Neither tourists nor spies or saboteurs, these young French nuns, Sisters of St. Joseph, came to St. Louis to begin a school for deaf children. The disguise was necessary in an often hostile Protestant milieu, where less than two years before their arrival the Ursuline convent of Charlestown, Massachusetts. had been plundered and burned. Much to their astonishment, the young nuns learned that in early-nineteenth-century America, Catholic women religious traveled in disguise to avoid insults and the possibility of being labeled “escaped nuns.”²

This inauspicious beginning is representative of the initial foundings of many religious communities of women in the United States. Most began with a small band of women—European-, Canadian-, or American-born —who began living and working together in spiritual, emotional, physical, and economic support networks that eventually spanned every region of the country. After the initial Ursuline foundation in New Orleans in 1727, Catholic women religious³ expanded their numbers to 46,000 by 1900. By 1920, approximately 90,000 women, representing over 300 separate religious communities, were working in American education, health care, or social service institutions.⁴

The expansion of American Catholic culture and identity and its subsequent influence in American society could not have occurred without the activities and labor of these women. The proliferation of schools, hospitals, and orphanages boggles the contemporary mind. By 1920, Catholic sisters had created and/or maintained approximately 500 hospitals, 50 women’s colleges, and over 6,000 parochial schools, serving 1.7 million schoolchildren in every region of the country, both urban and rural.⁵ These figures do not include the vast number of orphanages, private academies, schools for the handicapped, homes for unwed mothers, homes for working girls, and homes for the elderly also conducted by the nuns. Bishops vied for opportunities to lure sisters to their dioceses and boasted about the numbers and types of institutions under their jurisdiction, most of which were staffed, if not owned, by women religious. American Catholics, whose numbers exploded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, maintained a network of support and services that insured the transmission of Catholic values, culture, and education from generation to generation. What made this possible, and how did American sisters help create such a legacy that has lasted to the end of the twentieth century?

To understand the role that women religious played in the shaping of Catholic culture and American life, it is necessary to examine gender, religion, and power within the convent culture and how nuns functioned within the church and within American society. The religious community is one of the oldest and least analyzed of women’s groups in the United States. As a woman-defined space and culture within the highly structured American Catholic Church, it provides an intriguing challenge to historians of women to expand our understanding of nineteenth-century women’s culture within a patriarchal setting that had the potential to exploit or co-opt women’s work and contributions. Common myths and stereotypes of Catholic nuns conceal complex realities in the lives of these women who struggled to achieve ambitious goals in an environment—secular and religious—that offered many obstacles.

Historically seen as docile handmaidens and submissive subordinates in the expansion and growth of the Catholic Church, nuns have only recently become subjects of serious scholarship. Caught in a double bind of gender and religious marginality, American sisters have consistently been ignored by scholars of Catholic history and women’s history.⁶ This is a remarkable omission since the majority of Catholic schools, hospitals, and charitable agencies available in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States were created and/or maintained by American nuns. Although historically almost invisible, American sisters were some of the best educated and most publicly active women of their time. Talented and ambitious women from working-class and middle-class backgrounds, regardless of ethnicity, advanced to teaching, nursing, administration, and other leadership positions in Catholic religious communities. The reverend mothers or superiors general of these religious congregations functioned as some of the first female CEOS, administering institutions, personnel, and financial resources throughout the country.⁷

Although women religious had freedoms unknown to most other nineteenth-century women, this fact easily escapes notice because of the powerful and pervasive stereotype of nuns as otherworldly creatures, naive and unassuming, sheltered from the secular world. Nineteenth-century gender ideology and convent education helped maintain and reinforce this stereotype. Like Protestants, Catholic clergy and laity accepted gender ideology very similar to the pervasive model of Victorian womanhood that encouraged piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. One scholar argues that “domestic ideology never was limited to advocates of a single theological persuasion.... American Catholics adopted all the accoutrements of domesticity without notable theological change.”⁸ The public image of Catholic nuns supported and reinforced this gender ideology. Women religious also learned to adopt “convent manners,” which meant they were encouraged to avoid “singularity,” or attempts to stand out in any way.⁹ However, the daily reality of many sisters’ lives demonstrates how their behavior and activities expanded far beyond expectations based on ideology and training. Like other nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century churchwomen, they learned to work within the confines of traditional ideology while expanding and reinterpreting their gender and religious activities. In developing and sustaining multiple institutions, the sisters interacted with laity of all ethnic and socioeconomic classes, from clerics, attorneys, doctors, and bankers to soldiers, miners, orphans, and schoolchildren. Some members of the religious community traveled extensively to secure monetary and material gifts for their institutions. Catholic nuns were free of the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood and had opportunities to live in female settings where egalitarian friendships flourished.¹⁰

In this study, we analyze this convent culture and demonstrate how religious communities of women shaped the creation, development, and extent of American Catholic culture and its subsequent impact on American life. Vastly outnumbering male religious and clergy, the sisters directly impacted the lives of immigrant and native-born Americans, Catholic and Protestant, through their teaching, nursing, and other service activities.¹¹ The sisters’ convent communities and female-defined networks provided physical, emotional, economic, and spiritual sustenance for themselves and the people they served. Far from functioning as passive handmaidens for Catholic clergy and parishes, the nuns created, financed, and administered institutions, struggling with, and at times challenging and resisting, male secular and clerical authority. Furthermore, their ability to adapt to the frequently hostile American milieu and the rugged and often primitive conditions they encountered was firmly grounded in their view of themselves as vowed religious women. For them religion and gender were tightly bound into a single identity.

Using the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (CSJS) as a case study, we will ask the following questions: How did the religious community shape and form the sisters’ individual and collective identity in Protestant America? How did the nuns utilize religious and gender ideology to define, justify, and expand their behavior and activities? How did the sisters deal with patriarchal power (secular and clerical) and with governance in their all-female setting? And finally, in what activities were the sisters involved, and how did these activities shape Catholic culture and American life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

We recognize that no one congregation can be seen as “typical” of the more than 300 American sisterhoods, which included large and small, rural and urban, localized and extended, ethnically diverse and homogeneous groups, some focused on one particular activity while others engaged in multiple occupations. However, we believe that the CSJS are quite representative of American sisterhoods because their characteristics encompassed much of the rich diversity and variety of experience of other congregations. The CSJS were geographically diverse, having worked in nineteen states in every region of the United States, in large urban centers as well as small towns, mining communities, and Indian reservations. One of the largest American sisterhoods, they had a heterogeneous mix of ethnic and class membership that mirrored the larger American Catholic population. They also engaged in all three of the main activities characteristic of American nuns: education, health care, and social service. Some Catholic women’s communities worked in only one of these areas, some in two, but the CSJS from the earliest years worked in all three areas.¹²

Like many European communities of women religious, the French csJs came to the United States at the request of American clergy. In 1836, Bishop Joseph Rosati invited them to St. Louis to open a school for deaf children. By 1860, their revised “American” constitution had established a central government and effectively severed the American community’s ties with the motherhouse¹³ in France, establishing their own American power base. Significantly, in 1872 they elected their first American-born superior general who effectively mobilized and expanded a community of ethnically diverse women, native-born American, Irish, German, French, and Canadian-born sisters, into a large religious workforce. By 1920, 2,300 csJs were supporting approximately 200 institutions including 175 elementary and secondary parish schools and private academies, two schools for the deaf, three women’s colleges, ten hospitals, and nine orphanages. This massive expansion and institution building brought the CSJS directly into the lives of thousands of American Catholics and into American public life.¹⁴

Scholars in women’s history have consistently demonstrated that large numbers of Euro-American and African American women within JudeoChristian traditions used religion and the church to justify, define, and expand their role in American society. Religious beliefs and ideology have been the prime movers in many women’s lives, encouraging them to enter the public realm, inviting them to behave in ways that have brought them into conflict with clerical and lay males, and allowing them to broaden Victorian ideologies defining race, class, and gender.¹⁶

With few exceptions, when religion has been researched and integrated into women’s history, the studies have focused on middle- and upper-class, white Protestant women. Discussing the historiography of women and religion, Leslie Woodcock Tentler chides historians of women for their lack of interest in the study of women religious. In light of the sheer quantity of educational, charitable, health care, and social service institutions created by American nuns in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she states, “Had women under secular or Protestant auspices compiled this record of achievement, they would be today a thoroughly researched population.... Remedy is surely needed.”¹⁷ As a remedy, this study will attempt to place nuns within the mainstream of American history between 1836 and 1920.

The rich array of scholarship demonstrating how Protestant and secular women used gender, religion, and power in the formation of women’s organizations and associations in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America provides critical insights into what these women accomplished and how they felt about their work.¹⁸ Much of this information is relevant to the experiences of American sisters, and although the comparison is rarely made, commonalities are many. First, Protestant and secular women’s groups and Catholic sisterhoods created opportunities for lifelong friendships and physical and emotional support networks, providing opportunities for shared experience and collective gender consciousness in school and work settings. Second, Catholic sisterhoods and Protestant and secular women’s groups created public space for women, justifying their presence through gender-appropriate activity in charitable endeavors, hospitals, settlement houses, and schools. Third, these “public” activities helped churchwomen develop a variety of skills, such as leadership and financial and business acumen, outside the family or home setting. Fourth, through their activities, Catholic sisterhoods and Protestant and secular women provided needed caregiving functions to society through teaching, nursing, offering support services for women, and nurturing children and the poor. American nuns were often the first organized group of white women in remote settings in the trans-Mississippi West. Finally, Catholic women religious and Protestant and secular women’s organizations expanded women’s public culture, allowing single women to work and live in a meaningful way in society outside of marriage and motherhood.

In spite of these positive attributes of women’s associations, nuns, like their Protestant and secular counterparts, suffered the negative effects of gender in a patriarchal society. Resources and activities could be limited or taken away by uncooperative males. All-female settings were often marginalized or ghettoized in patriarchal society or church. Women’s organizations, activities, and finances were sometimes co-opted or dissolved because of male interference.

Elitist and class privileges prevalent in European convents had to be downplayed, if not discarded, in the more egalitarian atmosphere of the United States. Similar to many other transplanted European communities, the CSJS eventually abolished the class distinction between “choir” and “lay” sisters in 1908. Working-class, middle-class, and upper-class women came together to share community identity and goals ²⁰

Another reason for minimizing ethnic and class diversity in American religious communities was the need to overcome anti-Catholic prejudice, which was especially strong regarding cloistered religious who remained mysteriously secluded behind convent walls with no apparent purpose in society. However, cloister, in the sense of strict enclosure, was not a feature of most communities who came to America. Since the great majority of nuns came to America at the request of bishops seeking teachers, nurses, and social workers, most transplanted European communities were already engaged in these active works in their native countries. Their visible and useful contributions that served community needs helped alleviate Protestant suspicion and prejudice. The more homogeneous Protestant women’s organizations rarely had to prove their Americanism or their patriotism.²¹

A second distinguishing characteristic was the sisters’ approach to lifelong education and work. In every stage of a nun’s community life, as postulant, novice, and professed sister, education played a significant role. Postulants and novices had a rigorous schedule that included studies in spirituality, religious exercises, church history, CSJ community history, music, vocational training, theology, study of the vows (poverty, chastity, obedience), and by the early twentieth century, formal classes in teacher training and nursing.²²

Professed sisters continued their spiritual exercises and began on-the-job training for teaching, nursing, or child care. Each young sister had mentors who guided her in her work setting. The wide variety of schools, hospitals, and other social institutions provided ongoing, oftentimes intense educational experiences. Sisters were frequently moved from one setting to another as the need arose, and they typically encountered many diverse travel, work, and learning experiences in a variety of situations.²³ Although many Protestant women spent decades of their lives involved in various religious and secular organizations, most of these women were married and had to balance organizational activities with childbirth, child rearing, and other family duties. For women religious, the community functioned as family and work, an inseparable and lifelong educational experience and commitment.

A third unique quality of Catholic sisterhoods includes the taking of perpetual vows. Women religious, including the CSJS, learned to utilize their three vows (poverty, obedience, chastity) to justify, create, and control space for their public endeavors. The vow of poverty provided the justification for their own hardship and deprivation and also helped them understand the daily trials and needs of many Catholic and non-Catholic working-class immigrants. Although sisters were elevated spiritually in the eyes of their parishioners, their lack of financial security enabled them to empathize with the people they served. Their own poverty helped the csJs avoid a tendency to patronize the needy, a tendency prevalent in many middle- or upper-class, Protestant women’s organizations.²⁴

The sisters’ vow of “holy obedience” to their female superior provided a buffer to patriarchal authority, permitting them to resist pressure from male clerics, who utilized gender and hierarchical privileges to manipulate the sisters. This was an effective method even when the demands were inconsequential or for domestic services. In 1911, the parish priest in Georgetown, Colorado, wrote to Reverend Mother Agnes Gonzaga Ryan that the CSJS refused to clean his house and that all the parish was “upset” about this lack of subservience. Ryan wrote back, stating emphatically that “The Rule” (constitution) forbade CSJS to provide housekeeping for priests and that he would have to find his own housekeeper.²⁵

The sisters’ religious vow of chastity, of which most Protestants and Catholics alike were aware, afforded the nuns “asexual” status that proved useful when they were interacting in the public domain. Traveling across the country and creating, administering, and working in numerous institutions kept CSJS in close contact and in frequent interaction with all manner of secular men. Seemingly, the sisters had the best of both worlds: gender afforded them the special courtesy given to most nineteenth-century white women, even as their vow of chastity effectively shielded them from most male sexual advances or unwanted attention.

Finally, the religious community was a highly distinctive and inclusive environment that permitted multiple generations to live and work together within woman-only space and tradition. In this communal setting, meals, lodging, celebration, deaths, privileges, and deprivations were shared by all. Some sisters spent fifty or sixty years in a religious community that provided a familial atmosphere in which nuns functioned as mothers, teachers, mentors, friends, confidants, and role models of religious life. Additionally, since many secondary academies and colleges included both boarders and day students, many adolescent girls and young women followed a daily schedule that paralleled or mirrored much of convent life, and thus they interacted daily with sisters in all religious and social activities of the schools.

In addition to the familial setting, centuries of tradition, sacred symbols, and “sheltered space” have confirmed and enhanced the nun’s status in what has been mostly male-defined and -controlled “sacred space.” In her two-volume history of women, Gerda Lerner has written extensively about the importance of “free space,” sacred symbols, and feminine and divine role models (female saints, mystics, teachers, writers) to women. Catholic nuns have had a long, rich history of religious foremothers and role models who for sixteen centuries have used the convent setting to write, learn, think, and experience the divine through their “women-focused” lives in one of the few spaces available to them outside of marriage and motherhood—a setting that had the power to teach, nurture, and build a female power base.²⁶ This history and tradition added significance and validation to the lives of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women who chose to emulate these women and recreate this “sacred space.” Although small numbers of non-Catholic sisterhoods existed in the United States, there was no comparable heritage or tradition for women in Protestantism.²⁷

If one analyzes the development of a large, active religious community like the CSJS, a multifaceted story unfolds—a truly American narrative. It is a story of immigrants and native-born and the intersection of cultures: Anglo, African American, European, Hispanic, and Native American. It is a story of a religious minority and its growth and survival in a sometimes unfriendly Protestant setting. It is a story of a community of women whose massive institution building of schools, hospitals, and social services, combined with their faith and labor-intensive work, helped build and shape Catholic culture and American life. And finally, it is a story of change and adaptation and how centuries of European religious, class, and gender traditions clashed with democratic ideals and eventually realigned within nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American society.

This study ends in 1920 even though the history of women religious, including the CSJS, continues to the present day. For many historians of women, 1920 was a seminal year. With suffrage and other social, educational, economic, and political changes, American women’s lives began to encompass new sets of challenges and opportunities very different from those of their mothers or grandmothers. Besides changes in women’s roles, the American Catholic Church also began to “come of age” in modern America. By 1920, the United States, no longer considered a mission territory by the Vatican, came more directly under traditional papal control. American bishops began to consolidate their power, and lay Catholics began to lose some of their immigrant stigma, moving into the American middle class and mainstream society. The 1917 change in canon law (church law) mandated new restrictions and uniformity for Catholic nuns that, in essence, limited community autonomy and insured more hierarchical control and management. This occurred even as American religious communities began to grow in unprecedented numbers. The years after 1920, including pre- and post-Vatican II changes for American sisters, begin another story that deserves analysis in its own right.