most of these weren't in Ireland. They were not in Ireland.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The first Magdalene asylum, you know, that's their official name
Speaker 1: or whatever, It was the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia, and
Speaker 1: it was founded in eighteen hundred by a collection of
Speaker 1: Protestant denominations, including the sometimes but not this time based Quakers, who,
Speaker 1: by the way, invented the modern concept of prison. But
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that some other time. The Philly Magdalene
Speaker 1: School had as its vice presidents vice president the fucking.
Speaker 3: Mayor of Philly. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Because they've always been a collusion of church and state.
Speaker 1: Now Ireland pulled it off even better because they had
Speaker 1: that deocracy thing.
Speaker 3: We'll get to that.
Speaker 1: Like most of the rest of these, it started off
Speaker 1: voluntary survival. Sex workers could come and stay for a
Speaker 1: couple of days, or weeks to get back on their
Speaker 1: feet right soon it was a prison. A thirteen foot
Speaker 1: wall was built around it to keep the inmates from
Speaker 1: seeing anyone in the city. They weren't like, oh no,
Speaker 1: this isn't We're not building a wall to imprison you.
Speaker 1: It's so that you don't have like lustful thoughts looking
Speaker 1: at those handsome men walking down the street.
Speaker 3: It's fascinating how much of history is about like the
Speaker 3: fear of women's sexuality and like what will happen if
Speaker 3: we have life ful thoughts. It's like I got and
Speaker 3: it's so funny, especially because like the men making these laws,
Speaker 3: no's know that, like they can get turned on by gourds,
Speaker 3: you know, So why do they think anyone else is
Speaker 3: so different?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean because of the female sexuality
Speaker 1: is a complete mystery to men.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, because the uterus wanders and that creates all
Speaker 3: kinds of repercussions. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so they built a thirteen foot wall around this
Speaker 1: one in Philly. I don't know about this particular one,
Speaker 1: but at least the Baltimore one and probably a bunch
Speaker 1: of the other ones had broken glass mortared into the
Speaker 1: top of the stone. Walls as an old timey barbed
Speaker 1: wire to keep people from having lustful thoughts of course
Speaker 1: about the people on the other side.
Speaker 3: History is just saw that's the thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3: That is.
Speaker 1: The more I read history, the more I'm like, they
Speaker 1: never tortured someone the same way twice. They every culture.
Speaker 1: I mean, like drawn and quartered is like one of
Speaker 1: the most fucked up things you could possibly imagine happening,
Speaker 1: and was like kind of normal.
Speaker 3: Right, Like that's kind of on the okay end of
Speaker 3: what could happen to you if you compare it to
Speaker 3: like I don't know and so and then you know,
Speaker 3: there are accounts of torture that you're like, did this
Speaker 3: happen or did your cousin's boyfriend's little sister tell you it?
Speaker 3: But like, but I don't know something about I mean
Speaker 3: you talking about the penitent penitent prison as a as
Speaker 3: a tourist attraction. Like I always think about this with
Speaker 3: stuff like public executions, where like we kind of lament
Speaker 3: what people watch on TV today, but the fact is
Speaker 3: that before we could watch it on TV, we would
Speaker 3: just go out in the world and find it somewhere. Totally.
Speaker 1: That is a really good point, thank you and what
Speaker 1: we watch on TV is like or what we going
Speaker 1: and watching people get beheaded and cheering is like darker
Speaker 1: than watching Saw, you know, because it's.
Speaker 3: Actually had a good time making Saw. Yeah, it's maybe
Speaker 3: on a level with like some of the TLC reality shows,
Speaker 3: but that's a whole other conversation. I don't mind.
Speaker 1: Okay, So since women weren't like choosing to get better,
Speaker 1: they would be kept away from society to keep them
Speaker 1: from doing evil and quickly. It's not just for people
Speaker 1: doing sex work or accused of doing sex work, for
Speaker 1: for any girl might be tempted or whatever. This particular laundry,
Speaker 1: the Philly Laundry, lasted until nineteen eighteen. There were at
Speaker 1: least thirty nine of these places in the US, that's
Speaker 1: like the bare minimum number. Most of them ran until
Speaker 1: the night. Many ran until the nineteen sixties. And we'll
Speaker 1: talk about why they ended it. It's not humanitarian reasons.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about that later. That's gonna be a little
Speaker 1: thing dangle in front of people. Many worked with the
Speaker 1: state to basically become the first all women US prisons.
Speaker 1: There's this place in the Midwest that's like I think Indianapolis,
Speaker 1: but they're like, we had the first all women's prison,
Speaker 1: as if they should be proud, and like a bunch
Speaker 1: of people did research and were like, actually, Indianapolis or
Speaker 1: whatever the city had had exactly all women's prison that
Speaker 1: meets all of the criteria of prison except to process
Speaker 1: of law. But women convicted of moral crimes were sent
Speaker 1: to these laundries, including by the state. Right, it wasn't
Speaker 1: just people getting dropped off by their families or whatever,
Speaker 1: and these moral crimes that would get you sent to
Speaker 1: these no due process of law. Prisons was drunkenness, vagrancy,
Speaker 1: and sex work. Girls as young as fourteen were regularly
Speaker 1: convicted by US courts and sent to hellholes. Girls as
Speaker 1: much younger than that were sent by their families. Well,
Speaker 1: but this is a story about the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland.
Speaker 1: They were at their worst in Ireland, not because the
Speaker 1: Irish are like backwards or something, but because nearly a
Speaker 1: millennia of colonization left the island particularly vulnerable to exploitation
Speaker 1: by the Catholic Church and by English institutions like the
Speaker 1: Magdalen Laundries. The first one was set up in Ireland
Speaker 1: by the Church of Ireland so even in Ireland, those
Speaker 1: first ones were not Catholic, not trying to get the
Speaker 1: Catholics off the hook here, just spreading the blame and
Speaker 1: laying it on as thickly as necessary. The first one
Speaker 1: was set up by the Church of Ireland in seventeen
Speaker 1: sixty seven. Church of Ireland is the Irish branch of
Speaker 1: the Anglican Church. Once again, it was funded by a
Speaker 1: quote unquote philanthropist, and it was originally this first one
Speaker 1: was only open to Protestant girls. But then the Roman
Speaker 1: Catholics and the Presbyterians soon got in on the act,
Speaker 1: and the Catholic Church are going to take the gold here.
Speaker 1: They are in the competition to see who can be
Speaker 1: the most evil using the Magdalen laundry model. Why they're
Speaker 1: taking home the gold in a pretty literal sense, because
Speaker 1: it was all profit driven. The reason that the laundries
Speaker 1: were particularly bad in Ireland is because after the independence
Speaker 1: from Ireland, Ireland became a defect to theocracy. As often
Speaker 1: as not, revolution provides a power vacuum that some other
Speaker 1: evil institution steps into and out with England sort of.
Speaker 1: You know, Irish independence is like not complete, but whatever
Speaker 1: out with England in with the Catholic Church. Even before that,
Speaker 1: seventy years or so before that, the Irish Famine aka
Speaker 1: the England starved Ireland, committing a second genocide against the
Speaker 1: Irish people. It destroyed much of the traditional infrastructure of Ireland,
Speaker 1: and this allowed the Catholic Church to come in and
Speaker 1: start like quote unquote modernizing and specifically romananizing, like making
Speaker 1: Irish Catholics into Roman Catholics. Okay, a lot of places
Speaker 1: you'd have these nominal Catholics who've been Catholic for like
Speaker 1: a thousand years, right, but they didn't go to church.
Speaker 1: They allowed divorce by women, They practiced all kinds of
Speaker 1: terrible pagan things like believing in holy wells instead of
Speaker 1: blood drinking.
Speaker 3: And having a big wicker man every so often.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to put cops into, but not too many. And
Speaker 1: so the Catholic Church swept in in the eighteen fifties,
Speaker 1: eighteen sixties, the second half of the nineteenth century, and
Speaker 1: they increased church attendance and dependence upon the church hierarchy,
Speaker 1: all while getting rid of the wily pagan ways of
Speaker 1: the Irish Catholics. And they set themselves up as the
Speaker 1: true opposition to England seventy years or so before. We've
Speaker 1: talked about this in a couple other episodes. Protestants and
Speaker 1: Catholics worked together until the Uprising of seventeen ninety eight
Speaker 1: to try and oust England. Right, it wasn't like perfect
Speaker 1: happy fun times.
Speaker 3: But whatever. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, and so now they set themselves up as
Speaker 1: the true opposition to England. They managed to infuse Irish
Speaker 1: anti colonial sentiment with a religious nationalism that paved the
Speaker 1: way for their takeover in nineteen twenty two when Ireland
Speaker 1: sort of gained its dependants. So this is the worst
Speaker 1: place for the laundries because there's so much church and
Speaker 1: state collusion. Judges sent girls to the church instead of
Speaker 1: to prison. Survivors and their families and stuff. Say again
Speaker 1: and again that no one outside knew how bad the
Speaker 1: laundries were because the church was who had educated every
Speaker 1: single person in Ireland, and so it wasn't really possible
Speaker 1: to question it. All kinds of shit could get you
Speaker 1: sent to the laundries. The big one wasn't sex work.
Speaker 1: The big one was pre marital sex. If you're pregnant
Speaker 1: and unmarried, off to the laundry.
Speaker 3: With you.
Speaker 1: You're sent by social workers or your family or the police, whatever.
Speaker 1: But here's where it gets worse. Don't worry. If you're
Speaker 1: pregnant and unmarried, the Catholic Church will steal your baby
Speaker 1: and ship it off for adoption, selling it and not
Speaker 1: giving you any of the money.
Speaker 3: Well, I guess they need all the babies they can get. Yes,
Speaker 3: there may may be selfish of me to want to
Speaker 3: keep my baby exactly when that baby's street value is
Speaker 3: declining by the day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm glad you understand. Yeah, I mean it is.
Speaker 1: I don't you know.
Speaker 3: I think everybody listening to this knows this already, but
Speaker 3: I don't know. To me, it's worth emphasizing that, like,
Speaker 3: stealing someone's child is, like, truly, I think, one of
Speaker 3: the most overtly dehumanizing things you can do to someone,
Speaker 3: both in terms of its actual effect on them and
Speaker 3: what it communicates about what you think of them.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and so one of the many great crimes that
Speaker 1: the Catholic Church is perpetrated on a massive scale involves
Speaker 1: the Catholic adoption practices. So that's where we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about for a minute. The Catholic Church is probably the
Speaker 1: single largest human trafficking organization in history. They're so good
Speaker 1: at doing everything evil. They have the residential schools in Canada,
Speaker 1: they have the laundries in Ireland, they have the child
Speaker 1: abuse literally everywhere. And I didn't hear about the adoption
Speaker 1: stuff until a friend of mine who's like more or
Speaker 1: less a victim of this, started talking to me about it.
Speaker 1: The theft and sale of babies. Not every instance of
Speaker 1: Catholic adoption practices has been course of an evil, and
Speaker 1: we're actually going to talk about a counter example in
Speaker 1: a moment. But the short of it is that the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church pressured on web mothers into giving up their
Speaker 1: babies for adoption or often outrights, stole them, often by
Speaker 1: like putting the mother under anesthesia during birth and then
Speaker 1: being like your baby died in childbirth, oh God, and
Speaker 1: then sold them off different prices different times. The only
Speaker 1: price I've specifically seen was three thousand US dollars in
Speaker 1: like nineteen fifties market value.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: All the while, of course, the Catholic Church is massively
Speaker 1: campaigning against birth control and abortion, oh God, which helps
Speaker 1: their bottom line and creates a steady stream of babies.
Speaker 1: They've done this all across the world, and the abuses
Speaker 1: of the system are well documented. Since I can tie
Speaker 1: everything to the Spanish Civil War, anyone who's listening and
Speaker 1: being like as NOI as bitch is going to tie
Speaker 1: as the Spanish Civil War. But what you, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you, tuberculous is coming. Don't worry. The other thing
Speaker 1: that ties together all history. One of the most prominent
Speaker 1: places or that we have a lot of documentation about
Speaker 1: this happening was in Spain after Franco took power, because
Speaker 1: he was really fucking upfront about it, right, Franco took
Speaker 1: over and Institute of National Catholicism, which was a fascist
Speaker 1: regime that actually, in some ways, as we've talked about,
Speaker 1: actually broke from some of the church hierarchy, from the pope.
Speaker 1: But whatever, Republicans, Marxist anarchists, they all had their children
Speaker 1: stolen since they were not morally competent to raise their kids.
Speaker 1: Three hundred thousand babies in Spain alone between nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: nine and the nineteen nineties were stolen, and this went
Speaker 1: on after Franco died. Babies are stolen around the globe.
Speaker 3: This is the darkest fucking part of this.
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm doing it anyway anywhere the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church was strong enough. I feel, okay, why I'm doing
Speaker 1: all of this. I try not to like focus on
Speaker 1: really bad shit, but I think it's necessary to draw
Speaker 1: a certain attention of things. I think that, like, really
Speaker 1: we need to understand why Sinad O'Connor in nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: two ripped up a picture of the pope because it
Speaker 1: was completely misunderstood at the time. And I think that
Speaker 1: even before I started doing the research, I was like, well,
Speaker 1: there's a lot, but it's like a lot, a lot,
Speaker 1: a lot, you.
Speaker 3: Know, right, It's more than you can even begin to
Speaker 3: grasp unless you like lower yourself into the well. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: Not all babies that were sold in this way were stolen.
Speaker 1: Many of them were just the mothers are pressured. They
Speaker 1: are pressured and pressured and pressured. They are pressured by
Speaker 1: society around them, they are pressured by the Church, they
Speaker 1: are pressured by their religion right that it is not
Speaker 1: okay to be an unwed mother in the UK during
Speaker 1: also just now we're going to get to the Protestants
Speaker 1: doing it too. In the UK during the fifty sixties
Speaker 1: and seventies, half a million Christian children were given up
Speaker 1: for adoption. The Salvation Army and the Anglican Church were
Speaker 1: in on it too, not just the Catholics, through a
Speaker 1: combination of pressure and outright theft. I cannot say that
Speaker 1: all of those are like bad adoption, right, but is
Speaker 1: absolutely creating this institution that is doing all of these
Speaker 1: absolutely evil things in Australia. On twenty eleven, the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church apologized for the force adoption of fifteen hundred sorry,
Speaker 1: one five zero, why do I know worse?
Speaker 3: Thank you? One hundred and fifty thousand.
Speaker 4: In twenty eleven, the Catholic Church apologized for the force
Speaker 4: adoption of one hundred and fifty thousand babies.
Speaker 3: And that's how many they admitted to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, I was just going to start reading the script.
Speaker 1: No great, no, yeah, Sophie, Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 1: And that is so many fucking people. And that's just Australia, right,
Speaker 1: And that is what the church it admits to, and
Speaker 1: all this happens.
Speaker 3: It sounds like most of the people in Australia.
Speaker 4: I know. Yeah, I was gonna say, that's like Australia.
Speaker 1: I know, these are not big countries, right, Like it's
Speaker 1: like funny because I'm reading all these numbers in a
Speaker 1: country of like, what are we at like three hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty million people or something in the US right now?
Speaker 3: Maybe it's more than that. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I believe the correct term is fuck ton.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a fuck ton of people in the US.
Speaker 1: There's not a fuck ton of people in Ireland. Ireland
Speaker 1: is still not back at the numbers that they had
Speaker 1: before the famine. There's like as many people in Ireland
Speaker 1: as like half of New York City or something like that.
Speaker 3: And that really puts things into perspective. That's absolutely horrifying. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you're like half of a New York City
Speaker 1: is what's suffering this?
Speaker 3: And when like you've lost so much population that like
Speaker 3: you never come back from what the eighteen fifties?
Speaker 1: Yeah right, right, Yeah, So all this happened in Ireland too. Unmarried,
Speaker 1: pregnant women were shipped off to the laundry to begin
Speaker 1: their new life as often a slave. Maybe not for
Speaker 1: the rest of their lives, maybe for the rest of
Speaker 1: their lives their baby is stolen and sold, often to
Speaker 1: the US or that you were like, man, this can't
Speaker 1: get darker.
Speaker 3: Again. I believe in you. Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1: This is like one of the only times I'm going
Speaker 1: to make a content warning. I'm going to talk about
Speaker 1: some babies that die for the next little bit, and
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, and I will try not to be I
Speaker 1: try not to focus on details about that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: It's funny because I'm on the horrible things happening to
Speaker 3: babies beat via the Satanic panic. But these are all
Speaker 3: imaginary babies, you know, So it's a very different world
Speaker 3: out there.
Speaker 1: It's like the Satanists of her accuse of killing like
Speaker 1: five babies in the Catholic church is like what we
Speaker 1: do that shit every day.
Speaker 3: Right, They're just like, look, you get a system, you
Speaker 3: do it kind of you got the government in on it,
Speaker 3: like beat a screep, yeah, God's sake.
Speaker 1: So the town of Twam in County Galway, Ireland, we
Speaker 1: are going to get in this story. There's a cool
Speaker 1: person of the week. There's the woman who uncovered what
Speaker 1: happened there.
Speaker 3: And we're going to talk about her. Thank Heavens.
Speaker 1: Saint Mary's Mother and Baby Home of Twam. It's not
Speaker 1: quite one of the laundries. It's one of this larger
Speaker 1: network of like place to show up if you're an
Speaker 1: onwed mother, and it's a place for ONWB mothers to
Speaker 1: give birth. And if you're a repeat customer, they'll send
Speaker 1: you the laundries because you're not to be trusted. The
Speaker 1: building first opened in eighteen forty six as a workhouse,
Speaker 1: and then it became a place for the starving to
Speaker 1: die during the famine. This place is just fucking cursed.
Speaker 1: After the War of Independence ended in a treaty, it
Speaker 1: became a barracks for the pro treaty side of the
Speaker 1: Irish Civil War. So one morning six Republicans were shot
Speaker 1: to death for dreaming of an actually free Ireland here
Speaker 1: on the grounds, betrayed by their previous comrades. Then in
Speaker 1: the theocratic model of Ireland, it was a state funded
Speaker 1: but Catholic run place for disgraced women. If you got
Speaker 1: knocked up you could try and get to England. Otherwise
Speaker 1: you might wand up in twemb where if you misbehaved
Speaker 1: there was one major threat you'd be sent to the laundries.
Speaker 1: Behave well and once your kid is old enough to
Speaker 1: steal from you and sell, they'll let you go. Your
Speaker 1: baby goes off to England or more likely.
Speaker 3: To the US.
Speaker 1: Some mothers spent their entire lives tracking down their children,
Speaker 1: or trying to. Sometimes they would find their children and
Speaker 1: be unable to reclaim them. Some children who stayed unadopted
Speaker 1: spent their lives trying to find their parents. The home
Speaker 1: wasn't closed until nineteen sixty one. It was one of
Speaker 1: thirteen such places in Ireland, the last one closed, and
Speaker 1: I believe nineteen ninety eight one in seven kids who
Speaker 1: was born in that in these places died there. This
Speaker 1: is twice the mortality rate of Ireland at that time,
Speaker 1: and the bodies in Twam weren't discovered until the early
Speaker 1: twenty tens. Babies were sold to the US for three
Speaker 1: thousand dollars apiece. The children were called home children and
Speaker 1: they were like picked on by the community. The woman
Speaker 1: who actually did all the investigation in it like has
Speaker 1: an anecdote about how she like picked on a home
Speaker 1: child as a kid and feels guilty about it ever since.
Speaker 1: She gave one of the home children a like piece
Speaker 1: of candy, like but it was just an empty wrapper,
Speaker 1: and they like laughed when they could open. The fucking
Speaker 1: children are awful and even if you're a shitty kid,
Speaker 1: You can grow up to be amazing like this woman,
Speaker 1: is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, these kids, the
Speaker 1: home children. They were used as test subjects for at
Speaker 1: least thirteen different medical experiments, mostly vaccines, but also formula
Speaker 1: milk from nineteen thirty to nineteen seventy five. They were
Speaker 1: medically neglected, died at astonishing rates, and when they died,
Speaker 1: their bodies were thrown into unused septic systems or a
Speaker 1: specific one. This was not a septic tank, a sort
Speaker 1: of an unused sewer. Some of them were sold to
Speaker 1: medical schools. That is okay, that is the worst thing
Speaker 1: that I'm going to talk about all week and hopefully
Speaker 1: for the next fucking several months.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's good to know. It's all smooth sailing.
Speaker 1: Yeah and okay, So the horrors were revealed by an
Speaker 1: Irish historian named Catherine Corlis who grew up in twem
Speaker 1: and once gave a kid an empty piece of candy.
Speaker 1: And she's fucking cool. She's about seventy now. She's vegetarian
Speaker 1: and sober and wears all black. So what I'm saying
Speaker 1: is that vegan, straight edge goths have been doing cool
Speaker 1: shit since forever.
Speaker 3: It's so true.
Speaker 1: I love running across like all of the Like before
Speaker 1: there was like a culture around like veganism and straightedge
Speaker 1: and all that shit. I'm not straightedge, but I am vegan.
Speaker 1: I do are all black. I love that I keep
Speaker 1: running across in history like all of these people who
Speaker 1: do amazing shit, who are like, no, it's just like
Speaker 1: the lady who wears all black and doesn't even meet,
Speaker 1: does drink, you know.
Speaker 3: You know, just feel good.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't have a word for it, but I guess
Speaker 3: like it. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: So the way she found these the dead children, a
Speaker 1: few bones had been found by kids. There's a story
Speaker 1: about kids in the nineteen seventies like running around with
Speaker 1: a skull on a stick that they found in a field,
Speaker 1: and then their parents had to be like, that's not
Speaker 1: a Halloween direct decoration. That's not plastic, you know.
Speaker 3: And then there's probably a dad who was like, bet
Speaker 3: that'll save us a bit of money this Halloween. Let's
Speaker 3: end it up in the yard exactly, And everyone would say, oh,
Speaker 3: those are bodies of the famine victims, right, But it
Speaker 3: didn't add up to Catherine. So she managed to track
Speaker 3: down seven hundred and ninety six death certificates without burial records,
Speaker 3: and since everyone in Ireland at the time is like
Speaker 3: the same fucking name, They're all like John and James
Speaker 3: and Margaret and shit, it's like hard to correlate all
Speaker 3: this stuff. So she does an incredible amount of work
Speaker 3: on this. So she sets to work finding the bodies.
Speaker 3: She finds a modern map of Twam and an eighteen
Speaker 3: ninety map, and she like traces over between the two.
Speaker 3: She finds where the kids had found some bones. It
Speaker 3: was on top of it an old Victorian era septic
Speaker 3: system that had been discontinued in the nineteen thirties. So
Speaker 3: she dug it up and there were the remains. She
Speaker 3: self financed the whole thing, while everyone in town was like,
Speaker 3: don't do this.
Speaker 1: You have to stop. Do not go digging up old issues.
Speaker 1: We just want to like, let the past be the past.
Speaker 3: He's like that lady who found Richard the third under
Speaker 3: a car park.
Speaker 1: Oh, Mike, I knew that. I knew that someone found him,
Speaker 1: but I don't know anything about the story around it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well it was just similarly I don't know the
Speaker 3: story that well, but it was I remember from following
Speaker 3: it at the time that it was I think an
Speaker 3: independent historian who just like had done some research and
Speaker 3: was like, I really think Richard the Third is under
Speaker 3: this car park and we were like, all right, whatever,
Speaker 3: and by god, she was right that rules.
Speaker 1: So yeah, she self financed the whole thing. It was
Speaker 1: something of an open secret possibly that everyone was like,
Speaker 1: don't go digging it into this, you know. She started
Speaker 1: releasing articles about it in twenty twelve to like no fanfare,
Speaker 1: but eventually in twenty fourteen it caught national attention and
Speaker 1: she became like, this was like the biggest fucking deal, right,
Speaker 1: and the rules that became a big deal. It's a
Speaker 1: shame that it had to write for her work. She
Speaker 1: was invited to a reception with Pope Francis when he
Speaker 1: visited Ireland, like she was invited to the papal mass.
Speaker 1: She turned it down and instead went to a vigil
Speaker 1: outside for the dead children. She's received all kinds of
Speaker 1: awards for her work, which she deserves, and the last
Speaker 1: articles I could find on the matter because things like
Speaker 1: drop out of the news cycle. Right. She was fighting
Speaker 1: for the kids to be exhumed and properly buried, and
Speaker 1: the Archbishop of the region did support that wasn't like, no,
Speaker 1: you have to leave them there or whatever, you know.
Speaker 1: And she's spent her time since helping survivors of the
Speaker 1: home babies, like the home babies who survived, track their origins.
Speaker 1: She helps them find their parents, and she also helps
Speaker 1: parents find their children and shit. Most of the mothers
Speaker 1: went to England to be away from shame and condemnation,
Speaker 1: and the former Tasia, the Prime Minister of Ireland, Enda Kenny,
Speaker 1: had an almost good speech about it during the official
Speaker 1: acknowledgment by the Irish government, and I want to read
Speaker 1: a chunk of it because actually I think it's really interesting.
Speaker 1: No nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children.
Speaker 1: We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was
Speaker 1: the nuns care. We gave them up, maybe to spare
Speaker 1: them the savagery of gossip, the wink in the elbow,
Speaker 1: language of delight, in which the holier than thos were
Speaker 1: particularly fluent. We gave them up because of our perverse,
Speaker 1: in fact morbid relationship with what is called respectability. Indeed,
Speaker 1: for a while it seems as if in Ireland our
Speaker 1: women had the amazing capacity to self impregnate for their trouble,
Speaker 1: we took their babies and gifted them, sold them, trafficked them,
Speaker 1: starved them, neglected them, or denied them to the point
Speaker 1: of their dis appearance from our hearts, our site, our country, and,
Speaker 1: in the case of TWAM and possibly other places, from
Speaker 1: life itself. Yeah, it's kind of funny because I cried
Speaker 1: when I read that, and then I immediately read all
Speaker 1: the critiques from feminists about the reason I say it
Speaker 1: was an almost good speech is that it covers one
Speaker 1: important part of it, the cultural part. Right, this like
Speaker 1: respectability politics, but it doesn't talk about the fact that
Speaker 1: women were often physically forced to enter these places, and
Speaker 1: that the government itself has a lot of blame for this.
Speaker 1: And I know you were thinking, you're thinking, surely all
Speaker 1: of this story about adoption it doesn't tie into US racism.
Speaker 1: But let me tell you no, never, nothing ever does
Speaker 1: it does. But first, the other thing about the US
Speaker 1: culture is that we're advertising supported. We haven't done a
Speaker 1: second advert. I'm doing this correctly. Well, here's your second
Speaker 1: ad break, brought to you by a pike, not the fish,
Speaker 1: but the really really long spear.
Speaker 3: And we're back.
Speaker 1: There's another side of the Catholic adoption program. In some
Speaker 1: places and times, the priests and nuns were trying their
Speaker 1: hardest to provide for abandoned children and save them literally
Speaker 1: from capitalist exploitation, because there's always wherever there's people doing things,
Speaker 1: there's people doing it really good and really bad, you know.
Speaker 1: And they ran up against us racism in the process,
Speaker 1: because by the Catholic teaching, when people are doing it right,
Speaker 1: racism is nonsensical. All Catholics are Catholic, and beyond that,
Speaker 1: all humans are created by the Creator and are worthy
Speaker 1: of salvation or whatever. Right. There was this thing going
Speaker 1: on in New York City at the turn of the century,
Speaker 1: well for about seventy years before the turn. It went
Speaker 1: on for a really fucking long time. Again, lots of
Speaker 1: people are doing evil shit. Private for profit Protestant charities
Speaker 1: were literally snatching Irish kids off the street, using truancy
Speaker 1: laws and ethnic anti Irish hatred to get away from it,
Speaker 1: and then shipping them out west to be adopted by
Speaker 1: people who wanted them for child labor.
Speaker 3: Well, it's just about, what are you supposed to do?
Speaker 3: Pay for someone to work on the farm? Yeah?
Speaker 4: What? What?
Speaker 3: What?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 2: A horrible thing you just read.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's where Dorothy came from. By one estimate, one
Speaker 1: hundred and ten thousand Irish kids were stolen from the
Speaker 1: streets of New York by these programs over the course
Speaker 1: of about seventy years.
Speaker 3: Seventy years. Yeah, it's a very long standing program, I know.
Speaker 1: And it's it's kind of mushy because it's not like
Speaker 1: one like what it was the Catholic Church can be.
Speaker 1: Like Catholic Church had this thing, they called it this,
Speaker 1: they did this, right, they would come and go. But
Speaker 1: stealing kids is forever. H God, it's so funny too,
Speaker 1: right because like in the modern coext like people use
Speaker 1: fear of kidnapping to push all kinds of horrible agendas.
Speaker 1: But this does this fucking happened, and this was seen
Speaker 1: by the Catholics as an attempt at cultural genocide. You're
Speaker 1: stealing all of our children and sending them away to
Speaker 1: be raised by people outside of our religion. Now it
Speaker 1: seem to have that effect. Of course, the Catholic Church
Speaker 1: is also doing the exact same thing in like the
Speaker 1: Canadian schools, where they're raising people to be Catholic and
Speaker 1: stealing them away from indigenous practices and stuff, but it's
Speaker 1: still really fucking not good. So the Catholic Church had
Speaker 1: its own system going, and in this instance, at least
Speaker 1: according to the articles I read, they tried to do
Speaker 1: it just and well. They would set up these charities
Speaker 1: where if you have an unwanted child, and of course
Speaker 1: they've created the preconditions by which children could be unwanted
Speaker 1: just for being bastards or whatever. Right, but if you
Speaker 1: have an unwanted child, you can drop them off at
Speaker 1: this charity and the charity will care for them for
Speaker 1: three years, so they have a chance to come back
Speaker 1: and get them if you want them, if you change
Speaker 1: your mind, at which point after three years they are
Speaker 1: shipped off for adoption. Wow, I do not believe that
Speaker 1: the children at this particular one were sold because the
Speaker 1: I'll get to it, and specifically they tried to send
Speaker 1: them out to be adopted before they were old enough
Speaker 1: to work, even by the standards of the time. Right,
Speaker 1: so it's like mostly like three year olds and shit,
Speaker 1: who it's just hard to make them do work. I'm
Speaker 1: not even going to make a child labor joke. And
Speaker 1: so a bunch of Irish priests and nuns traveled out
Speaker 1: west to specifically vet families and towns where they could
Speaker 1: take these children, and they traveled with the children to
Speaker 1: drop them off. It wasn't just like see a later kid,
Speaker 1: and they almost got killed for it because of racism.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't anti Irish bigotry, right, it was anti
Speaker 1: Mexican bigotry because most of the Catholics out west where
Speaker 1: Mexican or Mexican American. The Church didn't care what color someone, right,
Speaker 1: these are Catholic families. That is the continuation that they're
Speaker 1: attempting to do, is that Catholic children are raised by
Speaker 1: Catholic families. The point is the immortal soul of the kids,
Speaker 1: not the color of their parents. So nineteen hundred they
Speaker 1: showed up to a small mining town with a bunch
Speaker 1: of children who needed families, and vetted each family and
Speaker 1: gave them to the families. The reason I think that
Speaker 1: they weren't selling these kids is because these families are poor.
Speaker 1: Shit and actually, like this comes up in court against
Speaker 1: the Catholics for having dared give kids to poor families.
Speaker 1: These kids and the reason this is so interesting, this
Speaker 1: is a kind of a This is a rabbit hole
Speaker 1: I fell down during this episode. But I think it's
Speaker 1: really interesting this story because these kids weren't quite white
Speaker 1: in New York City. They were absolutely a step above
Speaker 1: black and brown, but they were Irish until they got
Speaker 1: on the train. As soon as they're taken out of
Speaker 1: that context. To the wasps, skin color is all that mattered.
Speaker 1: Happy white kids being raised by Mexican families was too
Speaker 1: much for them. So with a monsoon raging, an armed
Speaker 1: mob of Protestants went door to door and stole the children.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, the Irish priest was run out of
Speaker 1: town by a lynch mob of four hundred people, which
Speaker 1: is more than half the white population of the town.
Speaker 1: The nuns stayed behind, successfully guessing that their gender would
Speaker 1: save them from the mob, which is brave as shit,
Speaker 1: because that could have gone not at all the way
Speaker 1: that it did, right, and they managed to rescue some
Speaker 1: but not all, of the kids. And it was this
Speaker 1: really fucking dark thing where basically the rich fox like
Speaker 1: the mine over owner or whatever, would get their pick
Speaker 1: of the kids in exchange for letting the rest go.
Speaker 1: I cannot imagine having to make this call. Nineteen of
Speaker 1: the kids stayed with kidnappers, twenty one were saved by
Speaker 1: the nuns God. This was the biggest news story in
Speaker 1: the region. All of the papers were against the Catholics.
Speaker 1: They ran anti Catholic and anti Mexican slurs constantly. No
Speaker 1: charges werever filed against the kidnappers, and the Arizona Supreme
Speaker 1: Court ruled that the Irish priest had picked bad homes
Speaker 1: because he hadn't taken racism into account, or rather that
Speaker 1: he had gone against the cultural norms in how he
Speaker 1: placed the kids.
Speaker 3: Yes, you got a factor in racism to your decision making.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what are you doing thinking about what are you
Speaker 1: doing pod the immortal soul of the kids based on
Speaker 1: the theological framework that you exist within.
Speaker 3: Just you know, it's also fascinating to be like, this
Speaker 3: is a bridge too far. We sanctioned the kidnapping and
Speaker 3: redistribution of children, but not to Mexicans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, right, these kids can't even work.
Speaker 3: What are you doing.
Speaker 1: There's one story that might be apocryphal and might not be,
Speaker 1: but exists in the town's history where one of the
Speaker 1: orphans escaped her captors and moved in with her Mexican parents,
Speaker 1: who then like ran into the storm, like out into
Speaker 1: the storm, and then returned years later, which is like
Speaker 1: mysteriously they have like a red haired teenage daughter. Hm,
Speaker 1: and this is that's my Not all Catholics were bad
Speaker 1: to kids aside, because it's an interesting story I ran across.
Speaker 1: But now, well, soon we're gonna go back to the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church for portraying unheard of evils in Ireland and
Speaker 1: the people who fought them. Lots of stories of prison breaks,
Speaker 1: and we'll tie it into Shenade O'Connor on Wednesday. Don
Speaker 1: don dont Yeah.
Speaker 4: I thought you were winning for that or some other
Speaker 4: cool sound effect that I'm qualified to make.
Speaker 1: Oh, thank you, Sarah, I think you did.
Speaker 2: Sarah Sarah. Do you have any pluggables for us?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 3: Oh, I should really have something ready. Will you accept
Speaker 3: a book?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Do I have to plug something that I'm doing?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Sure, it's a random thing I like. Okay, besides like
Speaker 1: children selling organizations.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, No, I don't work for Wayfair anymore, so
Speaker 3: cle I last week read Tina Brown's The Vanity Fair Diaries,
Speaker 3: and it's like the book I've enjoyed most in quite
Speaker 3: a while because it's her actual diaries from when she
Speaker 3: was running Vanity Fair in the eighties and everyone is
Speaker 3: in it. It's just like one of those murals in
Speaker 3: a restaurant worth of like eighties New York people running
Speaker 3: around and reading is fun when it's all gossip. That's
Speaker 3: what I've realized.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes sense. I also want to just shout
Speaker 1: out again the podcast you're wrong about. If you like
Speaker 1: cool people did cool stuff, you will like. And I
Speaker 1: don't have any you might like. You just will like
Speaker 1: Sarah Marshalls.
Speaker 3: Your totally sister podcast. Yes, yeah, absolutely, yeah so at
Speaker 3: Double Dip. Yeah, and I have a substack. I quit Twitter.
Speaker 3: That's my big news. If you see me on Twitter,
Speaker 3: I have gone against my own divine oath and what.
Speaker 2: Is this Twitter?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 3: Sorry, I quit X.
Speaker 1: I joined Twitter in two thousand and fucking nine, but
Speaker 1: I never signed up for X, so fuck it.
Speaker 3: I'm out.
Speaker 1: And if you want to see me talk about the
Speaker 1: things I talk about on you used to talk about
Speaker 1: on Twitter when Twitter existed, like more context about history
Speaker 1: stuff and also preparedness and politics and all that shit,
Speaker 1: you can find me on substack. It's Marter Kiljoy dot
Speaker 1: substack dot com. But you're not going to type that in.
Speaker 1: You're going to type in Marder, Killjoy, Substack into into
Speaker 1: Google and you can follow me there, and half of
Speaker 1: my content is free, and then my more personal like
Speaker 1: memoory type stuff is for paid subscribers, but there will
Speaker 1: always be a lot of free content there. That's what
Speaker 1: I have to plug, Sophie, hmmm, I don't want to
Speaker 1: plug today your ears from hearing about bad things.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, that too.
Speaker 4: I would like to plug a podcast hosted by one
Speaker 4: Prop called Hood Politics with Prop on this very network,
Speaker 4: cool Zone Media, because it is really good.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Prop has been putting out some amazing episodes lately, and
Speaker 4: his editor Matt also makes custom music for every single episode.
Speaker 4: And they are both insanely talented and we're lucky to
Speaker 4: note them, and you're lucky to be able to listen
Speaker 4: to them for free or listen to them add free
Speaker 4: on cooler Zone Media.
Speaker 2: A Rah, Wow, that was so good. That was so
Speaker 2: fucking good.
Speaker 4: Ian, please please please tell me offline and how good
Speaker 4: that was.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. Anyways, we'll be back next week.
Speaker 2: Oh no, we'll be back Wednesday. Damn, I was doing
Speaker 2: so well. We'll be back Wednesday with part two.
Speaker 1: Dun Dun, Dun, dun, dun.
Speaker 2: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 2: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 2: visit our website.
Speaker 4: Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 4: Apple
Speaker 2: Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.