National Network for Equitable Library Service

Shaped by Silence brings together the powerful and devastating stories of five women from Ireland, Canada, and Australia whose lives were shaped by forced confinement in Magdalene laundries and related reform "schools" operated by the Roman Catholic Order of Sisters of the Good Shepherd. Their narratives include one teenager's experience in a Good Shepherd training school in Toronto, Canada; one story of a child born into a Canadian Good Shepherd laundry; and three accounts of adolescent girls incarcerated in Good Shepherd Magdalene laundries in Ireland and Australia. In the Good Shepherd reform institutions, supposedly convertible souls became a coerced workforce. Hard, unpaid, and relentless physical toil, isolation from unseemly forces, and prayer were a large part of the nuns' strategy for converting their charges into the Christian image of pure womanhood. Girls and women suffered unspeakable physical, psychological, and emotional abuse. While intimately capturing dark journeys, these stories also offer hope. They represent pathways for re-envisioning our cultural practices and creating space for important alternative narratives.