From Miramax Films:

The Magdalene Sisters, an unflinching and compelling emotional drama, charting several years in the young lives of four “fallen women” who were rejected by their families and abandoned to the mercies of the Catholic Church in 1960s Ireland. While women’s liberation is sweeping the globe [I wish!], these women are stripped of their liberty and dignity and condemned to indefinite sentences of servitude in the Magdalene Launderies in order to atone for their “sins.” The last Magdalene Asylum in Ireland closed in 1996, and only since has the true horror of conditions in these institutions begun to emerge.