Epilogue
The six French Sisters of St. Joseph who disembarked in St. Louis in 1836 brought with them almost two centuries of tradition and experience in education, health care, and social service. For the next eighty-four years, through their efforts and those of the American- and foreign-born sisters who joined them, the CSJS, like thousands of other Catholic women religious, worked and lived at the center of Catholic culture and American life. Their story is one of survival, growth, risk taking, entrepreneurship, travel, and adventure as well as one of poverty, suffering, bigotry, loss, exploitation, and compromise.
The size, geographic extension, and diverse activities of the CSJ congregation make it an excellent example of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American sisters who numbered over 90,000 by 1920.
1 Nuns educated, nursed, and cared for generations of immigrant and working-class Catholics in every part of the United States. Catholic sisterhoods gave American women an alternative to marriage and motherhood, an opportunity for lifelong meaningful work, and a way to live out their spiritual ideals within an all-female community that shared similar goals and values. The travels and work experiences of sisters far exceeded the opportunities open to most nineteenth-century American women, Catholic or Protestant. Their religious identity provided them with the opportunity to go beyond gender barriers and produced the impetus and opportunity for them to be builders and shapers of Catholic culture and American life.
The nuns’ impact on American Catholic culture was powerful and pervasive, particularly when one considers the linguistic, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of the Catholic population. Consistently outnumbering priests and male religious, sisters were everywhere, serving as visible symbols, spiritual educators, and active caregivers of the church, particularly in the nineteenth century when Catholics in more isolated settings rarely saw a priest. The CSJS’ daily activities took them into homes, schools, hospitals, orphanages, and other settings that formed a support network spanning the country.
Although supposedly “sheltered from the world” the sisters were clearly in the public domain. By the mid-nineteenth century, American Catholics formed the largest religious denomination in the United States. Often the focus of anti-Catholic bigotry, nuns interacted with a variety of people, and this direct interaction with non-Catholics, particularly in the American West, in hospitals, and in their select academies, decreased hostile sentiments and behavior. The sisters’ activities and institution building had a direct impact on the larger society and touched the lives of generations of Americans.
Using gender and their religious convictions to build their own institutions, Protestant churchwomen envied, resented, admired, and competed with nuns. Consequently, both groups of churchwomen ultimately expanded the gender and religious parameters in Victorian America in an attempt to justify female-defined space, influence, and activity in the public domain. Like their Protestant and secular peers, women religious sometimes challenged patriarchal authority in an attempt to maintain autonomy and control over their activities. Also like Protestant women, they had mixed success in this endeavor. If power and influence are demonstrated by an ability to act and create, the evidence suggests that American sisters possessed power, influence, and the ability to shape Catholic culture and American life. However, unlike white, Protestant women who honed their political skills and established a “public voice” on social issues involving women and children, nuns did not. Limited as members of a minority religion composed of mostly working-class immigrants and by “convent manners” that emphasized humility, obedience, selflessness, and public silence, nuns demonstrated their influence but rarely gave voice to it.
Lack of a public voice, which was also problematic for Catholic laywomen, and sometimes laymen, in a male hierarchical church has been a factor in rendering the influence of women religious unremarked and invisible. Not only has “Father” or the “beloved Bishop” been credited for many of the sisters’ achievements, but twentieth-century stereotypes have buried the nuns’ major accomplishments in either negative caricatures of rigid, ruler-wielding drones or in romantic and syrupy discourse describing passive and self-sacrificing martyrs. Both of these stereotypical extremes have been perpetuated by ignoring the strength, creativity, and risk-taking behavior that marked many of the CSJS’ and other sisters’ activities. “Passive minions” or “self-sacrificing handmaidens” could not have created, financed, and/or administered the vast number of educational, health care, and social service institutions that were an accepted part of American Catholic culture by 1920. The complexity of the sisters’ lives and the breadth and significance of their activities belie these outdated and belittling stereotypes.
Post-1920
By 1920 the CSJS and other women religious were victims of their success and the increasing stability of the American Catholic Church. As shapers of American Catholic education and culture, they were now part of a large successful church that was moving more into the American mainstream and middle class. In fact, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, religious and secular factors coalesced, forcing sisters into a more subservient role than they had played in the nineteenth century—a role that would not change until the 1960s and the Second Vatican Council.
2 As a result of papal decrees in 1900 and 1901, the CSJS and other active sisterhoods were elevated to a “higher status” in the church. Their “simple” vows, which gave them lay rather than religious status, no longer excluded them from the ranks of “real religious,” despite lack of cloister and “solemn” vows. However, this “elevated status” also brought more interference from Rome and the American male hierarchy. Episcopal control was strengthened over diocesan women’s communities, and even orders with papal approbation like the CSJS were forced to standardize their internal organization, impose partial cloister, and restrict sisters’ travel.
3 In addition to this change in religious status, by 1908 the Vatican no longer considered the United States a “mission territory” and the entire American church came under traditional Vatican authority. The 1917 change in canon law reified this tightening of control by Rome, demanding that sisterhoods align their constitutions to comply with Vatican perceptions of gender and religious life. One historian describes the changes: “After the first World War, sisters, who had worked energetically and with freedom, were slowly curtailed in their activities and made to conform to a role and lifestyle which defined them as demure handmaidens, delicate, withdrawn brides of Christ who were not quite human.”
4Restricted in their travel and their interaction with seculars, family, and the outside world, limited in their autonomy and control over their missions, their flexibility as to religious exercises, and their ability to re-elect superiors, and hampered by new regulations, the sisters found their decision-making abilities and autonomy greatly diminished. Canon law had not been codified in 600 years, so the 1917 code required “the application of its prescriptions to the minute details of daily life [that] became a science engaging a whole corps of priest experts.”
5 Every five years superiors of Catholic sisterhoods had to submit responses to a detailed Vatican questionnaire, which measured how well the community was following the new canon law. Innovation, risk taking, and responding to the contemporary needs of the people, which were trademarks of the sisterhoods prior to 1920, were discouraged in favor of rigidity, uniformity, regulation, and following “the letter of the law.” The vow of obedience became the overriding concern.
6As part of this transformation process in the early twentieth century, American bishops honed their skills in the corporate world and began to centralize ecclesiastical and financial power within their dioceses. Catholic historian Jay Dolan writes, “Clericalism had become the standard, and the pastor, now enjoying a relatively long tenure in office, ruled as lord and master of his parish, where the lay people were left to pay, pray and obey.”
7 Demanding more of sisters yet often ignoring the professional aspects of teaching, nursing, and social work, some priests and bishops saw these skills as “natural womanly instincts” and treated sisters as unpaid “housekeepers” of the church and its people.
8 The mavericks and free spirits who had helped expand women’s communities and sisters’ work in the nineteenth century could no longer leave an unpleasant or difficult situation with a superior or bishop and hope to be accepted in another diocese.
As historians of women have so often noted, opportunities for women expand when their labor is needed during times of crisis or during the early stages of growth and expansion of an organization or movement. When the crisis is over or the new organization becomes stable, women see their influence and power eroded and diminished, co-opted by a return to male dominance. Although for different reasons, American Protestant women and secular women’s organizations also experienced some erosion of power in the early twentieth century when many previously all-female organizations became coed and males were placed in leadership positions formerly held by women.
9Although the sisters maintained their woman-only communities, control within the institutions they had created and/or staffed had significantly shifted to the male hierarchy. The American sisters who had once been builders and shapers in the world of education, health care, and social service found themselves in the quandary of needing formal education but lacking the time, support, autonomy, and funding to maintain parity with the secular professionalization in their fields. The proliferation of local, state, and national boards and accrediting agencies, secular and Catholic, often imposed contradictory demands on the sisters. Nuns were further isolated and marginalized with the centralization of Catholic boards and agencies that relied on clerical or male spokesmen to interact with secular agencies. The parochial schools, the sisters’ greatest gift to the church, exploited them in ever larger numbers. At the very time that educational, social, economic, and political opportunities were expanding for women in American society, the Catholic sisterhoods were reined in and put under more stringent controls than their nineteenth-century predecessors.
After 1920 communities of women religious calcified under the weight of ecclesiastical hegemony. For the next forty-five years, Catholic nuns labored under what one historian has labeled “The Great Repression” and another “A Virtual Ice Age.”
10 The irony is that young American women continued to enter religious communities in large numbers even though convent life after 1920 was far more dissonant with contemporary American society and gender expectations than ever before. This, however, is another story that needs prudent research and analysis, particularly considering the dramatic changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the ensuing decrease in religious vocations, and the more activist, and in some cases feminist, attitudes of contemporary American nuns. The years after 1920 have proven to be very different from the pre-1920 period, but they are equally fascinating and deserve careful analysis in the context of modern and postmodern American society.
