| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.1

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.1 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

'Do Penance or Perish': A Study of Magdalen Asylums in Ireland. By Frances Finnegan (Piltown, Co. Kilkenny: Congrave Press, 2001. xii plus 256 pp.).
The title of this book raises the hopes of Irish social historians, because it addresses an aspect of Irish history that has been neglected by historians at the same time that it has received a great deal of attention from journalists and filmmakers. Drawing primarily on the records of the Good Shepherd Sisters, who operated four magdalen asylums in Ireland, Finnegan explores the impulses that guided the founding of each of the asylums, the transformation in the function of the asylums from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, and the place of the asylum in Irish society. She makes extensive comparisons between Irish and British asylums, to reinforce the point that Irish institutions developed along a distinctly different path, mainly because of the distinct religious character of the Irish institutions.	1
The Irish magdalen asylum had its roots in the Victorian rescue movement, and many of the magdalen asylums began as lay efforts to rescue and reform prostitutes. Indeed, the first Good Shepherd asylum in Ireland, opened in Limerick in 1848, began as a lay movement; the Good Shepherds came to Ireland at the request of the asylum's original founders. The Good Shepherds, an enclosed French order, were founded specifically to save "fallen women" from their own base impulses. Because of their emphasis on sexual immorality and fallen women, according to Finnegan, the arrival of the Good Shepherds in Ireland was a momentous occasion in the history of Irish magdalen asylums: "The repercussions for Irish society were far reaching, as the French order was to be the driving force in the country's Magdalen movement for almost a century and a half." (p. 51)	. . .

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