Rie Croll

Dr. Rie Croll's Shaped by Silence: Stories from Inmates of the Good Shepherd Laundries and Reformatories brings together the powerful stories of five women from Ireland, Canada and Australia whose lives were shaped by forced confinement in Magdalene laundries and other institutions operated by the Roman Catholic Order of Sisters of the Good Shepherd.

In these institutions, women and girls became a coerced workforce. Hard, unpaid and relentless physical toil, isolation, enforced silence and prayer constituted the nuns' strategy for converting their "fallen" charges into the Christian image of pure womanhood. While intimately capturing the dark and enduring aftereffects of ill-treatment, the stories recounted in Shaped by Silence also describe survivors’ efforts to heal and rebuild their lives.

Dr. Croll, a professor of sociology in Grenfell's social/cultural studies program, was a therapist who worked with abused girls and women. She is a social activist with a research interest focused in the interrelationship between violence and marginalized identities.

The narratives in Shaped by Silence include one teenager's experience in a Good Shepherd training school in Canada; another story of a child who was born in a Canadian Good Shepherd laundry; and three accounts of adolescent girls held in Good Shepherd Magdalene laundries in Ireland and Australia. These institutions held Indigenous, immigrant, impoverished and other marginalized women and girls, those who represented a "moral contagion".

"Our citizens need to learn about and acknowledge the wrongs committed by church and state," said Dr. Croll. "As with residential schools for First Nations children, the Magdalene laundries deserve broad exposure for the heartless shams they were and the intergenerational trauma they caused."

Dr. Croll was a finalist for the 2020 Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing.