1 Memoirs of Sr. St. Protais Deboille, ACSJC-SLP. This is the only written record by one of the original six founders who came from Lyons, France, to St. Louis, Missouri, to begin the American foundation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (CSJ). Until recently, their sailing vessel was thought to be the Heidelberg, but microfilmed passenger lists recorded at the port of New Orleans on March 5, 1836, definitely show the sisters came to New Orleans on the Natchez (Port of Havre, France), and the sisters’ names and ages were recorded as follows: Antoinette Fontbonne (age thirty), M. A. Fontbonne (age twenty-three), Maria Chapellon (age twenty-five), Margaret Boute (age twenty-five, although this is probably a mistake since the CSJ records indicate an August 19, 1804, birth date, which would make her thirty-one), Maria Vilaine (age twenty-four), and Clodine Deboyne [Deboille] (age twenty-one). See also “Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New Orleans, 1820-1902,” No. 259, Roll 13, Washington, D.C., National Archives Microfilm Publications.

2 After the attack in Charlestown, other convents in Baltimore, St. Louis, Galveston, and other locations were subjected to mob violence and harassment. Mary Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 70-73, 146-60. See also Ewens, “The Leadership of Nuns in Immigrant Catholicism,” in Women and Religion in America, vol. 1, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 101-4. For an excellent analysis of the Charlestown attack see Jeanne Hamilton, “The Nunnery As Menace: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834,” in U.S. Catbolic Historian 14, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 35-65. In the anti-Catholic atmosphere of early-nineteenth-century America, Protestants often assumed that women who entered the convent were either kidnapped or coerced. The term “escaped nun” was used arbitrarily and referred to women who left the convent as well as to nuns in habit who traveled in the public domain.

3 The term “religious” when used in reference to a member of a religious community (i.e., a group of individuals who live together as sisters or brothers and publicly profess religious vows) is a noun and “women” would designate the gender of the group. Although the term “nun” specifically refers to a member of a religious order whose chief purpose and work is to worship in a cloistered setting, it is popularly used to refer to any woman religious. Therefore, throughout this book we will use the terms “sister,” “nun,” and “woman/women religious” interchangeably.

4 Exact numbers are difficult to assess, partly because the sisters were marginalized by the church and their numbers were rarely documented as carefully as male clergy. Also, communities sometimes divided, and how each group was counted and at what period of time can make significant differences in final tallies. For statistical information on nuns see Mary Ewens, “Women in the Convent,” in American Catholic Women: An Historical Exploration, ed. Karen J. Kennelly (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 17-47. Using a variety of Catholic directories published between 1817 and 1920, Ewens estimates that between 1830 and 1900, 106 new communities organized: 23 American, 8 from Canada, and 75 from European foundations. For a detailed analysis of individual communities in the early twentieth century see Elinor Tong Dehey, Religious Orders of Women in the United States (Hammond, Indiana: W B. Conkey, 1930), and Evangeline Thomas, Women Religious History Sources: A Guide to Repositories in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker Co., 1983). George C. Stewart’s Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 1994) painstakingly chronicles numbers of communities and their institutions compiled from multiple sources, including Elinor Tong Dehey’s Historical Statistics of the United States, the Official Catholic Directory (New York: P. J. Kenedy, 1912-20), and a variety of nineteenth-century Catholic directories (under multiple titles) published by Creagh, 1822, 1840, and 1850; Dunigan, 1860; Sadlier, 1870 and 1880; and Hoffmann-Wilzius, 1890 and 1900. Stewart’s “Sister-Population Statistics, 1830- 1990” (Appendix F in Stewart, Marvels of Charity), researched by Catherine Ann Curry, currently seems to be the most thorough and accurate source for statistics on Catholic sisters.

5 Stewart, Marvels of Charity, appendixes C and D; Official Catholic Directory (1920).

6 Although most Catholic history continues to focus on institutional history and male clerical achievements and women’s history continues to focus on the experiences of Protestant and secular women, there are some notable exceptions. See Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arums: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Marta Danylewycz, Taking the Veil: An Alternative to Marriage, Motherbood, and Spinsterhood in Quebec, 1840-1920 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987); Ewens, Role of the Nun; Susan Carol Peterson and Courtney Ann Vaughn-Roberson, Women with Vision: The Presentation Sisters of South Dakota, 1880-1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); James J. Kenneally, The History of American Catholic Women (New York: Crossroad, 1990); and Mary J. Oates, The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). For some recent anthologies on women and religion that include discussions on American sisters see In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women’s Religious Writing, ed. Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995), 17-60; Kennelly, American Catholic Women; and Joseph M. White, ed., The American Catholic Religious Life (New York: Garland Press, 1988).

7 Danylewycz, Taking the Veil, 96; Ewens, “Leadership of Nuns,” 107; Margaret Susan Thompson, “Discovering Foremothers: Sisters, Society, and the American Catholic Experience,” in White, American Catholic Religious Life, 275; Mary J. Oates, “‘The Good Sisters’: The Work and Position of Catholic Churchwomen in Boston, 1870-1940,” in White, American Catholic Religious Life, 195-96.

8 Ann Braude, “Women’s History Is American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas A. Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87-107. For further discussion on Catholic domesticity see Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 52-76, and Ann Taves, The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1986).

9 James J. Kenneally, “Eve, Mary, and the Historians: American Catholicism and Women,” in Women and American Religion, ed. Janet Wilson James (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 191-206; Oates, “‘Good Sisters,’” 177. Patricia Byrne states that the sisters themselves reinforced this perception with their lack of expressiveness concerning even dramatic events in their lives. The CSJs who went to Cuba as nurses in the Spanish-American War never discussed their experiences. Byrne states that “their reticence was likely inspired by a desire to avoid ‘singularity’—a considerable transgression of convent manners.” Quoted from Patricia Byrne, “Sisters of St. Joseph: The Americanization of a French Tradition,” U.S. Catholic Historian (Summer/Fall 1986): 263.

10 Leslie Woodcock Tender, “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (March 1993): 104-27. Tentler states, “The Catholic sisterhoods are without numerical equivalent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as alternatives for women to marriage and family life” (107). For a fascinating discussion of female friendship and friendships in the convent setting see Janice Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 78-82.

11 Ewens, “Leadership of Nuns,” 101. Using Catholic directories, Ewens states that by the late nineteenth century, sisters outnumbered male church workers in almost every diocese that kept records and that “there were almost four times as many nuns as priests by the century’s close.”

12 Most active or “apostolic” communities of women religious (as compared to contemplative orders that were cloistered and focused on prayer) provided one or more of three types of service: teaching, nursing, or social services (particularly in orphanages and homes for women). The CSJs engaged in all three activities, and between 1836 and 1920, 3,335 women entered the order. The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet Profession Book, ACSJC-G (hereafter referred to as CSJ Profession Book), records chronologically the name and demographic information for each woman who entered the community and took final vows of profession. By 1920, the order had placed sisters in nineteen states in every region of the country and had created and/or maintained over 200 educational, health care, and social service institutions. These numbers are compiled from the “Summary of Community Statistics” in General Chapter Reports (1869, 1875, 1881, 1887, 1893, 1899, 1908, 1914, 1920), ACSJC-G. The states represented and the number of institutions changed over time with the advent of central government in the 1860s and the subsequent loss of some CSJ communities that came under diocesan control. By 1920, if all Josephite communities that have roots in the original Carondelet foundation are included, these sisters had worked in twenty-five states and Canada.

13 “Motherhouse” is the name given to the place where each religious community has its central base or government. Typically, the main convent of the community is located there and all postulants and novices are trained within this setting.

14 “Summary of Community Statistics,” General Chapter Report (1920); Mary Lucida Savage, The Congregation of St. Joseph of Carondelet: A BriefAccount of Its Origin and Its Work in the United States, 1650-1922 (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1923), 319-28. A more recent CSJ history and useful secondary source is Dolorita Maria Dougherty et al., eds., Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1966).

15 Braude, “Women’s History,” 89.

16 There are some excellent studies that demonstrate the ways that Protestant women have utilized their religious beliefs to expand their control and influence. Some examples are Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W W Norton, 1976); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); and Ruether and Keller, Women and Religion in America and In Our Own Voices. See also Ruth Bordin, Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). For an excellent discussion on religion in the lives of African American women see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). For an extensive bibliography of journal articles on women and religion see Journal of Wómenj History 3 (Winter 1992): 141-78.

17 Tender, “On the Margins,” 107-8.

18 Besides the works cited earlier that document the direct impact of religion in the lives of Protestant women, other scholars describe women’s organizational activities that were grounded in their Protestant worldview but articulated in a more “secular” public culture of reform and activism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examples include Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelly and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

19 Assessing ethnic diversity was not an easy task. In the eighty-four years covered by this study the CSJs had many foreign-born sisters who entered their ranks. Approximately 32 percent were foreign-born, coming from nineteen different countries. Although exact data is impossible to acquire, it can be speculated that many second-generation immigrant daughters also entered the order. The Catholic population, particularly by the end of 1920, was also extremely ethnically diverse, and although many parishes coalesced around an ethnic population, the CSJs were sent all over the country into a myriad of ethnic communities. For a discussion of this Americanization process see Byrne, “Sisters of St. Joseph,” 241-72.

20 “Decrees of the General Chapter, 1908,” ACSJC-G. In 1836, when the sisters came from France, the community, like most other European-founded religious orders, continued the practice of differentiating sisters into “choir” or “lay” sisters, with the latter group performing domestic chores, wearing a different style habit, and not having full community privileges. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most religious orders eventually discontinued the practice because it clashed with American egalitarian ideals. See Margaret Susan Thompson, “Sisterhood and Power: Class, Culture, and Ethnicity in the American Convent,” Colby Library Quarterly 25, no. 3 (September 1989): 149-75.

21 Ewens, “Leadership of Nuns,” 101. In discussing anti-Catholic hostility Ewens gives major credit to the sisters and their activities. She states: “It might well be shown that sisters’ efforts were far more effective than those of bishops or priests.... It was they who established schools in cities and remote settlements ... and succored the needy ... [they] who changed public attitudes toward the church from hostility to respect.”

22 The CSJ Constitution (1860 and 1884) and the CSJ Customs Book (handwritten, 1868), ACSJC-SLP, delineate the specific types of activities that were appropriate and when for postulants, novices, and professed. By the late nineteenth century, CSJs, like many other orders, began to add more formal education, particularly for those who would be teachers or nurses; however, this varied among the four CSJ provinces. A good overall secondary source on the education and the historical changes in American sisters’ education, particularly prior to World War I, is Bertrande Meyer, The Education of Sisters (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1941), 3-49.

23 Mission records for each CSJ document the types of work settings and location of all assignments throughout her religious life. The assignments were usually based on need, and it was not unusual for a sister, particularly in the nineteenth century, to have served in nine or ten different locations, working in two or sometimes three different roles (education, health care, and social service) during her career.

24 We do not mean to denigrate the efforts of Protestant women’s organizations or downplay their importance. However, we would argue that there was greater socioeconomic disparity between many members of Protestant women’s organizations and their recipients compared with Catholic nuns and their clientele. Because nineteenth-century ideology frequently associated the “poor and the needy” with biological or social inferiority, this attitude oftentimes led benefactors to feel superior to or patronize those they aided. In spite of the institutional wealth of the Catholic Church, nineteenth- and twentieth-century activities of women religious were often minimally funded, and nuns (more so than male clerics) lived a life comparable to that of the community they served.

25 Correspondence between Rev. Mother Agnes Gonzaga Ryan and Fr. Peter J. Geraghty, September 21 and 25, 1911, ACSJC-SLP.

26 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford Press, 1985), 215-16, and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to 1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 58-74, 227-46.

27 For information on non-Catholic sisterhoods see Thomas, Women Religious History Sources. Thomas’s book includes information on Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist, Mennonite, and Orthodox orders of sisters and deaconesses. See also Catherine M. Prelinger, Episcopal Women: Gender, Spirituality and Commitment in an American Main-line Denomination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

1 Patricia Ranft, Women and the Religious Life in Premodern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 104. The Catholic Church convened the Council of Trent in 1545 to clarify doctrine and enact administrative and disciplinary reforms in response to the Protestant challenge.

2 Judith Combes Taylor, ”From Proselytizing to Social Reform: Three Generations of French Female Teaching Congregations, 1600-1720” (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 1980), 192-93, 197-98, and 706-26.

3 Monks and nuns with solemn vows had to accept cloister and a kind of civil death that made them unable to contract a valid marriage or exercise any property rights. They could be dispensed only by the pope. Simple vows had none of these effects. Catholic sensitivity to scandal about the conduct of nuns because of Protestant criticism of previous abuses was a major reason for Trent’s insistence on solemn vows for all women religious. Solemn vows also gave more security to upper-class families by protecting the “honor” of their daughters and preventing them from returning to the world where they might marry and claim a larger share of the family property. See Ruth P. Liebowitz, “Virgins in the Service of Christ: The Dispute over an Active Apostolate for Women during the Counter Reformation,” in Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 132-52.

4 Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and the Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 31.

5 Parlements were royal courts of appeal that also performed more general administrative duties such as registering royal decrees. There were parlements at Paris, Toulouse, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Dijon, Rouen, Aix, Rennes, Pau, Metz, Besançon, and Douai. Robin Briggs, Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 230. See also Taylor, “From Proselytizing to Social Reform,” 405, for discussion of social attitudes toward women religious.

6 “Tertiaries” are lay members of a religious order; “beguines” were women religious who belonged to communities without an approved religious rule; “Sisters of the Common Life” lived in community like nuns but did not take vows. For a discussion of these and similar groups see Elisja Schulte Van Kessel, “Virgins and Mothers between Heaven and Earth,” in Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, ed. Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge, vol. 3 of A History of Women, ed. Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 137-38; Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 391-92; and Ranft, Women and the Religious Life, 82-86.

7 Merry E. Weisner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 196.

8 Ephesians 5:22; 1 Timothy 2:11 (Revised Standard Version).

9 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. and trans. Edmund Hill (London: Blackfriars, 1964), vol. 13 (1a.90-102):39.

10 Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 97; Rapley, Dévotes, 4.

11 Women’s economic and legal position in early modern Europe is described in Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France 1750-1789 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 38-41; Merry E. Weisner, “Spinning out Capital: Women’s Work in the Early Modern Economy,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 2nd ed., ed. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stuard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), 221-49; Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert, “Overview,” in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present, ed. Boxer and Quataert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 35-36; Rapley, Dévotes, 12-15; and Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 124-51.

12 Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: A History of European Witchcraft (New York: Viking Penguin, 1996), 8. See also B. P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 1987), and Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe, 1100-1700: A Documentary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972).

13 Rapley, Dévotes, 19-22. The theory known as Gallicanism, developed in the thirteenth century, claimed for France the right to resist all but very restricted forms of papal intervention within its jurisdiction. Gallicanism was vigorously upheld by the French state courts (parlements), and it served as a convenient excuse for French clergy and government officials, including the king, when they wished to ignore papal decrees. Taylor, in “From Proselytizing to Social Reform,” and Rapley both describe French clerical support enjoyed by the early secular congregations.

14 Economic and social conditions in seventeenth-century France are described in Briggs, Early Modern France, 35-61; John Lough, An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century France, 1-59; Pierre Goubert, “The French Peasantry of the Seventeenth Century: A Regional Example,” in Trevor Aston, Crisis in Europe: 1560-1660 (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 141-65; and Robert Jutte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 21-82.

15 Quoted in Lough, Introduction to Seventeenth-Century France, 19.

16 Rapley, Dévotes, 79.

17 A well-known example of Tridentine spirituality is the Society of Jesus, founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola and approved by the pope in 1540. The Jesuits were “completely focused on the thought of greater service to God, to Christ, to His Church and to the souls He redeemed.” Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice: A Historical Study, trans. William J. Young, ed. George E. Ganss (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1964), 73.

18 Briggs, Early Modern France, 168. France had 120 bishoprics and almost 30,000 parishes with cures, along with a great number of vicars and unattached priests.

19 H. Outram Evennett, The Spirit of Counter-Reformation, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1968), 72-76; Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tension in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 364-80; Henry Kamen, The Iron Century: Social Change in Europe, 1550-1660 (New York: Praeger, 1971), 231-39.

20 Taylor, “From Proselytizing to Social Reform,” 102.

21 The dévots were pious laymen or laywomen (dévotes) and in the early seventeenth century also a religious party who represented the “Catholic” interest in politics in contrast to the more pragmatic policies of the king and his ministers. After losing influence at court in the 1630s they became critics of society and began attacking libertines, atheists, and actors and many aspects of popular culture. Aristocratic and influential, they were disliked by many for their excessive religiosity and ridiculed by Molière in Tartuffe (Rapley, Dévotes, 75).

22 The Ursulines were founded in Italy in 1535 by Angela Merici to educate young women. They took no vows, lived at home, and were originally not intended to be a religious order. After Angela’s death, changes occurred, and by 1582 they were living in community as a religious congregation. In 1612, a bull of Paul V added cloister and solemn vows.

23 Rapley, Dévotes, 51.

24 Ibid., 34-41, 48-60; Ranft, Women and the Religious Life, 101-6, 14-17.

25 Rapley, Dévotes, 39, 58-59, and 107.

26 Taylor, “From Proselytizing to Social Reform,” 216.

27 Since men also wanted to participate, de Paul experimented with a “mixed” confraternity but had to give it up. He explained that the men wanted to control all aspects of administration but “the women will not tolerate it” (Taylor, “From Proselytizing to Social Reform,” 225).

28 Rapley, Dévotes, 85-86.

29 Ibid., 93.

30 Taylor, “From Proselytizing to Social Reform,” 192-93, 197-98.

31 A typical example is the community of Filles de Sainte-Geneviève, founded in Paris in 1636 by Mademoiselle Blosset after ill health forced her to give up the life of a cloistered nun. She began a school for young girls that soon had 300 pupils receiving instruction from her community of schoolmistresses (Rapley, Dévotes, 96).

32 Emmanuel S. Chill, “Religion and Mendicity in Seventeenth-Century France,” International Review of Social History 7 (1962): 413; Rapley, Dévotes, 78; Kamen, Iron Century, 408.

33 Taylor, “From Proselytizing to Social Reform,” 706-26.

34 The date of the first CSJ foundation cannot be established with certainty. Sources mention a foundation made in Dunières in 1649 and indicate that another existed before 1647. Much information about pre-revolutionary religious communities has been lost, since all of them were suppressed during the Revolution, their property confiscated, and many of their records destroyed. In many cases only partial histories can be pieced together from scattered and fragmentary surviving records. See Rapley, Dévotes, 247-54.

35 Patricia Byrne, “French Roots of a Women’s Movement: Sisters of St. Joseph, 1650-1836” (Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 1985), 107-8, 7-38. In early modern France the term “hospital” referred to multipurpose institutions that cared for the sick, the indigent elderly and infirm, orphans, abandoned children, and various other groups, and sometimes distributed home relief. “General hospitals” were a new type of penal institution created in the seventeenth century to incarcerate the poor and discipline them through work. “Hôtels-Dieu” were primarily engaged in care of the sick, but they usually received foundlings also. For information on strategies hospitals used to manage the problems of poverty see Muriel Joerger, “The Structure of the Hospital System in France in the Ancien Régime,” in Medicine and Society in France, Selections from the Annales, vol. 6, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 104-36; Colin Jones, The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Régime and Bevolutionary France (New York: Routledge, 1989), 174-76; Chill, “Religion and Mendicity,” 400-425; Hufton, Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 133-76; and Jutte, Poverty and Deviance, 136-37, 75-77.

36 Byrne, “French Roots,” 37-41. The anonymous “grouping of women” could have been the early community at Le Puy, but verification for this is lacking. Marius Nepper, who researched the life of Médaille and the origins of the CSJ community, believes that the first foundation was in Saint-Flour, but Marguerite Vacher questions this. See Nepper, Origins: The Sisters of Saint Joseph, trans. Research Team of the Federation of the Sisters of St. Joseph, U.S.A. (Erie, Pa.: Sisters of St. Joseph, 1975), 16, and Vacher, Des “régulières” dans le siècle: Les soeurs de Saint-Joseph du Père Médaille aux XXVII et XXVIII siècles (Clermont-Ferrand: Adosa, 1991), 45.

37 Missionaries usually preached and evangelized among “heathens” in distant lands, but home missions began in seventeenth-century France after the clergy discovered large numbers of peasants, adults and children, who knew virtually nothing of their religion and had never received the sacraments. Vincent de Paul’s Congregation of the Mission was founded in 1625 to meet this need, and other orders also were involved, including the Jesuits. Rapley defines a home mission as “an organized descent by a group of preachers upon a community, a period of intensive exhortation and instruction which ended only when everybody had received the sacrament of penance” (Dévotes, 80).

38 Byrne, “French Roots,” 40; Ignatius of Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. George E. Ganss (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), 262-63.

39 Nepper, Origins, 8. The necrology was a compilation of brief biographies of deceased members of the Jesuit order. Jesuits usually maintained their distance from communities of active women religious. The precedent was set by St. Ignatius himself in connection with a Jesuit benefactor who obtained papal approval to found an order of women as a female version of the Jesuits. Ignatius believed the need to supervise the order’s affairs was distracting him from more “important” duties, and he successfully petitioned the pope to suppress the enterprise and forbid similar efforts in the future. The Jesuits were equally hostile when Mary Ward, who founded the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1609, modeled her order after them. See Weisner, Women and Gender, 196-98. McNamara comments that while the Jesuits consistently rejected partnership with virtuous women, they took a special interest in the conversion of fallen women (Sisters in Arms, 468). For an account of St. Ignatius’s dealings with women see Hugo Rahner, St. Ignatius Loyola: Letters to Women (New York: Herder and Herder, 1960).

40 Ranft, Women and the Religious Life, 114-20; Rapley, Dévotes, 50, 61, and 84.

41 Byrne, “French Roots,” 39, 108.

42 Ibid., 109-10; Vacher, “Régulières,” 56-57.

43 The four basic texts written by Médaille for the early Sisters of St. Joseph were the Règlements, probably the earliest rule; the Constitutions, a later, more developed rule outlining the purpose, activities, community life, government, and devotions of the congregation, which, with relatively minor revisions, became and remained the basic guide for the Carondelet CSJs until the early twentieth century; the Eucharistic Letter, an exposition of the spiritual ideals proposed for the early sisters; and the Maxims of Perfection, a series of 100 short maxims that briefly summarized Médaille’s basic spiritual advice for the CSJs.

44 Evennett, Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 40.

45 Nepper, Origins, 74.

46 Jean-Pierre Médaille, Constitutions for the Little Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph, trans. Research Team of the U.S.A. Federation of the Sisters of St. Joseph (Erie, Pa.: Sisters of St. Joseph, 1969), 12, 34, and 64, in ACSJC-G.

47 Jean-Pierre Médaille, The Little Design, the Règlements, the Eucharistic Letter, trans. Research Team of the U.S.A. Federation of the Sisters of St. Joseph (Erie, Pa.: Sisters of St. Joseph, 1973), 5-6, in ACSJC-G.

48 Nepper, Origins, 58.

49 Ibid., 86-87.

50 Médaille, Eucharistic Letter, 3 0.

51 Taylor, “From Proselytizing to Social Reform,” 344-45.

52 Byrne, “French Roots, 38-39; Vacher,” “Régulières,” 57-58.

53 Briggs, Early Modern France, 168. In seventeenth-century France the king had the right to nominate bishops, and his choices were usually accepted by the pope.

54 Vacher, “Régulières,” 55.

55 Rapley, Dévotes, 115.

56 Byrne, “French Roots,” 111-12.

57 Vacher, “Régulières,” Annexe 5.

58 According to Byrne, dowries typically ranged between 300 and 500 livres in the Lyons and Le Puy dioceses in the seventeenth century but increased to about 1,800 livres at Le Puy by the late eighteenth century. This supports Vacher’s comment that the sisters’ social level seemed to rise in the course of the eighteenth century. It did not approach that of the aristocratic women who entered traditional cloistered orders, where dowries of 7,500 to 8,000 livres were usual. Byrne, “French Roots,” 285-86; Vacher, “Régulières,” 321.

59 Intensified religious persecution under Louis XIV, culminating in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, meant that after that year French Protestants had to choose either conversion or emigration if they wished to avoid severe penalties.

60 Information about the CSJs’ work in institutions and parishes and their working and living conditions is from Vacher and Byrne unless otherwise noted.

61 Byrne says the Le Puy community reported 2,896 livres in revenue and 5,100 in expenses in 1787 (“French Roots,” 281).

62 Byrne, “French Roots,” 114.

63 Hufton, Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 151, 154.

64 Byrne, “French Roots,” 134.

65 Details about Mother Jeanne Burdier’s accomplishments as superior and later developments in Vienne are from Vacher, 213-51.

66 Byrne, “French Roots,” 131-33. Byrne’s account of the legal battle in Sauxillanges is based on an article by A. Achard in the Revue d‘Auvergne (1904). Records of the sisters’ response to Arnauld’s allegations may not have been available to Achard since Byrne does not include this information.

67 Letters patent gave a religious community or institution the status of a legal corporation with rights to control property and act in legal matters. The crown’s policy in granting them was vague, and few pre-Revolutionary CSJ communities managed to obtain them. Taylor, “From Proselytizing to Social Reform,” 397; Byrne, “French Roots,” 276.

68 Rapley, Dévotes, 176.

69 Médaille, Constitutions, 10.

70 Quoted in Rapley, Dévotes, 169.

71 The discussion of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century girls’ education in France is based on Rapley, Dévotes, 142-66, and Martine Sonnet, “A Daughter to Educate,” in A History of Women in the West, vol. 3, Renaissance and Enligbtenment Paradoxes, ed. Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 101-16.

72 Vacher, “Régulières”; Byrne, “French Roots.”

73 The revocation of the Edict of Nantes required Protestant schools in France to close, and subsequent royal edicts made elementary education, including religious instruction, compulsory (theoretically) for all children, in effect forcing Catholic education on the nominal converts (Briggs, Communities of Belief, 200).

74 Rapley, Dévotes, 157.

75 Sonnet, “Daughter to Educate,” 117-21.

76 Ibid., 114; Vacher, “Régulières,” 326.

77 Kathryn Norberg, “Prostitutes,” in Davis and Farge, A History of Women in the West, 3:460-65; Weisner, Women and Gender, 101; Wilma Pugh, “Social Welfare and the Edict of Nantes: Lyon and Nîmes,” French Historical Studies 8 (1974): 369-72.

78 Médaille, Constitutions, 11, 30.

79 Vacher, “Régulières,” 254-59. “Penitent” was the term commonly used for repentant prostitutes but also for unwed mothers or girls who had been seduced, even if they had no responsibility for what had happened to them. In general, “penitent” referred to women who had lost respectability but were not considered incorrigible.

80 Ibid., 322-34.

81 Quoted in Byrne, “French Roots,” 119, 126.

82 For the origins of the Revolution see Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, trans. R. R. Palmer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), and William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). For later developments and the Napoleonic period see Norman Hampson, The Terror in the French Revolution (London: Historical Association of Great Britain, 1981); J. McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (London: S.P.C.K. for the Church Historical Society, 1969); F. Markham, Napoleon (New York: New American Library, 1963); and P. Geyl, Napoleon For and Against (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).

83 Byrne, “French Roots,” 161.

84 Ibid., 163.

85 The CSJs executed during the Terror were Marie-Anne Garnier and JeanneMarie Aubert (possibly the former Sister Saint-Alexis), who were guillotined with two other women, a layman, and a priest at Le Puy; and Antoinette Vincent, Marie-Anne Sénovert, and Madeleine Dumoulin, guillotined with four priests at Privas. Ironically, the victims at Privas were executed shortly after the fall of Robespierre, when the Terror was almost at an end.

86 Byrne, “French Roots,” 186, 201.

87 The French census of 1808 reports a total of 439 sisters of St. Joseph in 66 houses in the dioceses of Clermont, Lyons, and Le Puy. Of these, 261 sisters and 39 houses were in Lyons. The number of sisters in 1836 is not available, but by that time there were 105 houses in the Lyons diocese (ibid., 202, 210).

88 Félicité de Duras to Bishop Rosati, Chambery, June 10, 1835, copy and translation in ACSJC-SLP; original in AASL.

89 Records of the Lyons motherhouse show that the number of novices received from 1832 to 1836 was 354 (Byrne, “French Roots,” 321).

1 Memoirs of Sr. St. Protais Deboille, ACSJC-SLP. Sr. St. Protais was the only member of the original six who recorded her experiences and thoughts about the journey and early days of the community. She handwrote this memoir (around 1890) in her somewhat “broken” English. She died in 1892 at the age of seventy-eight.

2 Mary Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 7. Her book and subsequent work provide some of the earliest scholarship on nineteenth-century American nuns. Canon law is the official body of laws that govern the Roman Catholic Church. Richard P. McBrien, ed., The Encyclopedia of Catholicism (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995), 219-20.

3 Catholic population data is difficult to assess, particularly prior to the Civil War. Gerald Shaughnessy, Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith? A Study of Immigration and Catholic Growth in the United States, 1790-1920 (New York: Macmillan, 192 5),134,145, estimates the Catholic population at 660,000 (1840), 1.6 million (1850), and 3.1 million (1860). For additional information including regional maps displaying concentrations of Catholic populations see Edwin Scott Gaustad, Histarical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 103-12.

4 Cited in Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Rinehart, 1938; rcprint, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 5 3. Billington’s book is still considered one of the best descriptions of the anti-Catholic mood prevalent in antebellum America. For more recent discussion on the anti-Catholic climate of the early nineteenth century see Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Franchot analyzes “the discourse through which antebellum writers of popular and elite fictional and historical texts indirectly voiced the tensions and limitations of mainstream Protestant culture.” See also Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1985), 201-3, 295.

5 Nikola Baumgarten, “Education and Democracy in Frontier St. Louis: The Society of the Sacred Heart,” History of Education Quarterly 34, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 171-92. William B. Faherty, Dream by the River: Two Centuries of Saint Louis Catholicism, 1766-1980, rev. ed. (St. Louis: River City Pub., 1981), 44-48, 76; and “Nativism and Midwestern Education: The Experience of St. Louis University, 1832-1856,” History of Education Quarterly 8 (Winter 1968): 447-58. See also an early history of the St. Louis diocese by John Rothensteiner, History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, 2 vols. (St. Louis: Blackwell Wielandy Co., 1928). The violence against CSJs that took place in 1846 probably resulted from a combination of racism and anti-Catholic sentiments; it will be described later in this chapter.

6 Gaustad, HistoricalAtlas, 108. Although activities, membership, and length and region of influence varied, the beginning dates for these groups are as follows: American Protestant Association (1842), the Know-Nothing Party (1854), the Ku Klux Klan (1865; 1915), and the American Protective Association (1887).

7 Memoirs of Sr. St. Protais Deboille, 11. The CSJs continued to deal with anti-Catholic sentiment throughout the nineteenth century, and all the CSJ archives contain many examples, some of which will be integrated throughout this book. For more examples of anti-Catholic sentiments experienced by the CSJs and other religious orders of women see Mary Ewens, Role of the Nun, 70-73, 120, and “The Leadership of Nuns in Immigrant Catholicism, in” Women and Beligion in America, vol. 1, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 101-4; Karen J. Kennelly, “Ideals of American Catholic Womanhood,” in American Catholic Women: An Historical Exploration, ed. Karen J. Kennelly (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 2; and Patricia Byrne, “Sisters of St. Joseph: The Americanization of a French Tradition,” U.S. Catholic Historian (Summer/Fall 1986): 262.

8 For a description of this event see Jeanne Hamilton, “The Nunnery As Menace: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834,” U.S. Catholic Historian 14, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 35-65. This was a shocking incident for many reasons. The sisters and student boarders barely escaped with their lives, and the mob spent hours defacing the structure, desecrating the cemetery, opening sisters’ coffins, and pulling teeth from corpses. Local police and firefighters stood and watched while the convent was torched. Many of these “exposé” books were written by men; some were later recanted by the authors as fictitious. For example see Maria Monk, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (New York: D. M. Bennett, 18 3 6), and Theodore Dwight, Open Convents (New York: Van Nostrand and Dwight, 1836). Rebecca Reed, the woman who has often been cited as inciting rancor for the burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, wrote Six Months in a Convent (Boston: Russell, Odiorne and Metcalf, 1835). This spate of “exposés” about convents continued into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Edith O’Gorman, Trials and Persecutions of Miss Edith O‘Gorman (Hartford: Connecticut Pub., 1881), and Fred Hendrickson, The “Black Convent” Slave or Nunnery Life Unveiled (Toledo: Protestant Missionary Publishing, 1914).

9 Ann Braude, “Women’s History Is American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religions History, ed. Thomas A. Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 105-6.

10 Mary Lucida Savage, The Congregation of St. Joseph of Carondelet: A Brief Account of Its Origin and Its Work in the United States, 1650-1922 (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1923), 36-37. Rothensteiner, History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, 1:300, 314, 447, 626, 634. St. Louis’s population grew rapidly between 1830 and 1840 from 5,000 (whites) to over 14,000, and Bishop Rosati sought additional sisters to support the growing Catholic population. U.S. Bureau of Census, Fifth Census of the United States and Sixth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C., U.S. Census Bureau, 1830 and 1840).

11 Memoirs of Sr. St. Protais Deboille, 13-23. The following narrative information and all quoted material about arrivals at Cahokia and Carondelet are taken from Sr. Protais’s memoirs. Although she was with the original three sent to Cahokia, she became ill and was sent to Carondelet to recover. This placed her in the position of being present in the earliest time periods at both missions. The material on the early foundations has been further researched and elaborated by Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 27-50, and Dolorita Maria Dougherty et al., eds., Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1966), 51-64.

12 Cahokia, Illinois, was located on the “bottoms” of the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, and serious epidemics and floods continually plagued the village. In 1844, a major flood destroyed the sisters’ convent and school and almost cost them their lives. They were rescued by boat from their second-story windows. Ill and discouraged, the CSJs did not return to Cahokia until 1848; they closed the school permanently in 1855 when once again floodwaters threatened their lives (1851) and after two cholera epidemics (1849, 1851) killed thousands, including three CSJs who were nursing the sick.

13 Although government payment for services was the exception rather than the rule, the CSJs and other religious communities did secure state monies for short periods of time. The CSJ school for the deaf in St. Louis received monies from the legislature between 1839 and 1847. Bishop Rosati’s political connections helped secure state money since the CSJ school was the only school for the deaf in the state. Locally, the city paid the sisters temporarily to educate girls between six and eighteen years of age. Dougherty et al., Sisters of St. Joseph, 67. Later, the CSJs also received some government monies for schools on Indian reservations. These contracts and subsidy arrangements occurred more in the nineteenth century than the twentieth century because local, state, or federal officials desperately needed the sisters’ services, particularly in isolated settings.

14 Ewens, Role of the Nun, 65-69. Although the CSJs did not use slave labor, Ewens states that many religious communities did, and no communities that used slaves failed to survive in the American milieu. The eight communities that used slaves were the Sisters of Charity, Carmelites, Sisters of Loretto, Visitandines, Nazareth Sisters of Charity, Dominicans, Religious of the Sacred Heart, and New Orleans’s Ursulines.

15 Memoirs of Sr. St. Protais Deboille, 25; Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 46-47.

16 The term “Mother” is used instead of “Sister” when the individual serves as the superior or leader at a mission site or local community.

17 Memoirs of Sr. St. Protais Deboille, 26-28.

18 “Copy of a Letter from Mother St. John Fournier to the Superior General of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Lyons, 1873,” cited in Maria Kostka Logue, Sisters of St. Joseph of Philadelphia: A Century of Growth and Development, 1847-1947 (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1950), 327-52. Mother St. John, who later became the superior of the Philadelphia community, described her voyage with Sr. Celestine Pommerel. Held in Havana because of the outbreak of yellow fever in New Orleans, the sisters did not arrive in St. Louis when expected. Bishop Rosati became concerned and feared they were lost at sea. When they arrived weeks late and in secular dress Rosati had them demonstrate their ability to communicate in sign language before he was convinced they were indeed his long-awaited nuns. Teasing them, the bishop “scolded” them by saying he had believed they had run away with the 400 soldiers who were also on the ship.

19 This was more than a clash of male egos. In Europe it was customary for communities to be assigned a specific cleric as “spiritual father” who advised the sisters. In the United States, the shortage of priests did not always make this possible, so the practice was often ignored or the local parish priest served in this capacity. Father Saulnier regarded the sisters as “his community” since they resided in his parish, and he felt Father Fontbonne was usurping his authority with the sisters (Dougherty et al., Sisters of St. Joseph, 68).

20 Letter from Fr. Edmund Saulnier to Bishop Rosati, October 5, 1837. Between October 1837 and December 1838, Saulnier wrote the bishop nine letters concerning the CSJs and his concerns about Fontbonne (copies of Eng. trans. ACSJC-SLP; originals in AASL).

21 Letters from Fr. Saulnier to Bishop Rosati, November 24 and 27, 1837.

22 Letter from Fr. Fontbonne to Bishop Rosati, May 26, 1837 (copy of Eng. trans. ACSJC-SLP; original in AASL).

23 Bishop Rosati’s appointment of Sr. Delphine to head the Carondelet group was surprising. At twenty-three, she was the second youngest member of the original six from Lyons. He may have done this out of respect for her aunt, Mother St. John Fontbonne, who allowed the group to come to St. Louis, or it is quite possible that he might have relied on Fr. Fontbonne, who came with the sisters, to make the decision. Based on Fontbonne’s affection for his younger sister and his own desire for influence, Sr. Delphine certainly would have been his first choice.

24 Letter from Sr. Mary Joseph Dillon to Bishop Rosati, March 22, 1838, copy in ACSJC-SLP; original in AASL. Unfortunately, her physical problems continued; in 1842 she died of consumption.

25 Letter from Sr. St. John Fournier to Bishop Rosati, November 24, 1837, and (n.d.), 1838 (copy in ACSJC-SLP; original in AASL).

26 The importance of these actions cannot be overemphasized in regard to CSJ survival. The coalition of Srs. Celestine Pommerel, St. John Fournier, and Mary Joseph Dillon proved to be an important one. Highly respected, Pommerel became superior and led the CSJs for eighteen years. Fournier eventually founded the Philadelphia community, and Dillon remained the only American-born novice and native English-speaker until 1841 (CSJ Profession Book, ACSJC-G).

27 Not wanting to miss an opportunity to blast his nemesis, Fr. Fontbonne, Saulnier, after lambasting Mother Delphine, added, “She has the same character as her brother (rustic).” Letter from Fr. Saulnier to Bishop Rosati, February 9, 1838.

28 Although her early youthful struggles as superior were traumatic, Mother Delphine Fontbonne continued with the American CSJs and, after spending one year in the CSJ Philadelphia community, was missioned in 1851 as the first CSJ superior in their newly established mission in Toronto, Canada. She led this community until her death in 1856 at age forty-two. Her sister, Febronie Fontbonne, continued in poor health after her dramatic rescue in the woods and later in the 1844 flood at Cahokia. Subsequent illness forced her to return with Sr. Febronie Chapellon, another of the original six sisters, to France in 1844, where she lived and worked until her death in 1881 at the age of seventy-five.

29 CSJ Profession Book; Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 55-56.

30 This bill was adopted February 8, 1839; cited in Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 52. It was not repealed until 1847, when the legislature finally provided money for a state institute.

31 “Minutes of the Board of Trustees,” April 23, 1839, cited in Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 53. See also, “Copy of a Letter from Mother St. John Fournier,” 329. Fournier stated that although it was short on cash “the city paid us every year in land.” The city hired a male teacher for the boys of the village.

32 The Mullanphy family were early donors to Catholic charities in St. Louis. Cotton merchant and realtor John Mullanphy contributed land for a hospital for the poor, regardless of their “color, country or religion,” and gave a house to the Sacred Heart Sisters for the first girls’ school in St. Louis. In 1850, the Sisters of Charity opened a facility for elderly women and orphans in a building bequeathed by the Mullanphy family. See Mary J. Oates, The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1995), 10, 30.

33 Memoirs of Eliza McKenney Brouillet, 1890-91, ACSJC-SLP. See also Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 56-60.

34 “Statistics of Carondelet School and St. Joseph’s Academy,” ACSJC-SLP.

35 Memoirs of Eliza McKenney Brouillet. Information about St. Joseph’s Academy has been taken from Brouillet’s memoirs unless noted otherwise.

36 Ewens, Role of the Nun, 67-69; Baumgarten, “Education and Democracy,” 173; Maureen Fitzgerald, ”Irish-Catholic Nuns and the Development of New York City’s Welfare System, 1840-1900” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1992), 234. Academies and parish schools will be discussed extensively in Chapters 5 and 6.

37 Ewens, Role of the Nun, 69.

38 Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 66.

39 CSJ Profession Book. This ledger includes demographic data on name, birthplace, residence before entrance, entrance date, province, reception date, profession date, and date of death for all sisters who took final vows in the community. This does not include data on any women who left the community during the postulant or novice stage.

40 Memoirs of Sr. St. Protais Deboille, 29; “Copy of a Letter from Mother St. John Fournier,” 332-33. Mother St. John and Sr. Protais were both assigned to the school, so their memoirs were based on firsthand information. The CSJs were not the only group of nuns to battle with locals over education for blacks prior to the Civil War. See Baumgarten, “Education and Democracy,” 176-77.

41 This undated and unsigned quote is from a longer essay recorded in the “Community Annals” and cited in Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 64.

42 “Copy of a Letter from Mother St. John Fournier,” 333. “Extract from the Records of St. Louis Diocese,” Book 1:221, copy ACSJC-SLP, original AASL. The CSJs had to take this threat very seriously and probably understood that not only racism but also anti-Catholic bigotry was involved. Only one year earlier, anti-Catholic sentiments had surfaced in St. Louis when the Jesuit St. Louis University Medical School had been harassed by a mob who threatened to burn the school to the ground. See Faherty, “Nativism and Midwestern Education,” 447-58. In 1847 the state of Missouri passed a law prohibiting the education of slaves.

43 In St. Louis and later in Philadelphia, the CSJs took over the institution from the Sisters of Charity, who withdrew from the male orphanage upon their affiliation with the French Daughters of Charity, whose constitution banned working with male orphans. See Byrne, “Sisters of St. Joseph,” 254. Byrne goes on to explain that the problem often was not with the women’s communities but with European-born, male clerics who did not think it was proper for nuns to work with male children, particularly adolescent boys. For a discussion on the Sisters of Charity and their battle with Archbishop John Hughes on this issue see Fitzgerald, “Irish-Catholic Nuns,” 250-53.

44 This was St. Joseph’s Hospital in Philadelphia. Although the CSJs maintained it for only ten years, it was an important step in furthering the CSJ mission in America. For a detailed description of the facility and its history see Logue, Sisters of St. Joseph, 49-56.

45 CSJ Profession Book. This number is approximate because although the profession book shows that 149 women had been professed by 1857, there had been a few deaths and any novices who left before profession would not be counted in this tally.

46 CSJ Constitution (1847), 9-11, ACSJC-SPP. The 1847 constitution was the first English translation of the French constitution that the sisters brought with them. The French version is thought to date back to the late seventeenth century. Joseph Rosati died in 1843, and Peter Richard Kenrick succeeded him. In 1847 St. Louis became an archdiocese and Bishop Kenrick then became Archbishop Kenrick.

47 Memoirs of Sr. Febronie Boyer, ACSJC-SLP. Like Sr. Protais’s memoirs, these are handwritten notes, undated but probably written around 1890, when Sr. Monica Corrigan was attempting to acquire information for a community history.

48 Ibid.

49 Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 112-14. Savage’s book, published in 1923, is both a primary and a secondary source. Sr. Lucida Savage entered the community in 1887 and knew Mother St. John Facemaz and many of the earliest sisters, and she was an eyewitness to many events in the late nineteenth century. With a Ph.D. in history, she was able to write an objective, well-documented history incorporating her firsthand experiences with the people and events that took place in the community.

50 Ibid., 113-14.

51 Byrne, “Sisters of St. Joseph,” 255-57. Byrne states and we would agree that there seems to be little written documentation in either the archives in St. Louis or Lyons on how this “mutual agreement” was achieved. Savage (108) cites correspondence from Fr. S. Auguste Paris to Mother Celestine Pommerel dating from 1856 that indicates discussions had already begun between the American and French communities.

52 The section of the CSJ Constitution (1860), 24-25, did in fact give Archbishop Kenrick superior powers over CSJ houses in other dioceses. In 1863 Rome changed this clause, limiting Kenrick’s power (“Observations of Cardinal Quaglia on the Constitutions,” as cited in Byrne, “Sisters of St. Joseph,” 257).

53 Margaret Susan Thompson, “To Serve the People of God: Nineteenth-Century Sisters and the Creation of a Religious Life,” Working Paper Series, Cushwa Center, University of Notre Dame, ser. 18, no. 2, Spring 1987, 9. In studying nineteenth-century communities, Mary Ewens concurs with Thompson’s assessment. “When given a free hand, bishops and other [male] directors ... could work havoc in communities under their control” (Role of the Nun, 286).

54 For brief discussions of bishops’ reactions to general government see the following histories of CSJ communities in Philadelphia, Wheeling, and Buffalo, where they became diocesan: Logue, sisters of St. Joseph, 172-73; Rose Anita Kelly, Song of the Hills: The Story of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Wheeling (Wheeling, W.Va.: Mt. St. Joseph, 1962), 203-5; and M. Dunne, The Congregation of St. Joseph of the Diocese of Buffalo, 1854-1933 (Buffalo: Holling Press, 1934), 87-88. These histories provide very little information on the difficult times before and after separation from St. Louis.

55 Letter from Mother St. John Facemaz to Cardinal Quaglia, 1869, ACSJC-SLP.

56 This quote is attributed to Mother de Chantal Keating, who came from the CSJ community in Flushing, N.Y, in 1864 to lead the fledgling community in Wheeling. Byrne, “Sisters of St. Joseph,” 258; Kelly, Song of the Hills, 211-12.

57 According to all CSJ historians, Sr. St. John Fournier and Mother Celestine were very close. Fournier had been raised as a “foster child” in Celestine’s home. Fournier continued to correspond with the Pommerel family and they with her for years after Celestine’s death. One author wrote that Fournier’s years “without her counselor and friend, loomed lonely and difficult.” Logue, Sisters of St. Joseph, 83-84. Lists of Philadelphia CSJ institutions are found in ibid., 321-25.

58 Memoirs of Sr. Ignatius Loyola Cox, as cited in Genevieve Schillo, “Dynamics for Change: Papal Approval for General Government in the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, 1836-1877” (unpublished manuscript, ACSJC-SPP). Schillo has spent years attempting to unravel the complex interactions involved in the formation of CSJ general government. We are grateful for her continuing work on this topic and her recent paper, “Yes or No: General Government in Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet and Related Daughter/Mother Houses (1836-1877),” presented at the History of Women Religious Conference at Loyola University June 1998. Mother Seraphine died soon after general government was created. Bishop Grace continued to struggle with general government and his loss of direct control over the CSJs. The 1860s continued to be a time of turmoil for the St. Paul community, but they remained under the new constitution and did not become diocesan.

59 Byrne, “Sisters of St. Joseph,” 264-66.

60 Letter to Mother Agnes Gonzaga Ryan from Sr. M. Irene, St. Joseph’s Convent, Toronto, March 13, 1913, ACSJC-SLP.

61 Examples of the struggles between American bishops and women religious fill the convent archives of every congregation. The battle for autonomy in a sexist and hierarchical setting took energy, perseverance, and constant effort on the part of the sisters. Margaret Susan Thompson’s work on nineteenth-century American sisterhoods provides extensive examples. See her “To Serve the People” and “Women, Feminism, and the New Religious History: Catholic Sisters As a Case Study,” in Belief and Behavior: Essays in the New Religious History, ed. Philip R. Vandermeer and Robert P. Swerienga (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 136-63. For other examples from a variety of community archives see George C. Stewart, Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 1994).

62 “Notes of Sr. Monica Corrigan from Sr. de Chantal Martin taken July 23, 1890, Nazareth Convent, St. Louis,” ACSJC-SLP. Sr. de Chantal was a young nun who was one of Mother St. John Facemaz’s companions during her first visit to Rome.

63 The “Decree of Commendation” is dated September 1863 and signed by Cardinal Quaglia (original Latin decree at ACSJC-SLP); English translation appears in Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 119-20. Letters in support of the CSJs’ constitution and general government were sent to Rome between 1861 and 1877, when final approbation was given. These letters came from bishops in St. Paul; Albany; Alton, Ill.; Dubuque, Iowa; Nashville, Tenn.; Marquette, Mich.; Natchez, Miss.; St. Joseph, Mo.; Tucson; and Chicago. Archbishop Kenrick of St. Louis wrote numerous letters to the Vatican in support of the CSJ constitution, and his support was invaluable to the sisters.

64 CSJ Profession Book; Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 160-61.

65 The CSJs received final approbation on May 16, 1877. For a brief history on formation of general government and events leading up to final approbation see Emily Joseph Daly, “History of the Generalate,” in Dougherty et al., Sisters of St. Joseph, 363-84, and Schillo, “Dynamics for Change.”

66 This story and quotes are cited in Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 130-31. The trip to Mississippi in 1855 had been by stage, and the sisters and the priest traveling with them were accosted by a male passenger who verbally harassed and spit tobacco juice on them. According to the sisters, when the coach stopped to change horses the priest threw the man out of the coach and he rode the rest of the way with the driver. Later in the trip, in Mississippi, the sisters boarded one evening with a Catholic judge who “expressed fear of being mobbed if he were known to harbor nuns” (Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 104-5).

67 Ibid., 133-35. Demographic information about Sr. Winifred Sullivan found in CSJ Profession Book.

68 Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 133.

69 Ewens, Role of the Nun, 208; Mary Denis Maher, To Bind up the Wounds: Catholic Sister Nurses in the U.S. Civil War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989), 27-43. This book is extremely well documented and is probably the best source on Catholic sisters’ nursing activities before and during the Civil War. See also Ursula Stepsis and Dolores Liptak, eds. Pioneer Healers: The History of Women Religious in American Health Care (New York: Crossroad, 1989). An older, less scholarly but interesting source is Ellen Ryan Jolly, Nuns on the Battlefield, 4th ed. (Providence, R.I.: Providence Visitor Press, 1930). Information on which orders provided nurses can be confusing because local newspaper reports and government documents typically listed all nursing nuns as Sisters of Charity or as Sisters of Mercy.

70 The CSJs in Philadelphia worked on hospital ships, and the CSJs in Wheeling had a military hospital. We will discuss the CSJs’ contribution to nursing in Chapter 7. For discussions on Protestant attitudes and CSJs’ interactions with soldiers and army doctors see Christopher J. Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning: A Religious History of Catholic Health Care in the United States (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 82-95; Carr Elizabeth Worland, ”American Catholic Women and the Church to 1920” (Ph.D. diss., St. Louis University, 1982), 72-75; Maher, To Bind up the Wounds, 125-54; and Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 143 -48.

71 This information is taken from a speech given by Ambrose Kennedy (R.I.) in the House of Representatives, March 18, 1918, cited in Jolly, Nuns on the Battlefield, 172-73. For more information about Mother de Chantal Keating and the CSJ nursing sisters in Wheeling see Kelly, Song of the Hills, 213-22.

72 CSJ Profession Book; “General Chapter Report, 1869,” ACSJC-G. Dolorita Maria Dougherty, “Chronological List of Establishments,” in Dougherty et al., Sisters of St. Joseph, 427-28.

73 CSJ Profession Book; Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 154-59.

74 Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 157. Savage had an opportunity to live and work around Mother Agatha for seventeen years before her death, so it is quite likely that Savage heard these sayings and stories herself.

1 CSJ Constitution (1860), 1, and (1884), 1, 12, ACSJC-SLP.

2 Most communities that came from Europe to the United States were active or apostolic. The term “apostolate” means “the saving mission of Christ in the world and the participation of Christian faithful in that mission.” A smaller number of European religious orders that came to the United States were “contemplative” and followed a life of “solitude and prayer.” Richard P. McBrien, ed., The Encyclopedia of Catholicism (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995), 76, 264. For contemplative orders to survive in America they had to provide “services” for the vast numbers of Catholic immigrants that flocked into the country in the nineteenth century. Contemplative orders such as the Carmelites and Benedictines had to begin or expand their teaching endeavor to survive financially and also to pacify American bishops who needed their services. See Mary Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 34. See also Charles Warren Currier, Carmel in America: A Centennial History of the Discalced Carmelites in the United States (Darien, Ill.: Carmelite Press, 1989), and Ephrem Hollerman, The Reshaping of a Tradition: American Benedictine Women, 1852-1881 (St. Joseph, Minn.: Benedictine Press, 1994).

3 CSJ Profession Book, ACSJC-G.

4 Memoirs of Srs. Grace Aurelia Flanagan (entered 1916) and Mary Guadalupe Apodaca (entered 1917) in Jubilarse, ed. Margaret John Purcell (St. Louis: Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, 1981), 147, 89.

5 Memoirs of Sr. Mary Charitina Flynn (entered 1900) in Purcell, Jubilarse, 1. According to the written memoirs and oral interviews available, this type of mystical or spiritual experience was not unusual for some sisters. These kinds of experiences, particularly for women, have been a part of most religious traditions across cultures. For examples of the multicultural experiences of American women see Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, eds., In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women’s Religious Writing (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995).

6 M. Anselm O’Brien (with Anna Marie Dickens), ... The Likes of Kitty O‘Brien (Florissant, Mo.: Huntington Press, 1977), 25. O’Brien entered the CSJs in 1915.

7 Maureen Fitzgerald, “Irish-Catholic Nuns and the Development of New York City’s Welfare System, 1840-1900” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1992), 226.

8 For examples from the Middle Ages to modern times see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the MiddleAges to 1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993),46-115, and Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). For examples from a variety of religious traditions in the United States see Betty DeBerg, UnGodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Bighteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin, eds., Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); and Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, eds., Woman and Religion in America, 3 vols. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981, 1983, 1986), and In Our Own Voices.

9 Marta Danylewycz, Taking the Veil: An Alternative to Marriage, Motherhood, and Spinsterhood in Quebec, 1840-1920 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987), 96; Margaret Susan Thompson, “Discovering Foremothers: Sisters, Society, and the American Catholic Experience,” in The American Catholic Religious Life, ed. Joseph M. White (New York: Garland Press, 1988), 275; Mary Ewens, “The Leadership of Nuns in Immigrant Catholicism,” in Ruether and Keller, Women and Religion, 1:101-4; Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Timer to the Present (Garden City, N.Y: Image Books, 1985), 290.

10 Ewens, “Leadership of Nuns,” 107.

11 CSJ Constitution (1884), 33-35. These prerequisite qualities are listed in all versions of the CSJ Constitution (1847, ACSJC-SPP) and (1860, 1884). In the 1860 version, the superior general was allowed to assess a dowry amount.

12 Although entry after the age of forty was rare, sisters between thirty and thirty-nine years of age did enter the community in significant numbers, accounting for 19 percent of candidates between 1836 and 1920. The mean age of first marriage for American women was 22.0 (1890), 21.9 (1900), and 21.6 (1910) (Historical Statistics of the United States: From Colonial Times to 1970 [Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Commerce, 1975], 19).

13 The dowry was a continuous stumbling block for European orders that were transplanted to the United States. Since the vast majority of the Catholic population in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were working-class, even American-born girls had difficulty in fulfilling dowry obligations. Most U.S. communities had to make exceptions on this issue even though most constitutions required between $100 and $500 for a dowry. See Fitzgerald, “Irish Catholic Nuns,” 238-39, and Ewens, Role of the Nun, 135.

14 Letter from Mother St. John Facemaz to Bishop Peter Richard Kenrick, February 10, 1868,and letter from Kenrick to Facemaz, March 17, 1868, ACSJC-SLP and AASL.

15 Postulant and Novitiate Records can be found at all four CSJ provincial archives (ACSJC-SLP, ACSJC-SPP, ACSJC-LAP, ACSJC-AP). If dowry payment is used as a means to determine class diversity of the candidates, the records indicate a broad range of socioeconomic levels.

16 Although all CSJ Constitutions mandated separation of postulants, novices, and professed, this was not always possible in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the early days of the community, lack of space made separation impossible. Even when more living space became available, second-year novices were needed in the workforce, so they often lived and worked with professed sisters away from the novitiate.

17 “Postulant Outfit,” CSJ Customs Book (1868), 145-46, ACSJC-SLP. Besides the clothes the candidates were to bring six yards of white bleached muslin, six yards of blue calico or check, six yards of brown drilling, six yards of black cambric, twelve yards of Irish linen, and one table service.

18 This is an undated novice manual, probably used in the mid-nineteenth century. It was thought to be translated from a French manual the sisters brought with them (ACSJC-AP). The CSJs wrote their first American customs book in 1868, and it was revised and expanded in 1917. In 1900 a spiritual directory was added to the prescriptive literature. All printed constitutions contained specific requirements for behavior and religious practices as well as guidelines concerning interactions among sisters and with seculars.

19 Sr. Winifred (Kate) Hogan, “My Reminiscences,” 1922, part 2, p. 14, ACSJCSPP.

20 O‘Brien, Likes of Kitty O’Brien, 49.

21 Interview of Sr. Aloysia Joseph McCarthy (entered 1901) by Susan Marie O‘Connor, March 4, 1975, Latham, N.Y., ACSJC-AP.

22 Sr. Cecilia Marie Hurley (entered 1919), “Reflections,” October 1, 1981, ACSJCAP.

23 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969), 44-55, 94-111, 147-60. Arnold Van Gennep’s work is taken from his Rites of Passage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1909).

24 Postulant and Novitiate Records, ACSJC-SLP. For examples from other orders see Fitzgerald, “Irish-Catholic” Nuns, 230-31. For an interesting discussion on the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary formation see Mary Ann Hinsdale, “The Roughest Kind of Prose: IHM Socialization, 1860-1960,” in Building Sisterhood: A Feminist History of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 119-50.

25 Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelly and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 186-92, and “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers,” Signs 10 (Summer 1985): 110; Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 126-59; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 254; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent.

26 Sklar, “Hull House,” 110.

27 Canon law required a minimum of one year in the novitiate. Depending on how soon the novices were needed in the workforce, the second year of the novitiate was usually less structured since they often were living and working with professed sisters outside the novitiate and away from the motherhouse.

28 Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 65.

29 Memoirs of Sr. Rose Edward Dailey (entered 1916) in Purcell, Jubilarse, 45.

30 For examples in a variety of settings see Estelle Freedman, “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930,” Feminist Studies 5 (Fall 1979): 512-29; Blanche Wieson Cook, “Female Support Networks and Political Activism, in” A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 423-24; Sklar, “Hull House,” 110-11; Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 82; Carol K. Coburn, Life at Four Corners: Religion, Gender, and Education in a German-Lutheran Community, 1868-1965 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 94-95, 158; and Lynn Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 41.

31 Raymond, Passion for Friends, 90. This quote is taken from a chapter devoted to friendship in convents, titled “Varieties of Female Friendship: The Nun as Loose Woman,” 73-112.

32 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1 (Autumn 1975): 1-29. Smith-Rosenberg’s article redefined and expanded the discussion of women’s love and friendship by placing it within the context of gender relationships in nineteenth-century America. See also Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1981).

33 Discussions of this issue are very brief in the CSJ prescriptive literature. Prohibitions against “particular friendships” were usually included in the section on the vow of chastity and placed amid warnings on intimacies with the opposite sex. CSJ Constitution (1860), 42, (1884), 17, and the CSJ Customs Book (1917), 54. See also Fitzgerald, “Irish-Catholic Nuns,” 226-27, and Raymond, Passion for Friends, 91-98. For Catholic theological discussions on female friendship and relationships see Mary E. Hunt, Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (New York: Crossroad, 1992), and Thomas C. Fox, Sexuality and Catholicism (New York: Geo. Braziller, Inc., 1994).

34 Letter from Mother Elizabeth Parrott to Sr. Cecelia O’Grady, September 22, 1907, ACSJC-LAP.

35 Lillian Faderman has argued that romantic friendships between women remained possible for the first two decades of the twentieth century, particularly for women born into “Victorian households”. When Americans began reading the work of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, attitudes began to change and women in particular were seen as more sexual beings. A “companionate marriage,” which advocated friendship and sex within heterosexual marriage became the only accepted norm, and consequently same-sex friendships came under suspicion. The same-sex bonding so typical of the nineteenth century was no longer seen as “natural” but as potentially pathological. See Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 298, and Christina Simmons, “Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat,” in Women and Power in American History: A Reader, vol. 2, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1991), 183-94.

36 Correspondence between sisters, obituaries, necrologies, and community histories written in the early part of the twentieth century or earlier use the terms “dear companion” or “life-long friend or companion” to designate special friendships between sisters. The point here is not to try to define what these words meant but to point out that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers felt comfortable noting these close friendships, unlike women born later in the twentieth century who had been socialized to view women’s friendships with suspicion. For an interesting discussion on this issue within the IHM community see Joan Glisky, “The Official IHM Stance on Friendship, 1845-1960,” 153-72, and Nancy Sylvester, “PFs: Persistent Friendships,” 173-92, in Building Sisterhood.

37 Ewens, Role of the Nun, 108-15, and McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 627. This was less of a problem for the CSJs than other communities such as the Carmelites, Dominicans, School Sisters of Notre Dame, Religious of the Sacred Heart, and the Visitandines, but all communities of women religious struggled with the balancing act between religious activities and public work in the United States (Ewens, “Leadership of Nuns,” 113-16). As the demands of professionalization and time commitments increased in the twentieth century, the dissonance between religious practices and the demands of public work increased for all communities of nuns.

38 Mary Ewens, “Women in the Convent,” in American Catholic Women: An Historical Exploration, ed. Karen J. Kennelly (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 37.

39 The “Chapter of Faults” is described in the CSJ Constitution (1860), 70, (1884), 52-55. The French constitution and its English version (1847) as well as the later American versions stipulated the use of a “monitor” or, as it was later called, “admonitrix”. The monitor’s role was to “admonish the Superior of her faults, and to receive such complaints as may be made against her.” CSJ Constitution (1847), 63-64.

40 See McDannell’s discussion of “Catholic domesticity,” in her book The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 52-76. See also Karen Kennelly, “Ideas of American Catholic Womanhood,” in Kennelly, American Catholic Women, 1-16; James J. Kenneally, “Eve, Mary, and the Historians,” in Women in American Religion, ed. Janet Wilson James (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 191-206; David G. Hackett, “Gender and Religion in American Culture, 1870-1930,” Religion and American Culture 5, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 127-57; and Joseph G. Mannard, “Maternity ... of the Spirit: Nuns and Domesticity in Antebellum America,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5 (Summer 1986): 305-24.

41 For examples of Catholic prescriptive literature for girls and women during the late nineteenth century see George Deshon, Guide for Catholic Young Women (New York: The Catholic Publication House, 1871); Orestes A. Brownson, “The Woman Question,” in The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, ed. Henry F. Brownson (Detroit: T. Nourse, 1882-85), 18:381-97; William Stang, Socialism and Christianity (New York: Benziger, 1905), 178-83; and Bernard O‘Reilly, Mirror of True Womanhood (New York: P.J. Kenedy, 1892). For a gender comparison see O’Reilly’s earlier book for men entitled True Men As We Need Them (New York: P.J. Kenedy, 1878).

42 “Maxims of Perfection,” CSJ Constitution (1884), 129-46. There are ninety-eight Maxims of Perfection in this version of the constitution. More than twenty discuss the need for self-effacement and humility and nine deal with self-sacrifice. Humility is discussed so extensively in all the prescriptive documents that it is almost a de facto fourth vow.

43 Patricia Byrne, “Sisters of St. Joseph: The Americanization of a French Tradition,” U.S. Catholic Historian (Summer/Fall 1986): 263.

44 Much of what we know about these events is gleaned from sisters’ correspondence with the motherhouse. At times superiors did request sisters to keep a journal. Sr. Monica Corrigan was one of those asked to do so. Her journal documented the journey she and her companions made to Tucson in 1870. Fortunately for us, Corrigan became interested in community history and began collecting memoirs in 1890 for a CSJ history. Although Corrigan never completed her CSJ history, Sr. Lucida Savage, a Ph.D. historian, utilized some of her collected materials and acquired more for her book The Congregation of St. Joseph of Carondelet: A Brief Account of Its Origin and Its Work in the UnitedStates, 1650-1922 (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1923).

45 Although there are some recent exceptions that have been cited in this book, the vast majority of Catholic national, diocesan, or local parish histories have been written with great reverence for bishops and local priests with scant mention of the sisters. We are not attempting to devalue the contributions of these male clerics, but the invisibility and lack of recognition of the sisters’ work are astounding, particularly since nuns were present in far larger numbers than either priests or orders of religious men.

46 “Maxims of Perfection;” Nos. 23 and 25, CSJ Constitution (1884), 133.

47 What we are referring to is the ideology of “maternal feminism” as defined and described by some historians of women. This is the idea that women could utilize their power as mothers to actively take on abuses of patriarchy and at times of capitalism in defense of their concern for children, not necessarily their own self-interest. See Linda Gordon, “Putting Children First: Women, Maternalism, and Welfare in the Early Twentieth Century,” in U.S History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 63-86; Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); and “Maternalism as a Paradigm,” a symposium in the Journal of Women’s History 5, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 95-131.

48 Caroline Walker Bynum, introduction to Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrel, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 2, 13.

49 One of the earliest attempts to reinterpret gender within the Protestant tradition was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible (New York: European Publishing Co., 1898; reprint, Seattle: Seattle Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion, 1974). See also Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); DeBerg, Ungodly Women; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent 122-36; and Ruether and Keller, Women and Religion, 1:ix-xii. The quote from St. Paul comes from Galatians 3:28 (King James Bible).

50 Madeleine Sophie Barat quote cited in McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 600.

51 The sisters viewed St. Joseph as Mary’s “silent spouse,” who was hardworking and faithful, an important, behind-the-scenes player who was seen as a “protector” of the CSJ community. The vast majority of institutions created by the CSJs were named for their patron. The feast of St. Joseph was always celebrated, and the postulants were routinely “received” into the community (novitiate) and given the habit on March 19, St. Joseph’s Day. Nine of ninety-eight “Maxims of Perfection” encouraged the sisters to emulate Christ, particularly in “self-sacrifice.” Although fewer in number, references are also made to the “heavenly father” and the Holy Spirit (CSJ Constitution [1884], 129-46). For a general discussion of nuns and the emulation of Jesus see Mary Ewens, “Removing the Veil: The Liberated American Nun,” in Ruether and McLaughlin, Women of Spirit, 257-59.

52 Fitzgerald, “Irish-Catholic Nuns,” 225.

53 Speaking bluntly about male physical aggression historically directed at nuns, McNamara wrote, “Something in the very nature of [nuns’] inaccessibility, their integrity, and their devotion seems to raise testosterone levels” (Sisters in Arms, 571).

54 “She is a man” quoted in Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 98. All other quotes come from Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Feminism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 17. For scholarly discussions of these women’s lives in the convent see Emile Zum Brunn and Georgette Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics in Medieval Europe (New York: Paragon Press, 1989); McNamara, Sisters in Arms; and Lerner, Creation of Feminist Consciousness. All five CSJ colleges are named for women: Avila College (formerly St. Teresa’s College) in Kansas City, Mo., The College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minn., The College of St. Rose in Albany, N.Y., Fontbonne College in St. Louis, Mo., and Mt. St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles, Calif.

55 All CSJ constitutions discuss these vows in specific detail: 1847, 38-47; 1860, 36-46; 1884, 13-21.

56 Nancy F. Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850,” in a Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 162-81.

57 For discussions of the choir/lay sister controversy in other orders of religious women see McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 582-84; Ewens, Role of the Nun, 92-94, 279-80; Fitzgerald, “Irish-Catholic Nuns,” 238-42; and Margaret Susan Thompson, “To Serve the People of God: Nineteenth-Century Sisters and the Creation of a Religious Life,” Working Paper Series, Cushwa Center, University of Notre Dame, ser. 18, no. 2, Spring 1987, 15, and “Sisterhood and Power: Class, Culture, and Ethnicity in the American Convent,” Colby Library Quarterly 2 5, no. 3 (September 19 8 9): 151, 160. For examples of controversies in CSJ diocesan communities, particularly Wheeling and Philadelphia, see Byrne, “Sisters of St. Joseph,” 266-70.

58 CSJ Constitution (1860), 22-23, and (1884), 5-6. Years in the community, not chronological age, determined rank, and once a term of office was completed the sister returned to her previous rank. Before 1908, choir sisters (professed and novices) ranked above lay sisters.

59 CSJ historian Patricia Byrne believes that it was Sr. Philomene Vilaine who came from France as a lay sister. Based on letters and records of Bishops Rosati and Kenrick, Sr. Philomene, on the advice of Rosati, may have worn a choir habit to avoid any taint of “anti-Americanism” in 1836. Her record of work is mixed, with both domestic and teaching duties, and no picture has survived to provide visual confirmation of her habit. See Byrne, “Sisters of St. Joseph,” 249, 267.

60 Memoirs of Sr. Febronie Boyer, ACSJC-SLP.

61 CSJ Constitution (1860), 23.

62 “Deceased Membership Information Reports,” ACSJC-SLP, list Sr. Febronie as a teacher in the 1850s in Cahokia and as a chapter councillor and procurator in the 1870s in Troy, N.Y.

63 “Decrees of the General Chapter,” 1908, and letter from Archbishop John Ireland to the General Chapter, 1908, ACSJC-G. Emily Joseph Daly, “The Generalate,” in The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, ed. Dolorita Maria Dougherty et al. (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1966), 369.

64 “Autobiography of Sr. Assissium Shockley,” April 24, 1912, ACSJC-SLP. At the end of her three-year term as provincial superior in 1869, Mother Assissium was recalled to St. Louis and replaced as provincial superior.

65 Thompson, “Sisterhood and Power,” 157-75, and “To Serve the People,” 19-22; McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 589-91; Fitzgerald, “Irish-Catholic Nuns,” 220.

66 Thompson, “To Serve the People,” 21. See also M. Georgia Costin, Priceless Spirit: A History of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, 1841-1893 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).

67 CSJ Constitution (1860), 40, and (1884), 15.

68 CSJ Customs Book (1917), 80.

69 CSJ Profession Book. CSJ provincial records are inconsistent in regard to information on parents of candidates. Some records list the location of parental baptism, and others do not.

70 The Western province was the last of the four provinces to be formed between 1860 and 1920. From 1876 to 1890 the headquarters of the province and novitiate was located in Tucson, Arizona. Between 1890 and 1900 the novitiate for the Western province was in St. Louis. Since 1903 the Western novitiate and province headquarters have been in Los Angeles.

71 CSJ Profession Book.

72 For other examples of recruiting trips by religious orders see Suellen Hoy, “The Journey Out: The Recruitment and Emigration of Irish Religious Women to the United States, 1812-1914.” Journal of Women’s History 6/7 (Winter/Spring 1995): 64-98; Thompson, “To Serve the People,” 20; and Fitzgerald, “Irish-Catholic Nuns;” 240-41. CSJ Postulant Records (St. Louis province), 1898-99.

73 Interview of Sr. M. Ailbe O’Kelly (entered 1912) by Sr. Susan Marie O‘Connor on January 23, 1981, in Syracuse, N.Y.

74 Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 28-29.

75 Ibid., 1-29. Diner lists the Sisters of Mercy, Presentation Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Sisters of Loretto, the Dominicans, and the Ursulines as orders that were influential in Ireland before coming to the United States. For a wonderful description of two Irish women immigrating to the United States to join the Dominican order see Suellen Hoy and Margaret MacCurtain, From Dublin to New Orleans: The Journey of Nora and Alice (Dublin: Attic Press, 1994).

76 Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 199, 259; Thomas Marie McMahon, ”The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet: Arizona’s Pioneer Religious Congregation, 1870- 1890” (master’s thesis, St. Louis University, 1952), m. “List of Sisters of St. Joseph from Early Mexican Families,” ACSJC-LAP.

77 Postulant Records of St. Louis Province (1892), ACSJC-SLP.

78 St. Claire Coyne, “The Los Angeles Province,” in Dougherty et al., Sisters of St. Joseph, 298. One of six persons in the Los Angeles-Monterey diocese was Catholic, and this mixture included diverse ethnic groups from eastern, western, and southern Europe as well as a large Hispanic population. “Dates of Reception and Profession, Los Angeles Province,” 1902-43, ACSJC-LAP.

79 Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 127-94; Thompson, “Sisterhood and Power,” 164-67; Ewens, “Removing the Veil,” 263-64.

80 Memoirs of Sr. Mary Eustace Huster in Purcell, Jubilarse, 3.

81 Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 143-44, 302. Quoting from a work on Polish Catholics by Anthony J. Kuzniewski, Dolan writes that the Irish continued to dominate the seats of power and “before long people began describing the church in the United States as One, Holy, Irish, and Apostolic” (302).

82 Irish surnames are prominent among provincial leaders in the Troy, N.Y, province. However, the most notable Irish connection occurred in the St. Paul province, where Seraphine Ireland served as CSJ provincial superior for almost four decades, teaming with her notable brother, Archbishop John Ireland, in the St. Paul diocese. Provincial leadership in the Los Angeles and St. Louis provinces appears far more ethnically diverse, with smaller “pockets” of Irish leadership in the geographically diverse local communities.

83 Cited in Byrne, “Sisters of St. Joseph,” 264.

84 Helen Angela Hurley, On Good Ground: The Story of the Sisters of St. Joseph in St. Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951), 138-40; Sisters of St. Joseph, Sisters of St. Joseph of Cleveland (Cleveland: Saint Joseph Convent, 1951), 43-45.

85 Mother Stanislaus Leary left with her two biological sisters for Arizona, but they ended up in Kansas, where they founded the Concordia community, which later expanded into a separate community in Wichita. In 1899, while in Chicago for her health, she accepted the invitation to found the LaGrange, Illinois, community, which later expanded into a separate community in Orange, California. A Sister of St. Joseph, Sisters of St. Joseph of Rochester (Rochester: Sisters of St. Joseph, 1950), 38-70; Evangeline Thomas, Footprints on the Frontier: A History of the Sisters of St. Joseph, Concordia, Kansas (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1948), 125-98; Eileen Quinlan, Planted on the Plains: A History of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Wichita, Kansas (Wichita: Greg D. Jones, 1984), 72-83; Brad Geagley, A Compassionate Presence (Orange, Calif.: Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, 1987), 3-4.

86 Sr. Mary Herman Lacy’s case is extraordinary because it involves so many people and dioceses. Standard community histories, parish histories, and diocesan histories are often problematic because they tend to omit entirely or place a positive “spin” on conflict within a religious community or between a sister and a priest or bishop. Two recent historians have researched this case extensively and analyzed the surviving primary documents. The following information is taken from Wanda Swantek’s “The Sisters of St. Joseph of Nazareth, Michigan, 1889-1900” (unpublished manuscript, November 11, 1972, copy in ACSJC-AP) and Sisters of St. Joseph of Nazareth, 1889-1929 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Borgess Hospital Printing, 1983) and Mary Alice Murphy’s “Reflections on the Life of Sister Mary Herman Lacy” (unpublished manuscript, February 11, 1981, copy in ACSJC-AP). Murphy completed this research “in hopes that others might be moved to continue to seek out the truth of this woman, who has touched so many in our Congregation.”

87 Sr. Grace Aurelia, “Notes on the Life of Sister Mary Herman,” as cited in Swantek, Sisters of St. Joseph, 5.

88 Sr. Winifred Maloney, “Story of Sister Herman,” as cited in Swantek, Sisters of St. Joseph, 3-5.

89 Swantek, Sisters of St. Joseph, 5; Murphy, “Reflections,” 2.

90 Srs. George Bradley and Mary Herman Lacy were both supporters and helpers in the founding of the Tipton community. See the History of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, Tipton, Indiana (Tipton, Ind.: Sisters of St. Joseph, 1986).

91 Lecture of Fr. Frank O’Brien to the Kalamazoo Sisters of St. Joseph, July 1890, as cited in Swantek, “The Sisters of St. Joseph,” 61-62.

92 George C. Stewart, Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 1994), 565. Stewart estimates that by 1920 there were 90,558 American sisters. The CSJs of Carondelet numbered over 2,300. If their former diocesan communities and daughter communities (most of whom were connected to the original motherhouse in St. Louis) were added to that number it would be over 4,000.

1 In 1834 and 1835 Lyman Beecher, a well-known New England minister and father of educator Catharine Beecher, minister Henry Ward Beecher, and author Harriet Beecher Stowe, made speeches to acquire donations for Lane Seminary in Cincinnati. These were published in A Plea for the West (Cincinnati: n.p., 1835). For more discussion on Beecher and other anti-Catholic rhetoric concerning Western expansion see Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Cruaade 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Rinehart, 1938; reprint, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 68-76; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W W Norton, 1976), 116-17 and 170-83; James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 116-27; and Bryan Le Beau, “‘Saving the West from the Pope’: Anti-Catholic Propaganda and the Settlement of the Mississippi River Valley,” American Studies 32 (Spring 1991): 101-14.

2 Le Beau, “‘Saving the West,’” 103. Two of the most prominent philanthropic societies were the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, organized in Lyons, France, in 1822 and the Leopold (or Leopoldine) Association, established in 1829 in Vienna. It was publications from the Society for the Propagation of the Faith that provided the incentive for Countess Félicité de la Rochejaquelin to fund the CSJ mission to America in 1836.

3 There are many excellent sources describing women in the West, but a good representative sample includes Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, eds., The Women’s West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, eds., Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); Lillian Schlissel, Vicki L. Ruiz, and Janice Monk, eds., Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988); Ruth B. Moynihan and Susan Armitage, eds., So Much to Be Done: Women Settlers on the Mining and Branching Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); a special issue on women in the West, in Frontiers: A Journal of women’s Studies 15, no. 3 (199 5); and Susan Armitage, Helen Bannan, Katherine G. Morrissey, and Vicki Ruiz, Women in the West: A Guide to Manuscript Sources (New York: Garland Pub., 199 1).

4 Schlissel, Ruiz, and Monk, Western Women, 47.

5 John Rothensteiner, in History of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, 2 vols. (St. Louis: Blackwell Wielandy Co., 1928), states that in the St. Louis diocese (which at one time included much of the territory in the Louisiana Purchase and beyond) in the late 1830s, one priest was responsible for 2,000 Catholics who lived scattered across Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin territory (1:581-85, 730-35). For other discussions on the shortage of priests in the West see Hennesey, American Catholics, 128-42; Dolores Liptak, Immigrants and Their Church (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 13-32; Jay P. Dolan, Catholic Revivalism: The American Experience, 1830-1900 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971), 1-24; and Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 263. For some general discussion on Catholics in the West see James P. Shannon, Catholic Colonization on the Western Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957); Michael E. Engh, Frontier Faiths: Church, Temple, and Synagogue in Los Angeles, 1846-1888 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992); and numerous articles on frontier Catholicism in U.S. Catholic Historian (special issue) 12, no. 4 (Fall 1994).

6 Some sources that have attempted to integrate nuns in the history of the American West include Mary Ewens, “Catholic Sisterhoods in North Dakota,” in Day In, Day Out: Women’s Lives in North Dakota, ed. Elizabeth Hampsten (Grand Forks: University of North Dakota, 1988), and Susan Carol Peterson and Courtney Ann Vaughn-Roberson, Women with Vision: The Presentation Sisters of South Dakota, 1880-1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1991). See also Susan Carol Peterson, “Religious Communities of Women in the West: The Presentation Sisters’ Adaptation to the Northern Plains Frontier,” Journal of the West 21 (April 1992): 65-70, and Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, “‘Pray for Your Wanderers’: Women Religious on the Colorado Mining Frontier,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 15, no. 3 (1995): 27-52.

7 Mary Ewens, “The Leadership of Nuns in Immigrant Catholicism,” in Women and heligion in America, vol. 1, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 101. The list of female religious orders that established foundations and institutions in the trans-Mississippi West is voluminous, but representative examples include Religious of the Sacred Heart, Benedictines, Daughters of Charity, Dominicans, Sisters of Mercy, Presentation Sisters, Sisters of Loretto, and Sisters of Charity.

8 “Report to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith,” Lyons, France, January 1851, as cited in Helen Angela Hurley, On Good Ground: The Story of the Sisters of St. Joseph in St. Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951), 17-18.

9 Hurley, On Good Ground, 19. Hurley reports that the Visitation Sisters and “other communities refused [Bishop Cretin‘s] appeals.” The Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Dubuque, Iowa) reportedly refused because they had no French-speaking sisters. Of the original four CSJs sent to St. Paul, three of the four were native French-speaking sisters.

10 William E. Lass, “Minnesota,” The Encyclopedia of the American West (New York: Macmillan, 1996), 3:995-99. See also James M. Reardon, The Catholic Church in the Diocese of St. Paul (St. Paul: North Central Pub. Co., 1952), 72-83.

11 Letter from Sr. Francis Joseph Ivory to Sr. Monica Corrigan, August 12, 1890, ACSJC-SLP. The early years in St. Paul are also described in three articles by Sr. Ignatius Loyola Cox in Acta et Dicta 3, no. 2 (July 19 14): 270-89, and in Mary Lucida Savage, The Congregation of St. Joseph of Carondelet: A Brief Account of Its Origin and Its Work in the United States, 1650-1922 (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1923), 80-93, and Hurley, On Good Ground, 1-109.

12 A chronological list of the sisters’ institutions in St. Paul and Minneapolis can be found in Helen Angela Hurley, ”The St. Paul Province;’ in sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, ed. Dolorita Maria Dougherty et al. (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1966), 139-214, and Dougherty, “Chronological List of Establishments” and “Alphabetical List of Establishments,” 432-34 and appendix V, 439, in ibid. In the 1860s and 1870s other female religious orders came to St. Paul, including the Dominicans, Sisters of the Good Shepherd, and the Sisters of the Visitation.

13 “Report of the General Chapter—St. Paul Province, 1920,” ACSJC-G. This report lists the institutions in each city and how many adults and children were served throughout the entire Northern province.

14 Lawrence H. Larsen, “Kansas City, Missouri;” in Encyclopedia of the American West, 2:803-4; A. Theodore Brown and Lyle W Dorsett, K.C.: A History of Kansas City, Missouri (Boulder: Pruett Publishing Co., 1978), 9; Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 142-43.

15 Dorothy Brandt Marra, “The Story,” in This Far by Faith: A Popular History of the Catholic People of West and Northwest Missouri, vol. 2, ed. Michael Coleman (Kansas City, Mo.: Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, 1992), 21-58; Gilbert J. Gerraghan, Catholic Beginnings in Kansas City: An Historical Sketch (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1920); Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 142-43.

16 Letters from Sr. Francis Joseph Ivory to Sr. Monica Corrigan, August 12 and September 10, 1890, ACSJC-SLP. Ivory was indeed a pioneer sister of many new foundations. She participated in the earliest beginnings in St. Paul, Kansas City, Canadaigua, and Buffalo, N.Y., and probably more. Personnel records of CSJs from the St. Louis province who died before 1949 are incomplete, but other records indicate that Ivory also spent many years in the Troy province in Glens Falls and Binghamton, N.Y. For a brief history of her active life see Ann Thomasine Sampson, “Sister Francis Joseph Ivory,” (unpublished manuscript, ACSJC-SPP). Other orders of women religious joined the CSJs in Kansas City before 1920, and some of these include Daughters of Charity, Little Sisters of the Poor, Dominicans, Benedictines, Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Sisters of St. Francis, Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Loretto, and School Sisters of Notre Dame.

17 Martha Smith, “Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet,” in Coleman, This Far by Faith, 2:607-13, and Michael Coleman, “Saint Joseph Health Center,” 572-75; “St. Joseph Orphan Home for Girls,” 575-77, and “St. Teresa’s Academy,” 582-86, in ibid. See also James L. Soward, Hospital Hill: An Illustrated Account of Public Healthcare Institutions in Kansas City, Missouri (Kansas City: Truman Medical Center Foundation, 1995), 14-15.

18 Although Kansas City was populated with fewer foreign-born than many cities, the 1910 census registered 10.2 percent of the population as foreign-born, 10 percent black, and for the first time a larger proportion of females to males (Brown and Dorsett, K.C., 183-86).

19 ”Report to the General Chapter—St. Louis Province, 1920” ACSJC-G. This report lists Kansas City and St. Joseph, Mo., statistics and institutions. For another list of Kansas City institutions see Dougherty, “Chronological List of Establishments,” 427-31.

20 Marra, “Story,” 55. American sisters almost always started schools for girls when they came into a new area. This was a continuation of their European traditions in most cases, but their efforts in the United States provided some of the earliest educational opportunities for girls and women, Protestant or Catholic. Records in St. Paul and Kansas City, as was the practice with most convent schools, listed the religious preference of each student. For additional examples see Mary J. Oates, “Catholic Female Academies on the Frontier,” U.S. Catholic Historian 12, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 12-36. Academies will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6.

21 Although we have provided an extensive list of sources that document this interpretation in note 3, the following sources supplement that list and emphasize the particular importance of families and community building: John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Joseph V Hickey, Ghost Settlement on the Prairie: A Biography of Thurman, Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); Robert V Hine, Community on the American Frontier: Separate butNotAlone (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980); Carol K. Coburn, Life at Four Corners: Religion, Gender, and Education in a German-Lutheran Community, 1868-1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992); William Loren Katz, The Black West (Seattle: Open Hand Publishing Co., 1987).

22 John Ireland served the Cathedral parish from 1867 to 1875, when he was appointed coadjutor bishop. He became the bishop of St. Paul in 1884 and archbishop in 1888. His two sisters and cousin were CSJs, and this was a family dynasty that served the CSJs well until 1918, the year of the archbishop’s death. Ireland was seemingly loved or hated, but neither his power and influence nor that he proved to be an invaluable ally to the CSJs can be denied. See Hurley, On Good Ground, 197-227; Marvin O’Connell, John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988); and Ann Thomasine Sampson, “The Ireland Connection” (unpublished manuscript, ACSJC-SPP).

23 Although there are many stories of his obvious favoritism to the CSJs, CSJ historian Hurley, in her On Good Ground, relates the following scenario. In the 1890s the pastor at Bird Island, Minn., came to Ireland to discuss his plans for a new school that he had asked the Sisters of Notre Dame to staff. Ireland told him: “You will do much better to have the Srs. of St. Joseph.” Not wanting to argue with the archbishop, he went to the CSJs, and they agreed to staff the school (223-24). See also, Christopher J. Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning: A Religious History of Catholic Health Care in the United States (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 97-99. Kauffman describes Ireland’s strategy in taking a Minneapolis hospital from the Sisters of Mercy and awarding it to the CSJs in 1887.

24 Fr. Donnelly was a true entrepreneur. In the 1850s he convinced civic planners that he could bring in crews to lower the bluffs along the Missouri River to allow the city to spread south. He sent ads to a Boston and New York newspaper requesting 150 Irish men from each area to come to Kansas City to complete the task. His only stipulation was that all the men from each group be from the same county in Ireland, “so that they could get along with each other.” The men came, completed the work, began an Irish immigration to the city, and significantly increased the Catholic population. A few years later, to facilitate building in the city, Donnelly had the soil surveyed on the church grounds and founded a brickyard that made thousands of dollars of profit for the parish and other Catholic institutions in the city (Marra, “Story,” 47-48).

25 Marra, “Story,” 71-73; Smith, “Sisters of St. Joseph,” 611; William J. Dalton, Pioneer Priest: The Life of Father Bernard Donnelly (Kansas City: Grimes-Joyce Printing Co., 1921), 139-43.

26 Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 122-25; Polly Welts Kaufman, Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 1-49.

27 Pascoe, Relations of Rescue, 43-44, 58; Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 217-18. Both religion and ethnicity fueled competition between institutions in St. Paul. Six years after the CSJs opened an orphanage in 1859, the Protestant Orphanage was founded, and in 1877 the Benedictines opened a German-Catholic orphanage.

28 Letter from Fr. Zephyrin Engelhardt to Rev. Mother Agatha Guthrie, February 4, 1886, ACSJC-SLP. The Society for the Propagation of the Faith published Annals, which provided written descriptions about Catholic missionary work from priests and bishops in the United States.

29 This is not a complete list of CSJ institutions but one that highlights the larger urban settings in the trans-Mississippi West. A complete list can be found in Dougherty, “Chronological List of Establishments,” 427-38. Independent CSJ diocesan communities established institutions in Wichita, Kansas; Lewiston, Idaho; and Pasco, Washington. The Idaho and Washington CSJs affiliated with the Carondelet group in 1925.

30 Peggy Pascoe, “Western Women at the Cultural Crossroads,” in Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 46. See also Elizabeth Jameson, “Toward a Multicultural History of Women in the United States,” Signs 13 (Summer 1988): 761-91, and two particularly good anthologies edited by Armitage and Jameson: Women’s West and Writing the Range.

31 Although CSJs served in Hispanic parishes in the Southwest and other parts of the country, almost no primary documents provide particular insight into this intercultural exchange. The Native American population was clearly a mixture of ethnicities and cultures as many Native American children had Spanish surnames. For good sources on the Hispanic population in the Southwest and the Catholic Church’s interactions with them see Jay P. Dolan and Gilberto M. Hinojosa, eds., Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900-1965 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994); Jay P. Dolan and Allan Figueroa Deck, eds., Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S.: Issues and Concerns (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996); and Timothy Walch, “More Pluribus Than Unum: Hispanic Catholics and Their American Church,” Journal of American Ethnic History 15, no. 4 (Summer 1996): 49-52. For good general sources see George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuse: Vulture, Class, and Cender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

32 For example, the Sisters of Loretto and the Sisters of Charity worked in New Mexico and the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur and the Daughters of Charity worked in California as early as the 1850s. For information on New Mexico and the early religious orders see Louis Avant, “History of Catholic Education in New Mexico since American Occupation” (master’s thesis, University of New Mexico, 1940), 16-18, 56, 60, 73, 77-79. For information on the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in California see Martha Smith, “Sister Mary Catherine Cabareaux,” in Encyclopedia of the American West, 1:217, and for a thorough discussion on the Daughters of Charity in Los Angeles see Engh, Frontier Faiths, 139-63.

33 Although we will be quoting from the original journal written in 1870, an edited and condensed version was published as Trek of the Seven Sisters (Tucson, Ariz.: Carondelet Health Services, 1991). Typed copies of the original journal are found in ACSJC-LAP, ACSJC-AP, and ACSJC-SLP. A Playhouse 90 television adaptation of this story was broadcast April 25, 1957, with Helen Hayes playing the role of Sr. Monica Corrigan.

34 Oral history interview of Sr. Emmelia James by Sr. Dolorita Dougherty at Nazareth Convent, St. Louis, on June 21, 1979. See also oral history interviews of Sr. M. Anthony Byrne by Dougherty and handwritten memoirs of Sr. Guadalupe Saucedo, who traveled from Mexico with her sisters under Corrigan’s care (ACSJCLAP and ACSJC-SLP). Stories about Corrigan (many from eyewitnesses) are legendary. Sisters marveled at her business acumen, strong will, and forthrightness, if not daring. She was credited with being a premier fund-raiser and “an arbitrator of civil and domestic disputes ... who had little regard for the unfavorable judgement of others and courageously undertook what many, who lacked her convictions, would have avoided” (unpublished essay by Sr. Alberta Cammack, ACSJC-LAP). See also the appendix in Monica Corrigan, Trek of the Seven Sisters (Diary, 1870) (Tucson: Carondelet Health Services, 1991).

35 Journal of Sr. Monica Corrigan, 1870, ACSJC-LAP. All further quoted material on the journey to Tucson will be from this source unless specified otherwise. Probably the most famous written documentation of a nun’s life in the Southwest is Sr. Blandina Segale, At the End of the Santa Fe Trail (Milwaukee: Bruce Pub. Co., 1948).

36 This quotation completes the writings from Sr. Monica Corrigan’s journal. There would be two other harrowing journeys to Arizona, in 1873 and 1876, before the railroads made the ocean voyage and overland trek unnecessary. In the 1873 journey, the CSJs went by train as far as Kit Carson, Colo. (southeast of Denver), then they traveled by wagon and foot. Lost and fighting their way through a heavy snow-storm, they found a deserted cabin and barely avoided freezing to death. The next day they reached Trinidad, Colo., and lodged overnight with the Sisters of Charity and probably Sr. Blandina Segale (Anonymous Account of the 1873 journey, ACSJC-SLP). In 1876, the sisters repeated the route of the original band, but instead of arriving in San Diego they continued their ocean voyage around San Lucas (Baja) to the mouth of the Colorado River and took a riverboat to Yuma, avoiding the California desert. They walked the last 250 miles to Tucson (Sr. John Berchmans Hartrich, “Journal to Tucson,” April 17 to June 8, 1876, ACSJC-SLP).

37 CSJs worked in four schools and one hospital in four locations. In Minnesota the CSJs staffed the Winnebago Indian Mission School, Long Prairie (1852-55), and St. Mary’s Academy, Graceville (1885-98); in Michigan, St. Xavier’s School (1866-1906) and L‘Anse (Baraga); and in Wisconsin, St. Joseph’s Industrial School (1883-?) andMenominee Hospital (1886-1912), Keshena.

38 Henry Warner Bowden, American Indiana and the Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 192-97. Bowden writes that churches were invited to nominate men for the agency positions scattered throughout the country. As a result of this policy, thirteen denominations gained control over the seventy-three Indian agencies. Because of centuries of native contact, particularly in the Southwest, Catholics had expected to receive a large number of protectorates, but because of the Protestant bias of the board, they received only seven. Methodists received fourteen, the largest share (192). See also Francis Paul Prucha, The Churches and the Indian Schools, 1888-1912 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979) and American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indians, 1865-1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976); David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); and Jorge Noriega, “American Indian Education in the United States: Indoctrination for Subordination to Colonization,” in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Extinction, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 371-402.

39 Mary J. Oates, The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 67. Oates states that when the government began offering contracts in 1877, many religious communities applied for them, and between 1886 and 1891 the BCIM was very successful in acquiring funds, much to the disgust of the anti-Catholic Office of the National League for Protection of American Institutions. A quote from one of their publications in 1890 stated that only Protestant schools should be funded because they “recognize allegiance to our Constitution and laws, and ... are devoted to American principles and institutions.”

40 For information on nuns’ work with Native Americans see Susan Carol Peterson’s three articles, “Challenges to the Stereotypes: The Adaptation of the Sisters of St. Francis to South Dakota Missions, 1885-1910,” Upper Midwest History 84 (1984): 1-9; “Doing ‘Women‘s’ Work: The Grey Nuns of Fort Totten Indian Reservation, 1874-1900,” North Dakota History 52 (Spring 1985): 18-25; and “Holy Women and Housekeepers: Women Teachers on South Dakota Reservations, 1885-1910,” South Dakota History 13 (Fall 1983): 245-60. See also S. Carol Berg, “The Economic Foundations of a Mission: The Benedictines at White Earth Reservation,” Midwest Review 9 (Spring 1987): 22-29.

41 Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 272, and St. Claire Coyne, “The Los Angeles Province,” in Dougherty et al., Sisters of St. Joseph, 334. The sisters were withdrawn in 1876 when the Papago and Pima agencies were merged and the school was closed. They returned in 1888 to teach both Papago and Pima children.

42 Some very useful secondary sources provide details on some of these CSJ missions. See Teresa Baksh McNeil’s three articles: “Catholic Indian Schools of the Southwest Frontier: Curriculum and Management,” Southern California Quarterly (Winter 1990): 321-38; “Sisters of St. Joseph under Fire: Pioneer Convent School on the Colorado River,” Journal of Arizona History 29, no. 1 (19 8 8): 35-50; and “St. Anthony’s Indian School in San Diego, 1886-1907,” Journal of San Diego History 34 (Summer 1988): 187-200. For works that include but are not limited to the CSJs’ work with Native Americans see Barbara Alice Perkins, “Educational Work of the Sisters of St. Joseph, 1903-1963” (master’s thesis, Mt. St. Mary’s College-Los Angeles, 1965); Ann Cecilia Smith, ”Educational Activities of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in the Western Province from 1870-1903” (master’s thesis, Catholic University, 1953); and George Dyke, “History of Catholic Education in Arizona” (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University, 1951).

43 Drexel, who was born in 1858, and her two sisters inherited a $14 million estate in 1885 after the death of their parents. After taking vows in 1891, Drexel spent the next forty years directing every aspect of her community’s work in the South, urban North, and Indian territory, contributing millions of dollars of her personal fortune to work for Native Americans and blacks. She also founded Xavier College in New Orleans, the only Catholic college for blacks in the United States. See Nancy A. Hewitt, “Mother Mary Katharine Drexel,” in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 206-8. See also Consuela Marie Duffy, Katharine Drexel: A Biography (Cornwell Heights, Pa.: Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, 1972), and Anne M. Butler, “Mother Katharine Drexel,” in By Grit and Grace: Pioneer Women Who Shaped the West, ed. Glenda Riley and Richard Etulain (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum Publishing, 1997), 198-220.

44 Oates, Catholic Philanthropic Tradition, 68-69. Oates also states that Drexel refused to give money to older, financially solvent religious orders such as the Jesuits “because she believed that this order had the financial means to support” its own schools. Drexel helped support all CSJ Indian missions either through the BCIM or directly. Interestingly, Fr. J. A. Stephan, longtime director of the BCIM, received some of his strongest financial support from a group of prominent Catholic laywomen.

45 Letter from Sr. Julia Littenecker to Rev. Mother Agatha Guthrie from Ft. Yuma, Calif., May 3, 1886, ACSJC-SLP. Littenecker, who had done the preliminary negotiations with government officials to staff the school, accompanied the first group of sisters to the fort to help them get settled.

46 Memoirs of Sr. Bernadette Smith upon her arrival in 1888 at San Xavier del Bac, outside Tucson, ACSJC-LAP.

47 Ibid.

48 Memoirs of Sr. Magdalen Gaffney at Ft. Yuma, Calif., written in 1946, ACSJC-LAP. Sr. Magdalen came to Yuma in 1890.

49 Anonymous CSJ, “Arrival of the First Sisters to St. John’s Indian Mission,” AACSJC-LAP.

50 For general information on curriculum and practices in reservation and non-reservation boarding schools see Adams, Education for Extinction, 136-63; Robert A. Trennert Jr., The Phoenix Indian School: Forced Assimilation in Arizona, 1891-1935 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); and Melissa A. Davis, “Indian Schools on the Reservation,” in Encyclopedia of the American West, 2:733-35.

51 The December Quarterly Report for 1908 at St. Boniface Indian School in Banning, Calif., listed two priests, eight CSJs, and four laymen (a farmer, a carpenter, a gardener, and a disciplinarian). The Indian Sentinel, published by BCIM, featured one or more schools in each issue, providing information about the curriculum, discipline, and socialization. The schools were remarkably standardized in schedule, curriculum, military drill, and regimentation. Annual reports from all BCIM schools and copies of the Indian Sentinel can be found at BCIM-AMU.

52 Sources listed in notes 38 and 50 discuss the problematic, if not destructive, nature of education for Native American children. Catholic historian Jay Dolan also documents the small enrollments, financial limitations, resistance to Christianity, and the “destructive effect” of “forced civilization” (The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present [Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1985], 285-87). For a perspective from Native Americans who attended some of these schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries see Patricia Riley, ed., Crowing Up Native American (New York: Avon Books, 1993).

53 Memoirs of Sr. Marsina Power, ACSJC-LAP.

54 Memoirs of Sr. Bernadette Smith.

55 Anonymous CSJ, “Brief History of San Xavier del Bac,” and Memoirs of Sr. Mary Thomas Lavin, ACSJC-LAP.

56 Jacqueline Peterson and Mary Druke, “American Indian Women and Religion,” in Ruether and Keller, Woman and Religion in America, 2:9. See also Peterson, “Women Dreaming: The Religiopsychology of Indian-White Marriages and the Rise of a Metis Culture,” in Schlissel, Ruiz, and Monk, Western Woman, 49-79, and Bowden, American Indians, 46-48.

57 Memoirs of Sr. Bernadette Smith.

58 Anonymous CSJ, “Arrival of the First Sisters.”

59 Memoirs of Sr. Bernadette Smith.

60 Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 286; Bowden, American Indians, 19 1. CSJ statistics for fourteen years at Ft. Yuma demonstrate the small number of conversions. The final total shows 120-30 “Christians on Reservation” and 500-600 “Pagans on the Reservation” (from “Statistics on the Fort Yuma School,” March 31, 1900, ACSJC-LAP). Conversion statistics tend to be exaggerated or misrepresented since Native Americans allowed themselves to be baptized more than once or received baptism but continued with their traditional religious practices.

61 Pascoe, “Western Women,” 55.

62 Letter from Mother Ambrosia O’Neill to Rev. Mother Agatha Guthrie, April 16, 1887, ACSJC-SLP.

63 Memoirs of Sr. Mary Aquinas Duffy and Memoirs of Sr. Mary Thomas Lavin, ACSJC-LAP.

64 For information about Protestant women missionaries and the hiring practices of various denominations see Barbara Welter, “She Hath Done What She Could: Protestant Women’s Missionary Careers in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Women in American Religion, ed. Janet Wilson James (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 111-25; Frances B. Cogan, All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 246-48; and Deutsch, No Separate Refuse, 63-86.

65 Letter from Fr. Zephyrin Engelhardt to Rev. Mother Agatha Guthrie, February 4, 1986, ACSJC-SLP.

66 The Yuma reservation ran along both sides of the Colorado River and encompassed 45,000 acres, mostly desert. The school had first been contracted with Presbyterians in 1884, but the missionaries left within two years. There were approximately 800-1,000 Yumans on the reservation. Correspondence from March 18 to May 13, 1886, between Sr. Julia Littenecker and the St. Louis motherhouse describes the CSJs’ initial contact and negotiations with the government officials and the Yuma chief, Pascual. The letters describe the fort and people in detail (ACSJC-SLP).

67 Letter from Thomas J. Morgan to Mother Ambrosia O‘Neill, October 29, 1891, ACSJC-SLP. Morgan sent O’Neill a notice to announce the upcoming superintendents’ meeting in Washington. However, he immediately “exempted” her from coming since, he said, “you would be the only woman there, with the possible exception of one woman special agent.”

68 Letter from Mother Ambrosia O‘Neill to Rev. Mother Agatha Guthrie, June 8, 1886, ACSJC-SLP. Mother Ambrosia had no choice but to sign her name as Mary O’Neill. Women religious were required by law to sign their birth name on legal documents.

69 San Francisco Argonaut, November 15, 1886, ACSJC-LAP.

70 Letter from Mother Ambrosia O‘Neill to Rev. Mother Agatha Guthrie, November 20, 1887, ACSJC-SLP. Stephan’s behavior was typical for many whites at the time who viewed Indian males as either “savages” or “child-like.” Stephan’s behavior probably only aggravated the situation for the sisters. As director of the BCIM, Stephan was amazingly unaware and unprepared for the hostility. Mother Ambrosia wrote that Fr. Stephan came to the fort under the impression that all the Yumans were Christians. He “seemed quite surprised to find it otherwise.”

71 Los Angeles Herald, July 15, 1893.

72 Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 286. Details on tribal politics can be found in Robert Bee, Crosscurrents along the Colorado: The Impact of Government Policy on the Quechan Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), 24-43.

73 Letter from Sr. Aniceta Byrne to Mother Agatha Guthrie, March 7, 1890, ACSJC-SLP. Thomas Morgan, a Baptist minister and staunch Republican, became Indian Commissioner in 1889 and began pushing his agenda of off-reservation schools. From his first visit to Ft. Yuma, the CSJs expressed concerns about his “bigotry” against Catholics and they feared that he would close their reservation school. Morgan was indeed successful in creating off-reservation schools, but he resigned in 1893, expressing his unwillingness to work for Democratic president Grover Cleveland (Trennert, Phoenix Indian School, 9-40).

74 Letters from Mother Ambrosia O’Neill to Rev. Mother Agatha Guthrie, April 7 and 20, 1899, ACSJC-SLP.

75 Letters from Sr. Perpetua Seiler to Mother Julia Littenecker, April 1 and 15, 1877, ACSJC-SLP. For a more detailed analysis of the CSJs in Colorado see Coburn and Smith, “‘Pray for Your Wanderers.’”

76 The CSJs also came to Denver in 1883 to begin teaching in parish schools: St. Patrick’s in 1883, St. Ann’s (later Annunciation) in 1888, St. Leo’s in 1891, and St. Francis de Sales in 1906. Unlike those in St. Paul and Kansas City, CSJs in Denver worked in schools, never creating hospitals or orphanages.

77 Thomas J. Noel, Colorado Catholicism and the Archdiocese of Denver, 1857-1989 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1989), 22-27. Machebeuf brought the Sisters of Loretto to Denver in 1864 to establish an academy, the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati to Trinidad in 1869 to open a school, and the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth to Denver in 1872 to begin a hospital.

78 Nuns often obtained free railroad passes when traveling. Lottery prizes included religious relics, valuable gemstones, minerals, and altar items of silver or gold. If nuns did not have members of their own order with whom to stay, they often boarded at the convents of other religious orders or in the homes of local parishioners. Hotels and other boarding establishments were viewed as unsuitable because they were too worldly. However, boarding at the Loretto Academy later proved to be problematic when it was discovered that the Lorettines were secretly negotiating with the bishop for the Central City School, offering him cash and a higher price than the CSJs.

79 Biographical data is limited because all personnel records of sisters in the St. Louis province who died before 1949 have been lost. Other records have been used to piece together information on age, birthplace, and work locations.

80 Correspondence between Fr. Burion and Bishop Machebeuf document months of feuding on the financial status of the Central City parish and academy in Denver (AAD).

81 Between March 25 and May 31, 1877, Sr. Perpetua wrote sixteen letters to her superiors in St. Louis documenting her negotiating and fund-raising efforts for the Colorado missions (ACSJC-SLP). We would like to thank Elaine Coburn Watskey for her analysis of the real estate transactions.

82 Letters from Sr. Perpetua to St. Louis motherhouse, April 27 and May 1, 1877, ACSJC-SLP, describe these incidents. When the bishop made a demand, Sr. Perpetua would use her vow of obedience to refuse him or buy time to contact her superiors. This gave her time to write to the motherhouse in St. Louis, explaining the situation and suggesting to her superiors how they should respond to the bishop’s telegrams, allowing her to “officially” refuse him.

83 Letters from Sr. Perpetua Seiler to Mother Julia Littenecker, April 27 and May 2, 1877, ACSJC-SLP. Mother Julia must have agreed because she appointed Sr. Perpetua as the first superior of the Central City community, and three years later she became the first superior of the second CSJ institution in Georgetown, Colorado.

84 Letter from Sr. Perpetua Seiler to Mother Julia Littenecker, May 1, 1877, ACSJC-SLP.

85 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 17.

86 Diary of Sr. Angelica Porter, June-July 1877, ACSJC-SLP.

87 Letter from Sr. Perpetua Seiler to Mother Julia Littenecker, May 24, 1877, ACSJC-SLP.

88 In diaries, correspondence, and other personal papers, secular women described nature, health concerns, adventure, and physical challenges. Sr. Angelica’s diary and other CSJ diaries of travel and life in the West provide similar information. Both the older and younger nun write positively of their travels; their accounts are particularly similar to those by single women traveling west. Elizabeth Jameson, “Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West,” in Armitage and Jameson, Women’s West, 149. For information on travel diaries and correspondence see Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken Books, 1982); Moynihan and Armitage, So Much to Be Done; and Vera Nor-wood “Women’s Place: Continuity and Change in Response to Western Landscapes,” in Schlissel, Ruiz, and Monk, Western Women, 155-81.

89 The prescriptive literature is quite clear as to the goal of a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet. The 1860 and 1884 CSJ Constitutions state in the first paragraph that sisters must “apply themselves to the attainment of Christian perfection, and devote themselves to the service of their neighbor.” They are to “practice a profound humility” and “endeavor to act from the supernatural motives of faith, of hope, and of divine love” (ACSJC-SLP). We would argue that this philosophy and goal was representative of many religious orders of Catholic women.

90 From 1877 to 1917 the CSJs staffed seven separate institutions in three different locations in Colorado: Central City, Georgetown, and Denver. The total Catholic population grew dramatically during this period. In 1875 approximately 18,500 Catholics resided in the Colorado territory; by 1915 108,336 Catholics resided within the state of Colorado. This data is taken from the Official Catholic Directory (New York: P. J. Kenedy, 1875 and 1915). For a decade-by-decade analysis from 1870 to 1920 see Gerald Shaughnessy, Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith? A Study of Immigration and Catholic Growth in the United States, 1790-1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 155-83.

91 Margaret S. Woyski, “Women and Mining in the Old West,” Journal of the West 20 (1981): 38-47. For a more detailed account of Central City and its influence in mining and commerce see Richard Hogan, Class and Community in Frontier Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 49-78; Duane A. Smith, Rocky Mountain West: Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, 1859-1915 (Albuquerque: University Press of New Mexico, 1992), 1-22, 112; and Carl Ubbelohde, Maxine Benson, and Duane A. Smith, A Colorado History, 6th ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Pruett Publishing Co., 1988), 69, 117-18. For more detail on the importance of early missionaries and churches throughout the state see Noel, Colorado Catholicism, and the research of Alice Cowan Cochran in Miners, Merchants, and Missionaries: The Role of Missionaries and Pioneer Churches in the Colorado Gold Rush and Its Aftermath, 1858-1870 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980). Cochran compares and contrasts all Protestant and Catholic denominations who were present in Colorado.

92 Noel, Colorado Catbolicism, 301-3. “Population—States and Territories,” Twelfth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 1901), 83.

93 “Population and Statistics,” Tenth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 1881), 113.

94 Smith, Rocky Mountain West, 82. See also Elliott West, The Saloon on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 133-41, and “Beyond Baby Doe: Childrearing on the Mining Frontier,” in Armitage and Jameson, Women’s West, 182, 186-87. For an older description of early Georgetown see Kathryn DePew, “William A. Hamill: Early Colorado Pioneer of Georgetown,” Colorado Magazine 32 (October 1935): 266-79.

95 Noel, Colorado Catholicism, 384-85. “Annual Report of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, 1885,” ADD.

96 Woyski, “Women and Mining,” 45.

97 The hospital is mentioned consistently in the Georgetown Courier, the local newspaper, from 1880 to even after the hospital’s closing in 1914. Data in the ACSJC-SLP include files on the Georgetown hospital, two patient ledgers, and lists of sisters who were missioned there. The ledgers are a valuable resource that list each patient’s name, birthplace, condition, and entrance and exit dates. Often males who had been “leaded” or “blasted” were brought in, but many patients had “La Grippe,” pneumonia, or other illnesses. As was the tradition at other CSJ institutions, the hospital also housed orphan children of the community. Often these children were orphans of miners. Less than 3 percent of all patients were under twenty-one.

98 Letters from Sr. Perpetua Seiler to Mother Julia Littenecker, March 25 and 29, 1877, ACSJC-SLP.

99 This story is told in numerous written (unpublished) accounts concerning the CSJs’ years in Central City (see ACSJC-SLP).

100 William D. Copeland, One Man’s Georgetown (Polson, Mont.: W. D. Copeland, 1973), as quoted in Noel, Colorado Catholicism, 385.

101 Undated newspaper clipping thought to be from 1915-16, after the hospital had closed for lack of funds (ACSJC-SLP).

102 One miner was so grateful for the sisters’ care that he left his mining claims to them upon his death (“Will and Testament of Jeremiah O‘Brien, September 27, 1884,” ACSJC-SLP).

103 To avoid conflict, many Catholic parishes were organized along ethnic lines. In Denver, some parishes were predominantly German or Irish, the predominant ethnic groups.

104 This data is compiled from the “Population and Statistics,” Tenth Census of the United States and Twelfth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 1881 and 1901), 492 and 739.

105 Patient Record Book—St. Joseph’s Hospital, 1880-89 and 1890-1913, recorded birthplace for each patient (ACSJC-SLP).

106 This information is compiled from biographical and mission information for each sister in the CSJ community (ACSJC-SLP). The Central City data comes from the Tenth Census and the Twelfth Census, 499 and 739.

107 See Introduction, note 24, for a brief discussion of this issue.

108 West, “Beyond Baby Doe,” 183-85. See Robert L. Griswold, “Anglo Women and Domestic Ideology in the American West in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,” in Schlissel, Ruiz, and Monk, Western Women, 15-33.

109 “Customs Relating to Christian Politeness,” CSJ Customs Book (1868), 18-20, ACSJC-SLP.

1 Bishop John Hughes of New York is given credit for this advice, and many bishops and Catholic educators used his idea as a battle cry throughout the nineteenth century. Vincent P. Lannie, Public Money and Parochial Education: Bishop Hughes, Covernor Servard and the New York School Controversy (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Press, 1968), 255; Jay P. Dolan, TheAmerican Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y: Image Books, 1985), 263; Timothy Walch, Parish School: American Catholic Parochial Education from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 40-43.

2 American sisterhoods worked in education far more than in any other endeavor. Between 1829 and 1884 there were forty-four nondiocesan teaching orders (like the CSJs) of religious women. The number of diocesan teaching communities runs into the hundreds. By comparison there were eleven male orders teaching during this same time period. See Harold A. Buetow, Of Singular Benefit: The Story of Catholic Education in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 115-17.

3 Most early colonial schools taught the sons of white male elites who wanted their sons prepared for the law or the ministry. The local schools were taught by male clergy or young men earning money for college. By the mid-eighteenth century, a larger number of white middle-class boys began attending English grammar schools or district schools. Young white middle-class girls had few opportunities, but some attended “Dame Schools,” which taught the three R’s and some ornamental skills (embroidery, music, French). These schools were held in the homes of matrons in the town. When district or grammar schools did admit girls, it was only for Saturdays or summers. See David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

4 For additional information on colonial and postcolonial attitudes on education and schools prior to the common school movement see Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970) and American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876 (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 1-147; Tyack and Hansot, Learning Together, 1-45; and Joel Spring, The American School, 1642-1993, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 1-61.

5 For discussion on the common schools and for a variety of interpretations on their purposes and effectiveness see Lawrence A. Cremin, The American Common School: An Historic Conception (New York: Teachers College Press, 1951); Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968); and Spring, American School, 62-96.

6 Spring, American School, 63. Although larger national purposes were important to the creation of common schools, it is important to remember that the U.S. Constitution says nothing about education. All authority to create schools had been given to the states and the local communities. This is why (to the present day) there is so much variability in financing, curriculum, etc., from state to state and from one public school district to another.

7 “To the Honorable the Board of Aldermen of the City of New York” in Catholic Education in America: A Documentary History, ed. Neil McCluskey (New York: Teachers College Press, 1964), 72. The most widely read textbooks of the nineteenth century, the McGuffey Readers, were notorious in the early editions for their anti-Catholic text and caricatures of the pope. Between 1836 and 1920, 120 million textbooks were sold.

8 Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 269-70. For additional analysis of the public school versus Catholic school controversy and the evolution of the Catholic school system see James A. Burns, The Catholic School System in the United States: Its Principles, Origin, and Establishment (New York: Benziger Bros., 1908) and The Growth and Devel opment of the Catholic School System in the United States (New York: Benziger Bros., 1912). For more current analyses that incorporate discussions on race, ethnicity, class, and, to a lesser extent, gender, see Michael F. Perko, ed., Enlightening the Next Generation: Catholics and Their Schools, 1830-1980 (New York: Garland Press, 1988), and Walch, Parish School.

9 Peter Guilday, A History of the Councils of Baltimore, 1791-1884 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 237-39; Buetow, Of Singular Benefit, 148-50; Marvin Lazerson, “Understanding American Catholic Educational History,” in Perko, Enlightening the Next Generation , 297-353.

10 Guilday, History of the Councils, 238-39; Spring, American School, 84-86; Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 271-77; Buetow, Of Singular Benefit, 146-54; Philip Gleason, “Baltimore III and Education,” in Perko, Enlightening the Next Generation, 381-417. In 1875 American bishops received a strong message of support for Catholic schools from Rome. See “Instruction of the Congregation of Propaganda de Fide Concerning Catholic Children Attending American Public Schools, November 24, 1875,” in Documents of American Catholic History, ed. John Tracy Ellis (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1956), 416-20.

11 Joel Perlman, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 64, and Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 277. Mary Jo Weaver has called the parochial schools “one of the most amazing building and educational programs in the history of the world.” See Weaver, New Catholic Women: A Continuous Challenge to Traditional Religious Authority (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), 27. Leslie Woodcock Tentler has echoed these sentiments in “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (March 1993): 107-9.

12 Dolan, American Catholic Exerience, 271; Buetow, Of Singular Benefit, 159-61; Walch, Parish School, 69-71, 88-90. The “Poughkeepsie Plan” and others in the state of New York were officially terminated by the New York state legislature in 1898.

13 M. Aida Doyle, History of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in the Troy Province (Albany: Argus Press, 1936), 167-70; Mary Ancilla Leary, The History of Catholic Education in the Diocese of Albany (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1957), 61-64.

14 The Stillwater arrangement ended in 1892, and Faribault ended one year later. Ireland evoked strong sentiment from Protestants and some Catholics, particularly German Catholics who feared that the German language and culture would be lost if Catholics did not have separate schools. Many bishops disagreed strongly with Ireland’s ideas on Americanization, and his speech to the National Education Association in 1890, in which he advocated state-supported church schools, had created a storm of controversy. See Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 274-76; James M. Reardon, The Catholic Church in the Diocese of St. Paul (St. Paul: North Central Pub., 1952), 290-303; La Vern J. Rippley, “Archbishop Ireland and the School Language Controversy,” in Perko, Enligbtening the Next Generation, 38-53; Thomas T. McAvoy, A History of the Catholic Church in the United States (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 296-99; and Timothy H. Morrissey, “Archbishop John Ireland and the Faribault-Stillwater School Plan of the 1890s: A Reappraisal” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1975).

15 Reardon, Catholic Church, 292-94. The quote is cited in Reardon, and he states it is taken from a letter from Ireland to Cardinal Gibbons, October 17, 1891.

16 Helen Angela Hurley, On Good Ground: The Story of the Sisters of St. Joseph in St. Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951), 210-15.

17 Ibid., 215. Florence Deacon reports that in Wisconsin nuns taught in the public schools, particularly rural schools, without such difficulties. See her “Handmaids or Autonomous Women: The Charitable Activities, Institution Building and Communal Relationships of Catholic Sisters in Nineteenth-Century Wisconsin” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1989), 153-87. However, many states enacted “anti-garb laws” to keep nuns out of public school classrooms, which effectively kept sisters from obtaining teacher certification in many states. For a legal analysis of the anti-garb issue in North Dakota and the School Sisters of Notre Dame see Linda Grathwohl, “The North Dakota Anti-Garb Law: Constitutional Conflict and Religious Strife,” Great Plains Quarterly 13, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 187-202.

18 Official Catholic Directory (New York: P. J. Kenedy, 1920), 1011. As with all national Catholic statistics and directories, there are some inconsistencies, although most historians agree within a few percentage points on school and population data. The other difficulty with school data is that parish and private academies or select schools were often lumped together, changing the total number of schools. For additional discussion and demographic detail see Buetow, Of Singular Benefit, 179; Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 275-76; and Gerald Shaughnessy, Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith? A Study of Immigration and Catholic Growth in the United States, 1790-1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1925).

19 George C. Stewart, Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 1994), 322, 564.

20 “CSJ General Chapter Report, 1920,” ACSJC-G.

21 Srs. Celestine Pommerel and St. John Fournier were chosen to be a part of the original group of sisters sent to the United States, but they spent a year in special training before coming to St. Louis in 1837. In the early nineteenth century the French were considered leaders in deaf education, so the two sisters probably received some of the best training available at the time. Dolorita Maria Dougherty et al., eds., The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1966), 120-22, 344-47. Although the large institute for the deaf in Buffalo became diocesan after the formation of general government, its earliest teachers came from St. Louis. Other CSJ communities that have worked with the deaf include those in Philadelphia, Boston, Rut-land, Vt., and Brentwood, Brooklyn, and Queens, N.Y See Sr. Rose Gertrude, “The Education of the Deaf in America by Sisters of St. Joseph” (unpublished manuscript, November 1958, ACSJC-SLP).

22 Letter from A. J. Meyer to Rev. Mother Agatha Guthrie, November 24, 1888, ACSJC-LAP. After 1920 and as parish elementary and high schools continued to increase, the CSJ academies that survived typically remained as private secondary schools for girls only—separate from the parish schools and funded by the CSJs and through tuition.

23 Letter from Sr. Flavia Waldron to Sr. Charles Brennan, October 6, 1898, ACSJC-AP. See also Doyle, History of the Sisters, 57-62, and Emily Joseph Daly, “The Albany Province,” in Dougherty et al., Sisters of St. Joseph, 222-24. For information about working-class Catholic families in Cohoes and Troy, N.Y, see Daniel J. Walkowitz, “Working-Class Culture in the Gilded Age: The Iron Workers of Troy, New York, and the Cotton Workers of Cohoes, New York—1855-1884” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1972).

24 Tyack and Hansot, Learning Together, 78-80. Tyack and Hansot argue that this was often a reflection of class bias. Middle-class and upper-class parents did not want their daughters mixing with working-class males.

25 Letter from Fr. A. J. Meyer to Rev. Mother Agatha Guthrie, November 24, 1888, ACSJC-LAP.

26 Ignatius Loyola Cox, “The Mission at St. Anthony Falls, or East Minneapolis,” Acta et Dicta 3, no. 2 (July 19 14): 289.

27 ”Report to the General Chapter—Troy Province 1920” and John F. Glavin, “Diamond Jubilee History—Albany Diocese 1847—1922,” ACSJC-AP. The high numbers in the first and second grade mirror attendance patterns in public schools.

28 Letter from Fr. J. J. Donnelly to Rev. Mother Agnes Gonzaga Ryan, January 12, 1906, ACSJC-SLP. There are other letters from Donnelly dating to 1916 expressing concern about the need for more teachers in the fast-growing parish. In a letter dated May 26, 1915, Donnelly stated that there were seventy children each in the first and second grade classes (ACSJC-SLP).

29 Letter from Fr. J. B. McNally to Rev. Mother Agatha Guthrie, July 28, 1885, ACSJC-SLP.

30 Although the manual was decades, if not a century old, the version of the manual that the original CSJs brought from France had been most recently published in 1832 in Lyons.

31 The School Manual for the Use of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (St. Louis: Carreras Pub. Co., 1884), revised 1910, ACSJC-SLP. See Mary Lucida Savage, The Congregation of St. Joseph of Carondelet: A Brief Account of Its Origin and Its Work in the United States, 1650-1922 (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1923), 94-96, and Dougherty et al., Sisters of St. Joseph, 218-19.

32 For discussions on the widespread use and high quality of the CSJ school manual see Buetow, Of Singular Benefit, 191-92, and Susan Carol Peterson and Courtney Ann Vaughn-Roberson, Women with Vision: The Presentation Sisters of South Dakota, 1880-1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 78-79. Many of the larger teaching orders, female and male, that originated in Europe had teaching guides.

33 CSJ School Manual (1884), introduction.

34 Ibid., 13-16, and CSJ School Manual (1910), 16-19. We wish to thank Dr. Laura Sloan of the Education Department at Avila College for her helpful analysis and comments on the manuals.

35 Catholic Child’s Letter Writer (St. Louis: Carreras Pub., 1886) incorporates geography and history to teach writing for grades 1-8; Child’s Geography and History of St. Louis City (St. Louis: Carreras Pub., 1886) includes a teacher’s edition for grades 3-4; and Language Manual incorporates language, letter writing, and arithmetic for grades 1-3 (St. Louis: Carreras Pub., 1890). All books are located in the ACSJC-SLP. Unfortunately we do not know the author(s) because in each case the books were “Compiled by the Sisters of St. Joseph.” It would be impossible to discern whether they were indeed a group effort or whether humility and avoiding singularity kept the author from stating her name.

36 Timothy Walch, “Catholic School Books and American Values: The Nineteenth-Century Experience,” in Perko, Enlightening the Next Generation, 267-76. Some of the most popular Catholic textbooks were published by the Christian Brothers, Sadlier, and Benziger Brothers.

37 Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 276. For a more extensive discussion on the importance and prevalence of ethnic parishes and the varieties of Catholic immigrant experiences see Walch, Parish School, 76-82; Jay P. Dolan, ed., The American Catholic Parish: A History from 1850 to the Present, 2 vols. (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), and The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975; reprint, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983); Jay P. Dolan and Gilberto M. Hinojosa, eds., Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900-1965 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994); Stephen Shaw, The Catholic Parish as a Way Station of Ethnicity and Americanization (New York: Carlsen Publishing Co., 1991); David O’Brien, Public Catholicism (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 34-61; and Michael Perko, “Catholics and Their Culturist Perspective,” in Perko, Enlightening the Next Generation, 311-16. For additional information on the importance of ethnic, religious, and cultural networks that includes discussions on immigrant Catholics see Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845-1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Robert A. Slayton, Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); and Kathleen Neils Conzen, Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).

38 German Lutherans, particularly those affiliated with the Lutheran ChurchMissouri Synod believed that to achieve reine Lehre (pure doctrine) children had to be taught the Lutheran faith in the language of Martin Luther. In the nineteenth century, they established the largest parochial school system of all Protestant denominations. Two sources provide extensive information about these schools: Walter H. Beck, Lutheran Elementary Schools in the United States (St. Louis: Concordia Pub., 1939), and August C. Stellhorn, Schools of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (St. Louis: Concordia Pub., 1963).

39 Hasia R. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 96-99. School teaching was a popular occupational choice for young Irish women on the Eastern seaboard, and they filled the ranks of urban public schools. Diner states that “school teaching for the second generation was what domestic service had been for the first” (97).

40 Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 276-84.

41 Quoted in Mary J. Oates, The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1995), 153. Oates also states that by the mid-1920s many of the 798 sisters teaching African American children came from Mother Katherine Drexel’s order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. This order focused its work on Native Americans and African Americans. A CSJ diocesan order that came from Le Puy to Florida and eventually Georgia was also heavily invested in the education of African Americans. Called the “nigger sisters” by local whites, the Florida community remained diocesan, but the Georgia group eventually affiliated with the CSJs of Carondelet in 1922. For more information on African American Catholic experience see Cyprian Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York: Crossroad, 1995) and “African-American Catholics and Their Church,” U.S. Catholic Historian (special issue) 12, no. 1 (Winter 1994).

42 Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 282-83. Dolan states that in rural areas with fewer than 2,500 people, it took an average of fourteen years to build a school. In small towns of 2,500 to 10,000 people it took an average of eleven years for the parish to create a school. In cities with a population over 50,000 a school was built within five years of the founding of a new parish.

43 For specific CSJ demographic data see Chapter 3. By the late nineteenth century, the CSJs still had a number of sisters who were bilingual, speaking fluent French, Spanish, or German as well as English. Although they probably did not have enough German- and Spanish-speaking sisters to meet the needs of various ethnic groups, they continued to staff bilingual schools for French Canadian, German, and Hispanic populations.

44 Margaret Susan Thompson, “Sisterhood and Power: Class, Culture and Ethnicity in the American Convent,” Colby Library Quarterly 25, no. 3 (September 1989): 149-75; Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 241-81. For additional reading on the significance of ethnic and linguistic differences among American Catholics see note 37, above, and Colman J. Barry, The Catholic Church and German Americans (Milwaukee: Bruce Pub., 1953); Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America; Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and John J. Bukowczyk, And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of the Polish-Americans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

45 Hurley, On Good Ground, 18-20, 149-50, 169-70; Annabelle Raiche and Ann Marie Biermaier, They Came to Teach: The Story of Sisters Who Taught in Parochial Schools and Their Contribution to Elementary Education in Minnesota (St. Cloud, Minn.: North Star Press, 1994), 73-74. The two German schools in St. Paul and Hastings were eventually staffed by two German orders, School Sisters of Notre Dame and Benedictines when the CSJs could not continue to supply enough German-speaking sisters.

46 Interview of Sr. Ailbe O‘Kelly by Sr. Susan Marie O’Connor, Syracuse, N.Y., January 23, 1981, ACSJC-AP.

47 “Florence, Arizona, 1883-1889” and “List of Sisters of St. Joseph from Early Mexican Families,” ACSJC-LAP. Six young women, Mexican-born or first-generation American-born, entered the Western province when it was located in Tucson in the late 1870s. Ann Cecilia Smith’s interview with Sr. Serena McCarthy about her experiences at St. Augustine’s in 1898 is cited in Ann Cecilia Smith, ”Educational Activities of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in the Western Province from 1870 to 1903” (master’s thesis, Catholic University, 1953), 35-36.

48 “Notes on St. Mary’s School—Oswego, N.Y.,” ACSJC-AP; Doyle, History of the Sisters, 45-55.

49 Dougherty et al., Sisters of St. Joseph, 113, 177. Eventually, ethnic rivalries divided some of these groups into separate parishes in Hancock. The French and Germans stayed together and the Italians and Irish each had their own parish.

50 “History of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in the Diocese of Mobile,” ACSJC-SLP; Lucida Savage, The Century’s Harvest, 1836-1936 (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1936), 52.

51 “Notes on St. Patrick’s Parish—Los Angeles,” ACSJC-LAP.

52 Leary’s History of Catholic Education examines each educational institution in the diocese of Albany (which originally included Syracuse and other parts of upstate New York), and in almost every case lay teachers had been the forerunners of sister-teachers in the parish schools. Even with the increase in teaching sisters, many schools hired lay teachers to serve in the larger schools because there were never enough sisters to fill all the needs of parish education, particularly since these New York parishes often offered secondary course work before parish schools in other parts of the country.

53 Mary J. Oates, “Organized Voluntarism: The Catholic Sisters in Massachusetts, 1870-1940,” in Women in American Religion, ed. Janet Wilson James (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 154-59; Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 289; Raiche and Biermaier, They Came to Teach, 105.

54 Historians of education have extensively researched this transition from male to female teachers in the United States. For more discussion on this phenomenon see Tyack and Hansot, Learning Together, Spring, American School; Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic; Nancy Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1981); and Polly Welts Kaufman, Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).

55 Oates, “Organized Voluntarism,” 154-56; Dolan, American Catbolic Experience, 289. Oates has made a very careful study of sisters’ salaries and compared them to those of female public school teachers and to the cost of living expenses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

56 Burns, Growth and Development, 23, 100, 282.

57 “Silver Jubilee” program for St. Mary’s Parish, St. Paul, Minn., ACSJC-SPP. The nuns may have earned even less since their salaries were recorded for 1898 and the Brothers’ salaries were recorded from 1876.

58 “The Institute Journal,” Amsterdam, N.Y, 1889-90, ACSJC-AP.

59 Financial Report (1914) from St. Vincent’s Convent, Los Angeles, ACSJC-LAP.

60 Memoirs of Sr. Rose Edward Dailey in Jubilarse, ed. Margaret John Purcell (St. Louis: Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, 1981), 45.

61 “Statement of Account—St. John’s Parish, Kansas City, Mo.,” June 1882-Dec. 1904, ACSJC-SLP. The CSJs came to the parish in 1887 to open the school and stayed until 1935.

62 Letter from Fr. J. B. McNally to Rev. Mother Agatha Guthrie, July 26, 1883, ACSJC-LAP.

63 Account statement and itemization of the St. Mary’s Academy Convent, Hoosick Falls, N.Y., ACSJC-AP. The CSJ contribution included everything from carpet to window fixtures and the appliances for the laundry and the kitchen.

64 “Ascension [Parish] Builds a House [for Sister-Teachers],” n.d., ACSJC-SPP.

65 Interview of Sr. Liboria Wendling by Sr. St. Henry Palmer, July 1964, in Tucson, Arizona, ACSJC-LAP.

66 Mary Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 68, 98, 215.

67 Letter to the Rev. Andrew Duplang from the “Sisters of St. Joseph,” June 2, 1911, ACSJC-AP. Although only the Duplang letter survives, it was sent to all “Reverend Pastors” in the Albany and Syracuse dioceses. The letter probably came from Mother Odilia Bogan, the provincial superior. The CSJs in the other three provinces did not close their academies, so when the Troy province closed these schools in 1883, the order probably came from the bishop. James Hennesey states that in 1883 in a preliminary meeting, American bishops created the agenda for the 1884 Baltimore Council that mandated parish schools. Therefore, the timing of the change is probably not coincidental since bishops certainly understood the upcoming need for more parish teachers. Closing the select academies freed up sisters to staff parish schools (American Catholics, 182).

68 Thomas J. Noel, Colorado Catholicism and the Archdiocese of Denver, 185-1989 (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1989), 362-64. A series of articles on the feud can be found in the Denver Republican beginning May 1909 and appearing for a year, until the civil court case was completed. Carrigan had friends in the press and city hall, but Matz prevailed and reassigned him to Glenwood Springs in 1910. Fr. Carrigan was appointed to St. Patrick’s by French-born bishop Machebeuf, but he was greatly disappointed when in 1889 French-born Matz was appointed at Machebeuf’s death. Carrigan had hoped for an Irish bishop, and he proceeded to challenge Matz and criticize him in the diocese.

69 The letters and telegrams were sent from May to August 1909 (ACSJC-SLP). Matz communicated only with the motherhouse in St. Louis. He sent a representative to talk with the local sisters at St. Patrick’s. Sr. Marguerite Murphy was superior of the Denver convent, and she wrote the motherhouse continuously about how the sisters were put in untenable situations. Coming close to blows on several occasions, Fr. Carrigan and the bishop’s representative, Fr. Donovan, battled over who would hear the sisters’ confessions, who would provide the “Blessed Sacrament,” and who would have coffee and breakfast in the morning with the sisters. Carrigan labeled Sr. Marguerite “hysterical” in a June 4, 1909, telegram to St. Louis, and Matz sent a telegram on June 11, 1909, advising the Reverend Mother to tell her Denver sisters to “mind their own business and not waste their sympathies upon a suspended and excommunicated priest.” If they do this, he continued, “they will have nothing to fear [from him].”

70 Letter from Rev. Mother Agnes Gonzaga Ryan to Bishop Matz, June 18, 1912, ACSJC-SLP.

71 Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, introduction to Women and Power in American History: A Reader, vol. 2, ed. Sklar and Dublin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1991), 2.

72 Once again, the fact that the CSJs had papal approbation and were not a diocesan community ruled by the bishop gave them an additional buffer against his demands. This chronic problem of male interference may be the most common one experienced across all orders of women religious. For examples similar to the CSJ experience see M. Georgia Costin, Priceless Spirit: A History of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, 1841-1893 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994); Mary Roger Madden, The Path Marked Out: History of the Sisters of Providence of St. Mary-of-the-Woods, vol. 3 (Terre Haute, Ind.: Sisters of Providence, 1991); Stewart, Marvels of Charity; and Ewens, Role of the Nun. For an interesting cross-cultural comparison of gender politics in the church see Anne McLay, Women out of Their Sphere: A History of the Sisters of Mercy in Western Australia (Western Australia: Vanguard Press, 1992).

73 Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession, 210-11. For additional analysis on the shift to a bureaucratic, business model for schools see Michael Katz, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools (New York: Rhinehart and Winston, 1975), and David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1974).

74 Guilday, History of the Councils, 239.

75 For a chronological analysis of this transition and the similarities of Catholic and public schools see Lazerson, “Understanding American Catholic Educational History,” 340-50. Lazerson states that it took decades for the transition to reach all Catholic parishes and that the larger cities were advantaged because they had many lay Catholics who were involved in the standardization of the public schools as well.

76 Hennesey, American Catholics, 210; Leary, History of Catholic Education, 315-17; Lazerson, “Understanding American Catholic History,” 348-50; Buetow, Of Singular Benefit, 180-84; John F. Murphy, “Professional Preparation of Catholic Teachers in the Nineteen Hundreds,” in Perko, Enlightening the Next Generation, 243-53.

77 R. G. T., “Fifty Years in Retrospect,” in the Souvenir Program of the Fiftieth-Anniversary Celebration, St. Mary’s Institute, Amsterdam, N.Y., June 22-27, 1930. Leary, History of Catholic Education, 40-42. Leary indicates that the state instituted the exams in 1877 (139, 336).

78 Interview of Sr. Petronilla McGowan by Sr. Susan O‘Connor, January 17, 1985, in Latham, N.Y., ACSJC-AP. Sr. Petronilla also told the story about Sr. Blanche Rooney.

79 For the vast majority of states we feel this to be true, although there are some notable exceptions. Mary Oates has documented the high quality of public school teachers compared to sister-teachers in Massachusetts. However, as she has stated, Massachusetts was always ahead of the national norm in education and therefore is the exception, not the rule. See Oates, “Organized Voluntarism,” and Walch, Parish School, 134-55.

80 Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession, xiv-xxi.

81 Ibid., 13, 212.

82 Katherine M. Cook, State Laws and Regulations Governing Teacher’s Certificates (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1921), 16, and P. P. Claxton, foreword to Annual Report of the State Commissioner of Education for 1912—New York (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913), xviii.

83 For examples from other religious orders see Oates, “Organized Voluntarism,” 166, and Mary J. Oates, “‘The Good Sisters’: The Work and Position of Catholic Churchwomen in Boston, 1870-1940,” in The American Catholic Religious Life, ed. Joseph M. White (New York: Garland Press, 1988), 181; Deacon, “Handmaids or Autonomous Women,” 198-204; Weaver, New Catholic Women, 80; and Peterson and Vaughn-Roberson, Women with Vision, 67-77.

84 Memoirs of Sr. Mary Eustace Huster in Purcell, Jubilarse, 3-4.

85 Raiche and Biermaier, They Came to Teach, 37. The orders of teaching sisters in Minnesota include CSJs, Sisters of St. Benedict, Franciscan Sisters, School Sisters of Notre Dame, and Sisters of St. Francis.

86 Bertrande Meyer, The Education of Sisters (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1941), 6-7; Deacon, “Handmaids or Autonomous Women;’ 187-98; Raiche and Biermaier, They Came to Teach, 63-64; Stewart, Marvels of Charity, 323-24; Madden, Path Marked Out, 558-59.

87 Raiche and Biermaier, They Came to Teach, 37-41; Sr. Winifred (Kate) Hogan, “My Reminiscences,” 1922, ACSJC-SPP.

88 Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 176.

89 A. C. Mason, 1,000 Ways of 1,000 Teachers: Being a Compilation of Methods of Instruction and Discipline Practiced by Prominent Public School Teachers of the Country (Chicago: S. R. Winchell, 1882).

90 Meyer, Education of Sisters. This work uses a variety of archival sources from female teaching orders to elaborate on all three components of teacher preparation used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

91 For one of the best primary sources on the early years of the Sisters’ College summer institute and degree programs see the Catholic Educational Review (1911-20). Thomas E. Shields of Catholic University began the journal in January 1911, and as an avid proponent of Sisters’ College he provided extensive coverage of its early years. A good overview of the college after eight years can be found in Shields, “The Need of the Catholic Sisters’ College and the Scope of Its Work,” Catholic Educational Preview 17 (September 1919): 420-29. See also Murphy, “Professional Preparation,” 248-53. and Philip Gleason, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 88-89.

92 Since all-male Catholic colleges would not admit women, even women religious, sisters typically attended the closest state institution that had an education program. According to Meyer, Education of Sisters, the Paulist Fathers inaugurated a Sisters’ Institute in New York City in 1895 and Catholic University began an Institute of Pedagogy in New York in 1902. Eventually other colleges, such as the University of Chicago, St. Louis University, and Marquette University, established a Saturday, 4-6 P.M., session and a full summer session, designed to take advantage of times when few male students were on campus (16-17).

93 Interview of Sr. Letitia Lirette by Sr. Patricia Kelly, March 7, 1985, at Carondelet Convent in St. Louis, ACSJC-SLP.

94 Raiche and Biermaier, They Came to Teach, 62.

95 Letter to the Rev. Andrew Duplang from “Sisters of St. Joseph,” June 2, 1911.

96 Thomas J. Shahan, “The Summer School,” and Patrick J. McCormick, “The Summer School and Report of the Secretary,” Catholic Educational Review 2, no. 2 (September 1911): 593-604 and 658-61. The thirty-one Sisters of St. Joseph included the Carondelet group and other CSJ communities. The Sisters of Mercy had the largest number with fifty-two and the Benedictines were second with thirty-six. Twenty-nine lay women teachers also attended.

97 An Ursuline of St. Ursula Convent, “The First Session the Summer School of the Catholic University,” Catholic Educational Review 2, no. 2 (September 1911): 654-57, and A Sister of Holy Names, “What the First Summer School at the Catholic University of America Was to Students,” Catholic Educational Review 2, no. 3 (October 1911): 673-81. The sisters wrote the essays anonymously to avoid “singularity.” Their identity is still not known.

98 J. A. Burns, “A Constructive Policy for Catholic Higher Education,” Catholic Educational Review 17 (1919): 458.

99 Raiche and Biermaier, They Came to Teach, 62-63.

100 Deacon, “Handmaids or Autonomous Women,” 197-98. This was particularly ironic in Wisconsin, where local districts were allowed to hire nuns (in habit) for public schools.

101 “University Degrees Conferred on Sisters,” Catholic Educational Review 5 (June 1913): 47-50.

102 Thomas E. Shields, “The Sisters College,” Catholic Educational Review 3, no. 1 (January 1912): 1-12, and “The Summer Session,” Catholic Educational Review 9, no. 1 (January 1915): 36-42.

1 Although some female institutions were called academies and others seminaries, in reality there was very little difference between them. Both included moral and religious training, as did almost every school in the nineteenth century. Although some institutions were not affiliated with a particular Protestant denomination, they were rarely secular and espoused a “pan-Protestant” moral and religious perspective. We will use the terms “academy” and “seminary” interchangeably in this chapter.

2 Thomas Woody, A History of Women’s Education in the United States, vol. 1 (New York: Science Press, 1929; reprint, New York: Octagon Books, 1980), 39-30. Woody states that the curriculum was very rudimentary and it is difficult to know if course work went beyond the three R‘s, industrial training, and religion. His two-volume work provides abundant detail on all aspects of women’s education in the United States. For more information about these early academies see H. C. Semple, ed., The Ursulines in New Orleans, 1725-1925 (New York: P. J. Kenedy, 1925); Lyman P. Powell, History of Education in Delaware (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893); and W C. Reichel, History of Bethlehem Female Seminary (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1858).

3 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness from the MiddleAges to 1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 209-15; Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: W W Norton, 1988), chs. 7 and 8, and “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—An American Perspective,” American Quarterly 28 (Summer 1976): 187-205; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 243-55.

4 Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W W Norton, 1976); Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 14-42; Polly Welts Kaufman, Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Nancy Hoffman, Woman’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1981), 1-63.

5 For an extensive chronological list with descriptions of some academies see Woody, History of Women’s Education, 1:329-96. The importance of these academies probably cannot be overstated in their ability to encourage women to expand their influence and expectations beyond the home. Some scholars have argued, quite convincingly, that the academy/seminary experience created a generation of women with the skills and confidence to participate in nineteenth-century social activism in moral reform societies and abolitionist, temperance, and women’s rights movements. For example see Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 15-42; Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 101-25; Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), 40-71; and Sara Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: The Free Press, 1989), 70-81, 93-118.

6 For a discussion of the importance of European convent schools see Lerner, Creation of Feminist Consciousness, 26-28, 198-200, and Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 184-93. Besides the Ursulines, other communities that opened academies in the United States include Visitandines, Sisters of Charity, Dominicans, and Religious of the Sacred Heart. See Barbara Misner, Highly Respectable and Accomplished Ladies: Catholic Women Beligious in America, 1790-1850 (New York: Garland Press, 1988).

7 For information on these antebellum academies see Sr. M. Benedict Murphy, ”Pioneer Roman Catholic Girls’ Academies: Their Growth, Character, and Contribution to American Education: A Study of Roman Catholic Education for Girls from Colonial Times to the First Plenary Council of 1852” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1958). For information on the state school systems and Catholic sisters’ schools see Maria Alma, Standard Bearers: The Place of Catholic Sisterhoods in the Early History of Education ... until 1850 (New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1928); see also Misner, Highly Respectably Ladies; Mary Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 35-68; Eileen Mary Brewer, Nuns and the Education of American Catholic Women, 1860-1920 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1987); and Mary J. Oates, “Catholic Female Academies on the Frontier,” U.S. Catholic Historian 12, no. 4 (1994): 121-36.

8 For reasons discussed in Chapter 5, the Eastern province (Troy, N.Y) closed its secondary academies in 1883 and allowed them to be absorbed into the parish system in upstate New York (Albany and later Syracuse dioceses). Many of these schools retained their academy names but functioned as parish high schools, receiving a charter under the New York Regents System. Although CSJs in the other three provinces taught in parish and diocesan high schools, they retained their private academies.

9 Whether analyzing Catholic or non-Catholic academies or public schools, studies show that girls attended in larger numbers at the secondary level. For a comparison of male and female Catholic secondary education in Antebellum America see Edmund J. Goebel, A Study of Catholic Secondary Education during the Colonial Period up to the First Plenary Council of Baltimore, 1852 (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1937). Catholic directories (1840-1920), as well as research done by Catholic University, verify this phenomenon. See “The Condition of Catholic Secondary Education,” Catholic Educational Preview 10 (1915): 204-10. This “Report of the Advisory Board” surveyed Catholic schools and reported 557 secondary schools for girls educating 39,740 students, compared to 438 secondary schools for boys educating 34,798 students. According to historian Thomas Woody, girls attended in larger numbers in private secondary schools, both Catholic and non-Catholic, and public high schools showed the same disparity. By 1920 over one million girls were in public high schools compared to 800,000 boys. For more analysis and data on public school attendance see Woody, History of Women’s Education, 1:545-46.

10 This organization sponsored hundreds of graduates from these eastern academies, and between 1848 and 1854 seminary graduates from New York and New England received teaching assignments in seventeen states, from western Pennsylvania to as far west as Oregon. For discussion on the NBPE see Kaufman, Women Teachers, 5-39, and Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 183, 217.

11 Letter from Harriet Bishop in New York Evangelist, October 13, 1853, cited in Annabelle Raiche and Ann Marie Biermaier, They Came to Teach: The Story of Sisters Who Taught in Parochial Schools and Their Contribution to Elementary Education in Minnesota (St. Cloud, Minn.: North Star Press, 1994), 6.

12 The quote is attributed to Fredrika Bremer, who met Catharine in Milwaukee in 1851, and is cited in Sklar, Catherine Beecher, 220.

13 Ibid., 170-72. Some of these quoted phrases and a list of convent academies in the West can be found in Catharine Beecher, An Address to the Protestant Clergy of the United States (New York: Harper and Bros., 1846) and Evils Suffered by American Women and American Children: The Causes and the Remedy (New York: Harper and Bros., 1846).

14 Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 17-22; Woody, History of Women’s Education, 1:349-62; Oates, “Catholic Female Academies,” 123-24; Murphy, “Pioneer Roman Catholic Girls’ Academies,” 111.

15 Woody, History of Women’s Education, 1:379; Nikola Baumgarten, “Education and Democracy in Frontier St. Louis: The Society of the Sacred Heart,” History of Education Quarterly 34 (Summer 1994): 171-92.

16 Baumgarten, “Education and Democracy,” 182-83. See also Woody, History of Women’s Education, 1:409-22; Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 2 3; Oates, “Catholic Female Academies,” 124-26; and Anne Firor Scott, “The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822-1872,” History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring 1979): 3-25.

17 Memoirs of Eliza McKenney Brouillet, ACSJC-SLP. These are comprised of a series of letters written in the 1890s to Sr. Monica Corrigan to provide information for a community history.

18 Sr. Mary Rose Marsteller was born in Virginia and educated in Baltimore; she entered the CSJ community in 1841 at the age of thirty-one. The CSJs were extremely fortunate that she came to St. Louis and began teaching in the academy during the illness and eventual death of their first American-born and only English-speaking sister, Sr. Mary Joseph Dillon. It is probable that Marsteller entered the community after she had already begun to teach at the academy. In Brouillet’s memoirs (ACSJC-SLP), she is referred to as “Miss Marsteller of Baltimore,” implying that Marsteller was teaching before she became a postulant—a postulancy that was reduced to three months after Dillon’s death. Mary Lucida Savage, The Congregation of St. Joseph of Carondelet: A Brief Account of Its Origins and Its Work in the United States, 1650-1922 (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1923), 62, 94-96, and Catharine Frances Redmond, “The Convent School of French Origin in the United States, 1727-1843” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1936), 117. This dissertation also provides a good overview of curriculum and structure of the early French-based convent academies.

19 The academies all existed for different periods of time, and some states had as many as seven different academies within their borders. The secondary academies were located in Missouri, New York, California, Arizona, Alabama, Illinois, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Michigan, Minnesota, and North Dakota. Academies in Mississippi, Colorado, and Tennessee existed for only a short time and never developed much beyond the elementary grades. Georgia is not included in this list because the formerly diocesan Georgia community did not merge with the CSJs of Carondelet until the 1920s, after the time period of this study.

20 Palladium Times, September 6, 1858, Oswego, N.Y.

21 Baumgarten, “Education and Democracy,” 182-83; Oates, “Catholic Female Academies,” 123-25; Kim Tolley, “Science for Ladies, Classics for Gentlemen: A Comparative Analysis of Scientific Subjects in the Curricula of Boys’ and Girls’ Secondary Schools in the United States,” History of Education Quarterly 3 6, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 129-53. Tolley presents a strong argument on this issue and blames this “misinterpretation” of the importance of “ornamentals” on the unquestioned acceptance of Woody’s 1929 classic, History of Women’s Education, 1:415.

22 For comparisons of a variety of Catholic orders regarding curriculum and costs see Ewens, Role of the Nun, 98-104; Brewer, Nuns and the Education; Baumgarten, “Education and Democracy;” and Oates, “Catholic Female Academies.”

23 Surviving catalogs and documents are from the three provinces that maintained secondary academies through 1920. Examples include “Prospectus of St. Joseph’s Academy, St. Louis,” 1861, Academy of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, 1893 and 1913, ACSJC-SLP; H. W Wells, “Academy of Our Lady,” in The Schools and the Teachers of Early Peoria (Peoria, Ill.: Jacquin and Co., 1900), 127-31, and St. Teresa’s Junior College and Academy Yearbook, Kansas City, 1919-20, ACSJC-SLP; “St. Joseph’s Academy for Young Ladies, St. Paul, 1861,” Annual Catalogue of St. Joseph’s Academy, St. Paul, 1875 and 1907, Annual Catalogue of St. Margaret’s Academy, Minneapolis, 1907, and Annual Catalogue of St. John’s Academy, Jamestown, N.D., 1909, ACSJC-SPP; and Annual Catalogue of St. Mary’s Academy, Los Angeles, 1904-5, and Annual Catalogue of St. Joseph’s Academy, Prescott, Ariz., 1909, ACSJC-LAP.

24 Tolley, “Science for Ladies,” 129-53. Tolley confirms that boys’ academies and colleges had increased their science offerings significantly by the late nineteenth century. For an expanded analysis of Tolley’s work see her ”Science Education of American Girls, 1794-1932” (Ph.D. diss., University of California—Berkeley, 1997), and Deborah Jean Warner, “Science Education for Women in Antebellum America,” Isis 69 (March 1978): 58-67. See also Woody, History of Women’s Education, 1:563-65. His analysis of 162 academy catalogs published between 1742 and 1871 confirms that natural philosophy (physics), astronomy, chemistry, and botany were among the ten subjects most frequently listed in the standard curriculum.

25 Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 95-96; “St. Joseph’s Academy,” St. Paul, 1861, ACSJC-SPP; “Prospectus of St. Joseph’s Academy,” Cohoes, N.Y, 1861, ACSJC-AP.

26 Woody, History of Women’s Education, 2:52-97; David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 165-242. Tyack and Hansot describe the “differentiating by sex” of the American public high school. Although girls outnumbered boys in coeducational high schools, gender-segregated courses produced a detrimental effect on girls’ enrollment in math and science courses. Girls actually lost ground between 1890 and 1930, when boys were tracked into math and science and girls “counseled out” of these subjects in favor of a practical education (i.e., home economics and commercial courses). The curricular trends also impacted racial and ethnic minorities who were consistently channeled into vocational tracks in high schools. See also William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 220-30. For discussion on how gender-segregated curricula affected women’s higher education see Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 82-87, 149-56.

27 Academy of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, St. Louis, 1913; Wells, “Academy of Our Lady,” and “St. Joseph’s Academy,” Green Bay, Wisc., ACSJC-SLP; St. Teresa’s Junior College and Academy, Kansas City, Mo., 1919-20, Avila College Records, Kansas City, Mo.; Annual Catalogue of St. Joseph’s Academy, Prescott, Ariz., 1910, and Annual Catalogue of St. Mary’s Academy, Los Angeles, 1904-5, ACSJC-LAP; Annual Catalogue of St. Joseph’s Academy, St. Paul, 1907-8, Annual Catalogue of St. John’s Academy, Jamestown, N.D., 1909, Annual Catalogue of St. Margaret’s Academy, Minneapolis, 1907, and “Derham Hall—Program of Study, 1918-1919,” St. Paul, ACSJC-SPP.

28 For sources on and examples of convent academy life in a variety of communities see Brewer, Nuns and the Education, 45-77, and Murphy, “Pioneer Roman Catholic Girls’ Academies,” 44-45. For examples of sources published for popular audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see Mary Elliott, “School Days at the Sacred Heart,” Putnam’s Magazine, March 1870, 275-86; Agnes Repplier, In Our Convent Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1905); and George Sand, My Convent Life, trans. Maria Ellery McKay (Boston: Roberts, 1893; reprint, Chicago: Academy Press, 1978).

29 Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 60.

30 Memoirs of Eliza McKenney Brouillet, ACSJC-SLP. These memoirs provide rich descriptions of the early years (1840s) of St. Joseph’s Academy in St. Louis.

31 Ibid.

32 Sr. Winifred (Kate) Hogan, “My Reminiscences,” 1922, ACSJC-SPP.

33 Woody, History of Women’s Education, 434-56; Brewer, Nuns and the Education, 45-77. This comparison is probably based on a difference of degree of student supervision and regulation, which certainly varied depending upon the time period. Early Protestant seminaries were extremely restrictive with student behavior codes, but toward the end of the nineteenth century and definitely by the early twentieth century, Catholic convent academies retained more conservative student regulations than many private academies and certainly far more than public high schools.

34 Hogan, “My Reminiscences.”

35 Brouillet’s and Hogan’s memoirs describe many student pranks. See also Evelyn O’Neill, “St. Teresa’s Academy,” Kansas City (unpublished manuscript, May 1925, ACSJC-SLP and STAA).

36 Hogan, “My Reminiscences.”

37 St. Teresa’s Academy Catalogue, 1919, 5, ACSJC-SLP; St. Joseph’s Academy Catalogue, 1910, 5, ACSJC-LAP; Tucson City Directory (1881), 5, ACSJC-LAP; Wells, Schools, 129.

38 Protestant attendance at convent academies is well documented. Some communities kept specific records on religious affiliation and actually had a Protestant majority in the early days of the academies. For information and discussion on this issue see Baumgarten, “Education and Democracy,” 174-75, 182, 186-88; Brewer, Nuns and the Education, 87-91; Murphy, “Pioneer Roman Catholic Girls’ Academies,” 143-49; Ewens, Role of the Nun, 66-67; Oates, “Catholic Female Academies,” 127-28; and Joseph G. Mannard, “Maternity ... of the Spirit: Nuns and Domesticity in Antebellum America,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5 (Summer 1986): 311-16.

39 This quote and others are cited in Mannard, “Maternity ... of the Spirit,” 310-11. See The American Ladies Magazine, September 1834, and The Mother’s Magazine, May 1835. Editors of these magazines, Sarah Hale and Abigail G. Whittelsey, often used the writings and speeches of Catharine Beecher to promote these ideas.

40 Baumgarten, “Education and Democracy,” 186; Mary Ewens, “The Leadership of Nuns in Immigrant Catholicism,” in Women and Religion in America, vol. 1, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 102; Mary Ewens “Removing the Veil: The Liberated American Nun,” in Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 269.

41 Hogan, “My Reminiscences.”

42 These four became leaders in the community, but there certainly were others of lesser status; unfortunately, biographic information is sketchy or absent on nineteenth-century CSJs. For a discussion on the “social appeal” of Catholic religious life see Joseph Mannard, “Converts in Convents: Protestant Women and the Social Appeal of Catholic Religious Life in Antebellum America,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 104 (Spring/Winter 1993): 79-90.

43 “Annals of the Sisters of St. Joseph at Chillicothe, Mo.,” ACSJC-SLP. Mother Herman Lacy was one of the “mavericks” discussed in Chapter 3. Chillicothe appears to be where she was reassigned after her clash with a bishop while at the Cathedral School in New York. It is rare that a nun’s loss of temper would be recorded by another sister, so Lacy’s frustration over having been banished from the relative comforts of an Eastern academy to “primitive” northwestern Missouri must have been intense.

44 Diary of Sr. Justine LeMay, Hancock, Mich., ACSJC-SLP.

45 Sr. Dolorosa Mannix, “St. Joseph’s Academy, Tucson”; Reminiscences of Sr. St. Barbara Reilly, ACSJC-LAP.

46 Ledger Book 3, 1873-83, St. Teresa’s Academy, Kansas City, Mo., STAA.

47 “Brief Items Connected with the Establishment of the Home of Our Lady of Peace, San Diego, Calif.,” ACSJC-LAP.

48 In the first eighteen years of the conservatory 4,421 pupils were registered in art or music classes (“St. Agatha’s Conservatory—Number of Pupils, 1884-1902,” ACSJC-SPP).

49 Although the provincial archives (ACSJC-SPP) contain many materials about St. Agatha‘s, the most accessible and interesting information can be found in Ann Thomasine Sampson, “St. Agatha’s Conservatory and the Pursuit of Excellence,” Ramsey County History 24, no. 1 (1989): 3-19. The conservatory closed in 1962.

50 Memoirs of Sr. Francis Joseph Ivory, ACSJC-SLP.

51 See Chapter 4 for descriptions of CSJ fund-raising activities in the Rocky Mountains and Southwest.

52 Depending upon the location of the academies, boarders came from surrounding states. In St. Paul, academies had high representations from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota. In a central location like St. Louis or Kansas City as many as ten states might be represented at the academy.

53 Letter from Bishop Nicholas Matz to Rev. Mother Agnes Gonzaga Ryan, August 31, 1911, ACSJ C-SLP. The sisters’ behavior was not unusual for nineteenth-century nuns on recruiting trips, so this clash probably had more to do with the power struggles between the nun and bishop. Matz and Ryan had not been on the best of terms ever since Ryan had withdrawn CSJs from St. Patrick’s School (Denver) during Matz’s legal dispute with Fr. Michael Carrigan two years earlier. As of this date she had refused to send sisters back to St. Patrick’s.

54 By the mid-nineteenth century CSJS and other sisterhoods filed for incorporation status to alleviate ownership disputes over their institutions. Examples of the struggles between male clerics and nuns fill the convent archives of every congregation. For examples from a variety of religious communities see Margaret Susan Thompson, “To Serve the People of God: Nineteenth-Century Sisters and the Creation of a Religious Life,” Working Paper Series, Cushwa Center, University of Notre Dame, ser. 18, no. 2, Spring 1987, and “Women, Feminism, and the New Religious History : Catholic Sisters As a Case Study,” in Belief and Behavior: Essays in the New Religious History, ed. Philip R. Vandermeer and Robert P. Swerienga (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 136-63; Ewens, Role of the Nun; George C. Stewart, Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 1994); and Florence Deacon, “Handmaids or Autonomous Women: The Charitable Activities, Institution Building and Communal Relationships of Catholic Sisters in Nineteenth-Century Wisconsin” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1989), 340-85.

55 O’Neill, “St. Teresa’s Academy,” 39-47.

56 Ibid., 47. Fifty-one years later the CSJs in Kansas City “lost” in another property negotiation. The St. Joseph’s Orphan Home for Girls was owned outright by the CSJS. They had never received remuneration for their seventy-seven years of service to the Catholic community in Kansas City, having assumed renovation costs and other expenses during that time. After the sisters refused Bishop John Cody’s request to make it coeducational in 1957, he pressured them to sell it to him for $100,000. Less than one year later he placed the property on the market for over four times that amount. See Michael Coleman, ed., This Far by Faith, vol. 2 (Kansas City, Mo.: Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, 1992), 575-77.

57 Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 50; Stewart, Marvels of Charity, 549-56; Mary J. Oates, introduction to Higher Education for Catholic Women: An Historical Anthology, ed. Mary J. Oates (New York: Garland Press, 1987), and “The Development of Catholic Colleges for Women, 1895-1960,” U.S. Catholic Historian 7 (Fall 1988): 413-26; Edward J. Powers, A History of Catholic Higher Education in the United States (Milwaukee: Bruce Pub. Co., 1958), 184; Philip Gleason, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 89.

58 See note 9 for documentation; however, it is important to note that many male colleges, Catholic or Protestant, included preparatory programs; therefore, some males were receiving secondary course work but under the auspices of a “college.”

59 Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for American Women (New York: Harper, 1959), 46. In 1870 this figure included only .7 percent of women between eighteen and twenty-one, and in 1920 it included 7.6 percent of this age group.

60 Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education; Or, a Fair Chance for the Girls (Boston: Osgood, 1873), 18, 23, 63, 69, 116, 122-29. This book was widely read and went through seventeen printings. In 1874 Clarke wrote a sequel, The Building of a Brain (Boston: Osgood, 1874). For further discussion of Clarke’s impact on the debate on women’s higher education see Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: The Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 1-27.

61 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871), 1:278-79.

62 G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (New York: Appleton, 1904), 2:602. These arguments are fully detailed in Henry Maudsley’s Sex in Mind and Education (Boston: Osgood, 1884). Both Edward Clarke and Maudsley quote extensively from the writings of S. Weir Mitchell, a noted neurologist who recommended a “rest cure” for such “high-strung” women. One of his most notable patients was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who later wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper,” fictionalizing her real-life experiences with Dr. Mitchell and the “rest cure.”

63 Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, 30-31, and “The Academic Prism: The New View of American Women,” in Women of America: A History, ed. Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1979), 318-41. The nineteenth-century American West has often been portrayed as egalitarian in its early acceptance of coeducational colleges. In reality, the small struggling universities throughout the Midwest and West had no choice but to allow and encourage women to attend if they were to remain open. See John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities, 1636-1976 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 66-69, and Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S. Wechsler, eds., The History of Higher Education, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).

64 Rosenberg, “Academic Prism,” 320-23; Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 58. Solomon states that by 1900 more than twice as many women were enrolled in coeducational institutions than in women-only colleges. See Newcomer, Century of Higher Education, 37, 46, and Woody, History of Women’s Education, 2:256-57, 281.

65 Opponents and proponents of women’s higher education used cultural arguments to predict contradictory outcomes on how women’s education would impact sex roles, marriage, and childbirth. For examples see Mary Ashton Livermore, What Shall We Do With Our Daughters? (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1883), 43-45; Ely Van deWarker, Women’s Unfitness for Higher Education (New York: Grafton Press, 1903), 8; John Bascom, “Coeducation,” Educational Review 36 (1908): 444; and Willystine Good-sell, The Education of Women: Its Social Background and Its Problems (New York: Macmillan, 1923). For a discussion on the concept of “race suicide” and how college-educated women were blamed for the lower white birthrate see Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (New York: Penguin Press, 1976), 131-58.

66 Thomas J. Shahan, “The Summer School,” Catholic Educational Review 2, no. 2 (September 1911): 593-604.

67 Woody, History of Women’s Education, 2:280-81.

68 For an excellent anthology of primary documents that illuminate the debates on Catholic women’s higher education see Oates, Higher Education. Two of the more outspoken bishops who were proponents of higher education for women were John Ireland (St. Paul) and John Lancaster Spalding (Peoria, Ill.). For a related discussion of clerical and lay attitudes toward women’s place, suffrage, and higher education for Catholic women see Karen J. Kennelly, “Ideals of American Catholic Womanhood,” in American Catholic Women: An Historical Exploration, ed. Karen Kennelly (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 1-16; James J. Kenneally, The History of American Catholic Women (New York: Crossroad, 1990); and Colleen McDannell, “Catholic Domesticity, 1860-1960,” in Kennelly, American Catholic Women, 48-80.

69 Educators at Catholic University in 1911 did inaugurate Sisters’ College, which is described in more detail in Chapter 5, adjacent to the university. Mary J. Oates, “The Development of Catholic Colleges,” 413-14, and introduction to Oates, Higher Education ; Powers, A History of Catholic Higher Education, 182-84; Gleason, Contending with Modernity, 87-89.

70 Oates, “Development of Catholic Colleges,” 415; A Sister of Notre Dame (Mary Patricia Butler), An Historical Sketch of Trinity College, Washington, D.C., 1897-1925 (Washington, D.C.: Trinity College, 1925), 72-73. See also Oates, Higher Education.

71 Gleason, Contending with Modernity, 89-95. The CSJs’ College of St. Catherine in St. Paul was on this list of accredited institutions. By 1918 there was concern about Catholic women’s colleges proliferating too quickly without enough concern for trained faculty and high-quality curriculum. See Mary Molloy, “Catholic Colleges for Women,” and Grace Dammann, “The American Catholic College for Women,” in Oates, Higher Education, 342-49 and 149-70.

72 For an overview of St. Catherine’s see Carol K. Coburn, “The College of St. Catherine,” in Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education, ed. Linda Eisenmann (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 86-88.

73 Karen Kennelly, “The Dynamic Sister Antonia and the College of St. Catherine,” Ramsey County History 14, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 1978): 7. Ann Thomasine Sampson, “The Ireland Connection” (unpublished manuscript, ACSJC-SPP).

74 “Sermon on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Sisters of St. Joseph in St. Paul, Minnesota,” published in a modified version under the title “A Catholic Sisterhood in the Northwest,” in John Ireland, The Church and Modern Society, vol. 2 (Chicago: D. H. McBride, 1896), 279-301.

75 The Ireland family came to the United States in 1850. Ellen Ireland became Sr. Seraphine and governed the CSJ St. Paul province for thirty-nine years. Eliza became Sr. St. John and taught in many CSJ academies in St. Paul and Minneapolis. Ellen Howard, a first cousin, became Sr. Celestine and was the creator of St. Agatha’s Conservatory, which provided decades of financial support for the province, and John Ireland was the bishop of St. Paul from 1884 until his death in 1918. This Irish immigrant family had a powerful affect on Minnesota Catholicism for decades.

76 Northmest Chronicle, April 10, 1891.

77 Ibid.

78 Woody, History of Women’s Education, 2:179, 258-59. Many early women’s colleges existed because of individual benefactors. For example, Woody states that Henry Sage’s endowment opened the doors to women at Cornell and that Matthew Vassar generously endowed Vassar College. The women of Michigan raised $100,000 for women to be allowed into the state university, and large donations helped women enter Johns Hopkins University. Susan B. Anthony worked for many years to open the University of Rochester to women.

79 Helen Angela Hurley, On Good Ground: The Story of the Sisters of St. Joseph in St. Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951), 228-37; Kennelly, “Dynamic Sister Antonia,” 7; Rosalie Ryan and John Christine Wolkerstorfer, More Than a Dream: Eighty-Five Years at the College of St. Catherine (St. Paul: College of St. Catherine, 1992), 2-3.

80 Diary of Sr. Hyacinth Werden, 1903, CSCA. This is a fascinating document that details their many stops in Germany, France, and Belgium. Werden was German-born and fluent in the German language. Her notes are in excellent English, but they are supplemented with German script at times. She was fascinated with the aesthetic surroundings of these places and supplemented her diary with “lessons” on European history. See also Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 242-45.

81 Ryan and Wolkerstorfer, More Than a Dream, 6.

82 Oral interview of Margaret Shelly, n.d., CSCA.

83 Kennelly, “Dynamic Sister Antonia,” 10-11. Attending classes from 1905 to 1909, when she completed her master’s thesis, McHugh was exposed to esteemed women faculty and an undergraduate population that included a majority of women. Her contacts included University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper, who had received a letter of introduction about her from Bishop John Ireland.

84 For a discussion of the energized atmosphere at the University of Chicago in the early 1900s, see Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres. A debate over gender-separate curriculum ensued once Chicago had “too many women.” For details about the curriculum at St. Catherine’s and McHugh’s changes see Kennelly, “Dynamic Sister Antonia,” 12-13; Helen Margaret Peck, “Academic History of the College of St. Catherine, 1905-1920” (unpublished manuscript, 1982); and College of St. Catherine Catalog, 1907-8, 1910-11, 1915-16, 1919-20, CSCA.

85 “Faculty Lists with Master’s Degrees,” 1919-20, CSCA. See Helen Margaret Peck, ”The Growth and Expansion of the College of St. Catherine to the End of the Presidency of Sr. Antonia McHugh, 1905-1937” (unpublished manuscript, 1984, 46-47, CSCA).

86 Kennelly, “Dynamic Sister Antonia,” 12-13; Peck, “Growth and Expansion,” 19-20; Ryan and Wolkerstorfer, More Than a Dream, 7. McHugh’s ingenuity and connections helped her obtain North Central Accreditation. Up to that point the only problem with accreditation had been that the college did not have an endowment and therefore could not qualify. With the help of friends in the educational establishment she convinced North Central that the sisters’ lack of salary compensation more than represented the equivalent of a cash endowment for the institution. The agency agreed, awarding accreditation in 1916.

87 “The College of St. Catherine,” brochure, 1916, CSCA.

88 Letter from Bishop Edmund Gibbons to Clergy, August 15, 1920, cited by Mary Ancilla Leary, The History of Catholic Education in the Diocese of Albany (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1957), 212.

89 All five CSJ institutions continue to the present day. All have become coeducational except the College of St. Catherine. St. Teresa’s Junior College in Kansas City became a four-year institution in 1940 and in 1963 changed its name to Avila College.