Many of these "laundries" were effectively operated as penitentiary work-houses. The strict regimes in the institutions were often more severe than those found in prisons. This contradicted the perceived outlook that they were meant to treat the women as opposed to punishing them. "The heat was unbelievable. You couldn’t leave your station unless a bell went." Laundries such as this operated in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, Canada, the United States, and Australia, for much of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, the last one closing in 1996. The institutions were named after the Biblical figure Mary Magdalene, in earlier centuries characterised as a reformed prostitute.