Book Summary and Reviews of The Fallen by Louise Brangan

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Janine_S

What the past reveals
This is such an eye-opening book, exposing what a country when deducted to religion and morality can do to ensure that women are kept in their place - under the guise of protection - and erased from society. While many know of the Magdalene Laundries, many do not know other institutions used to incarcerate women or their history, cruelties and secrets. This book tells it all.

When Ireland was a new country in the early 20th C, it created laws to control women under the belief if women could be controlled, the rest of Irish society would be controlled as well. This thinking was based on the mythical view of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the purest form of womanhood. The government worked with the Catholic Church to make use of convent facilities as places to send young girls susceptible to the sins of the pagan world where they could be reformed. Besides the laundries, they used prisons, asylums, industrial and reformatory schools, Mother and Baby homes, and County homes for this purpose and legalized their use as part of its carceral system. At one time 1 of the Irish population was confined to these outstripping the “current rate of mass incarceration in America.”

The book presents stories of several women who were confined to these institutions and their horrific stories of what they endured. What was most cruel was how the nuns running these places strove to dehumanize the girls and women by changing their names, dressing them in rags, and forcing them to do dangerous work. The last home closed in 2013. By statistics reported in a recent Irish report, over 10,000 women died and were erased from memory.

This is a well researched and written book. It begs the mind of how such cruelty could be done by a government but in today’s America that is exactly what the white Christian nationalists want. White men who feel emasculated by women joyfully await this as I heard one young man stare recently. This is why a book such as this is so important. In today’s Ireland abortion is legal. Why? Because as history has shown you cannot enforce religion on the people.

Highly recommend.

I’d like to thank NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for allowing me to read this ARC.

Janine_S

Reexamining the past
This is such an eye opening book, exposing what a country when deducted to religion and morality can do to ensure that women are kept in their place - under the guise of protection - and erased from society. While many know of the Magdalene Laundries, many do not know other institutions used to incarcerate women or their history, cruelties and secrets. This book tells it all.

When Ireland was a new country in the early 20th C, it created laws to control women under the belief if women could be controlled, the rest of Irish society would be controlled as well. This thinking was based on the mythical view of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the purest form of womanhood. The government worked with the Catholic Church to make use of convent facilities as places to send young girls susceptible to the sins of the pagan world where they could be reformed. Besides the laundries, they used prisons, asylums, industrial and reformatory schools, Mother and Baby homes, and County homes for this purpose and legalized their use as part of its carceral system. At one time 1 of the Irish population was confined to these outstripping the “current rate of mass incarceration in America.”

The book presents stories of several women who were confined to these institutions and their horrific stories of what they endured. What was most cruel was how the nuns running these places strove to dehumanize the girls and women by changing their names, dressing them in rags, and forcing them to do dangerous work. The last home closed in 2013. By statistics reported in a recent Irish report, over 10,000 women died and were erased from memory.

This is a well researched and written book. It begs the mind of how such cruelty could be done by a government but in today’s America that is exactly what the white Christian nationalists want. White men who feel emasculated by women joyfully await this as I heard one young man stare recently. This is why a book such as this is so important. In today’s Ireland abortion is legal. Why? Because as history has shown you cannot enforce religion on the people.

Highly recommend.

I’d like to thank NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for allowing me to read this ARC.