Repeatedly in the early 1550s, the Lisbon Inquisition compelled formerly enslaved Maghrebi washerwomen to work in the Hospital Real de Todos-os-Santos after they were found guilty of 'Islamismo'. A skilled yet particularly arduous and degrading work - beyond the sheer physical strain of carrying heavy loads, washerwomen were regularly exposed to infectious disease through the handling of polluted fabric - washing cloth and clothing ranked among the most common forms of domestic labour, one in which enslaved and formerly enslaved women were over-represented. Drawing on mid-sixteenth century records from the Inquisition and the Hospital to reconstruct a set of individual trajectories that converged through these institutions, this paper examines how several of these washerwomen - women born in Muslim lands but converted to Catholicism after being enslaved in Portugal - performed textile-based labour as part of their imposed 'reintegration' into Lisbon's Catholic society. It argues that through the reemployment of their skills, these women were strategically reappropriated by the city's major charitable institutions, incorporated not as beneficiaries but as cheap, skilled, and indispensable labour. By shedding light on these women's place within Lisbon's broader community of converted North Africans, and by considering the impact of their work on their complex sociabilities inside and outside the Inquisitorial and charitable machinery, it is possible to reflect on how charity, gendered labour, and exploitation intersected in one specific locus. Through the prism of the lived experience of these Maghrebi washerwomen, the paper argues that the hospital and the prison - linked institutionally, ideologically, and geographically - illustrate how labour and penance converged on these women's bodies, tying the fulfilment of their salvation to public hygiene.