Witches, Women, and Magdalene Houses: Reclaiming Power Through Fiction
Content warning: institutional abuse, forced adoption, religious coercion.
“The Witch, No. 3” lithograph by Geo. H. Walker & Co., 1892
What do witches and “wayward” laundresses have in common?
Ask history and it will whisper the same answer in two different centuries: they knew too much. In 1650 a healer might be tried for witchcraft after brewing cough-soothing thyme tea; two hundred years later her great-grand-daughter could be locked in an Irish Magdalene Laundry for “moral failings” as vague as being poor or speaking her mind. Different labels, same dread of unruly feminine power.
That revelation lit the fire under my novel When Witches Can’t Cast—and under my teapot.
Unidentified Magdalene Laundry, Ireland, c. 1900
Survivors of Ireland’s laundries have testified—often through the Justice for Magdalenes Research Oral-History Project—that women were committed for being “difficult,” “too curious,” or simply having no man to vouch for them.
Similarly, most early-modern witch accusations began with suspicion of behavior outside the norm: too much knowledge of herbs, too much land, too loud a laugh. Both systems aimed at erasure—social, legal, sometimes physical.
Researchers teaching comparative social-studies courses note that the laundries formed part of a wider “architecture of containment” designed to police women’s bodies and labour—a phrase widely used in Irish-studies scholarship. This ready-to-use lesson plan, “Deliver Us from Evil: ‘Fallen Women’ and the Irish Magdalene Laundries,” makes those parallels for classrooms.
“Confinement, control, silence—these are the threads that stitch witch-trials to laundries.”
—Sex in a Cold Climate, Channel 4 documentary (1998)
Key Dates:
1650s – Height of witch-hunts
1765 – First Magdalene Laundry opens in Dublin
1922 – 1996 – Ten laundries operate in the Irish Free State/Republic
March 1998 – Documentary Sex in a Cold Climate airs, triggering 450 survivor calls
5 Feb 2013 – Publication of the McAleese Report and formal State apology
2013 → present – Magdalen Restorative Justice Ex-Gratia Scheme offers redress
2025 – Plans advance to convert Dublin’s last State-owned laundry into a national memorial centre
A photograph capturing a ledger listing various clients for the Magdalene Laundry operated by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity located at High Park in Drumcondra, now part of the Little Museum's permanent collection.
Magdalene Laundries: Houses of Shame, Not Healing
Named for the mischaracterised “fallen” Mary Magdalene, these Catholic-run institutions forced women into unpaid labour until the last laundry closed in 1996. The Encyclopaedia Britannica entry confirms their global spread and punitive purpose.
Scholar Frances Finnegan’s Do Penance or Perish documents name changes, cropped hair and lifelong detention as routine tactics of control. Children born inside were frequently adopted out without consent, as detailed in Al Jazeera’s survivor interviews.
The trial of a witch at the First Church of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Etching, American, late 19th century.
Witch Trials: Fear of Women Who Know Things
Midwives, herbalists, widows—many owned property or knowledge that unsettled a male-dominated order. Their household recipe books (“domestic pharmacopoeias”) could even appear in court as proof of sorcery. When magistrates condemned them, the women became cautionary tales: stay small, stay silent.
Between 1450 and 1750 an estimated 40,000–60,000 people—about 80 percent of them women—were executed for witchcraft, according to data compiled by History.com. German principalities endured the fiercest waves, while Ireland recorded comparatively few deaths, a disparity explored in a feature by The Guardian.
Accusations often hid economic motives. A widow who inherited grazing rights or a healer whose remedies undercut the town physician might suddenly be branded diabolical. Digitised court books reveal that Scottish indictments spiked after failed harvests and land disputes, a pattern highlighted in the BBC’s interactive witch-hunt records.
Public appetite for burnings eventually waned. Britain’s Witchcraft Act of 1736 repealed death sentences and reframed magical claims as consumer fraud—an awkward but telling pivot from fear to skepticism.
Today historians mine those trial dossiers not for demons but for lost women’s voices: herbal formulas, midwifery notes, neighbourly quarrels. The very documents meant to silence “dangerous” knowledge now help us restore it—and remind us why remembering, naming, and retelling still matter.
Blickling Hall, Norfolk, south-west facade
Turning the Narrative Inside-Out
In When Witches Can’t Cast, Blythewood Hall looks every inch a Magdalene Laundry—starched aprons, iron gates—but Helena Hartford secretly shelters the very women society brands hazardous: healers, archivists, survivors. The fictional refuge flips the historic script traced in psychological studies of Ireland’s “architecture of containment,” a system built to lock troublesome women out of sight. Each night Helena locks the front gate—not to trap the women in, but to keep the hunters out.
Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper, Blythewood insists that what clinicians once called female “madness” is often the sane response to a cage too small for a whole life.
Young Girl Writing a Love Letter by Pietro Antonio Rotari, c. 1755
Storytelling as Resistance
Feminist historians argue that naming oppression is the first step toward dismantling it. Writer–activist Rebecca Solnit observes that “to name something truly…is key to the work of changing the world.” Fiction cannot rewrite the past, but it can re-story it—mourning, questioning, and daring readers to notice where those same patriarchal logics still lurk today. That’s a big part of why I write.
Magdalene laundry victims are commemorated with a memorial in Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin. Photograph: Julien Behal/PA
“Magdalene Justice” protest art, Dublin, 2012
From Condemnation to Collective Remembrance — and Hope
In 2013 then-Taoiseach Enda Kenny called the laundries a “national shame,” delivering the long-sought State apology to survivors. Yet financial redress and open archives are still works-in-progress.
What has begun to blossom is a culture of public remembrance — and it’s gathering pace:
National Centre for Research and Remembrance (2025) – Government plans will turn the State’s last laundry on Seán McDermott Street into a site of conscience: a museum, research archive, social-housing apartments and a commemorative garden. Dublin City Council approved the redevelopment in late 2024.
Interim memorials – A public sculpture honouring all laundry inmates was unveiled in 2022, the first permanent marker on the site.
Survivor-led advocacy – Organisations like Justice for Magdalenes Research sit on the design advisory panel, ensuring the new centre foregrounds lived experience, not just artefacts.
Classroom change – Free lesson plans such as “Deliver Us from Evil: Fallen Women and the Irish Magdalene Laundries” are now used worldwide, helping the next generation recognise—and resist—systems that silence women.
These steps cannot erase the past, but they mark a collective resolve: the women once hidden behind high walls will be remembered in the open air, their stories told in their own voices—and their courage will shape how we build justice going forward.
When Witches Can’t Cast is a historical novel by Matilda Lockwood, blending atmospheric fiction with threads of real women’s history. Set in 18th-century England, the story reimagines a Magdalene-style house as a secret refuge for women accused of witchcraft—herbalists, healers, survivors, and storytellers. This book honors those who were silenced and offers a fictional sanctuary for what might have been.
Ready for more?
✨ Read the first chapter of When Witches Can’t Cast free on my website:
https://www.matildalockwoodwrites.com/first-chapter
Prefer paperback? Find the full novel on Amazon or join my tea-infused research ramblings on Instagram @matildalockwoodwrites.
