Orders of nuns across the world ran workhouses and laundries for ‘fallen women’ – prostitutes, unmarried mothers, and other women whose sexualities made their communities uneasy.20 Conditions in these ‘Magdalene laundries’ were primitive at best and often brutal; even in the twentieth century, women could be confined within them for their whole lives, imprisoned without trial for the ‘moral crime’ of sex outside of marriage. Many women and their children died through neglect or overwork and were buried in unmarked graves. In Tuam, Ireland, 796 dead children were secretly buried in a septic
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