Wash Out

Off went the Today programme about Magdalene laundries. It would obviously have been better for those girls in trouble to have slept on the streets, wouldn't it, Auntie? They would have been so much better-treated over here in those days, wouldn't they? The work of a washerwoman is beneath human dignity, isn't it? (They had on a guest who actually claimed that it had been referred to the UN as "torture"!) Leaving school at 14 and going into work was otherwise unheard of among people now in their seventies and eighties, wasn't it? And no one else of that generation ever experienced violence at work, did they?