The laundry industry, an essential part of nineteenth-century domestic life, has been little studied. This book describes the founding and running of Dublin's largest laundry. Set up in 1888, the Dublin Laundry rapidly expanded and by 1900 the company employed 300 people. Its founder, Thomas Edmondson, is an intriguing character, a shrewd businessman and paternalistic employer, a resourceful operator and humane man, who operated his top-class 'Dublin Laundry' within a larger British Isles Quaker network. His life, one of both commercial success and great personal tragedy, offers a fascinating insight into life and trade in Dublin at the turn of the century. This historical biography throws new light on the Quaker movement and the business intricacies of creating and financing a new laundry, and vividly recreates the working conditions of the time with many rare photographs.

The Magdalen laundries were workhouses in which many Irish women and girls were effectively imprisoned because they were perceived to be a threat to the moral fiber of society. Mandated by the Irish state beginning in the eighteenth century, they were operated by various orders of the Catholic Church until the last laundry closed in 1996. A few years earlier, in 1993, an order of nuns in Dublin sold part of their Magdalen convent to a real estate developer. The remains of 155 inmates, buried in unmarked graves on the property, were exhumed, cremated, and buried elsewhere in a mass grave. This triggered a public scandal in Ireland and since then the Magdalen laundries have become an important issue in Irish culture, especially with the 2002 release of the film The Magdalene Sisters. Focusing on the ten Catholic Magdalen laundries operating between 1922 and 1996, Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment offers the first history of women entering these institutions in the twentieth century. Because the religious orders have not opened their archival records, Smith argues that Ireland's Magdalen institutions continue to exist in the public mind primarily at the level of story (cultural representation and survivor testimony) rather than history (archival history and documentation). Addressed to academic and general readers alike, James M. Smith's book accomplishes three primary objectives. First, it connects what history we have of the Magdalen laundries to Ireland's “architecture of containment” that made undesirable segments of the female population such as illegitimate children, single mothers, and sexually promiscuous women literally invisible. Second, it critically evaluates cultural representations in drama and visual art of the laundries that have, over the past fifteen years, brought them significant attention in Irish culture. Finally, Smith challenges the nation—church, state, and society—to acknowledge its complicity in Ireland's Magdalen scandal and to offer redress for victims and survivors alike.

The first biography of Alfred Webb, Irish nationalist and president of the 1894 Indian National Congress. The biography explores how Webb viewed nationalism as a vehicle for global social justice. Drawing on archives in Britain, Ireland and India the author reveals how Irish and Indians used cosmopolitan London to create networks across the Empire.

The first book to tackle the controversial history of prostitution in modern Ireland.

This fascinating book provides a detailed account of the history of maternity and child welfare in Dublin between 1922 and 1960. In so doing it places maternity and child welfare in the context of twentieth-century Irish history, offering one of the only accounts of how women and children were viewed, treated and used by key lobby groups in Irish society and by the Irish state. Mother and child is of critical importance to understanding the political and social history of modern Ireland as it examines the responses of the State, the church, voluntary groups and women to the emergence of the welfare State in Ireland. As such it makes a welcome contribution to Irish political, social, medical and gender history.