90 Hurley, On Good Ground, 233-34; Kennelly, “Dynamic Sister Antonia,” 14.

91 Letter from Rev. Mother Agnes Gonzaga Ryan to Sr. Evelyn O’N eill, March 25, 1913, ACSJC-SLP.

1 Many religious communities specialized in one particular area such as health care or education. For a detailed listing of work done by communities of sisters see Elinor Tong Dehey, Religious Communities of Women in the United States (Hammond, Ind.: W. B. Conkey, 1930). Although the work of schools and orphanages began immediately, the CSJS opened their first hospital in Philadelphia in 1849 at about the same time that St. Louis CSJS began treating cholera victims.

2 For a variety of sources on the history of nursing see Ann Doyle, “Nursing by Religious Orders in the United States,” American Journal of Nursing 29 (July-Dec. 1929): 775-86, 959-69, 1085-95, 1197-1207, 1331-43, 1466-86. The classic history of nursing is Mary Adelaide Nutting and Lavinia Dock, A History of Nursing, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907, 1912). See also Josephine A. Dolan, Nursing in Society: A Historical Perspective (Philadelphia: W B. Saunders, 1978); Philip Kalish and Beatrice Kalish, The Advancement of American Nursing (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978); Susan Reverby, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Joan I. Roberts and Thetis M. Group, Feminism and Nursing: An Historical Perspective on Power, Status, and Political Activism in the Nursing Profession (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995). For a general history of American medicine see Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982).

3 CSJ Constitution (1847), ACSJC-SLP. With the earliest constitution the sisters were mandated to “consecrate themselves to the service of their neighbor” and “undertake in general all the duties of charity and works of mercy; they serve the poor in hospitals” (21). For an older but useful work on sister-nurses’ training and attitudes see Doyle, “Nursing by Religious Orders.” Another useful source is John O‘Grady, Catholic Charities in the United States (Washington, D. C., 1930; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1971), 183-212. For recent information on sister-nurses see Ursula Stepsis and Dolores Liptak, eds., Pioneer Healers: The History of Women Religious in American Health Care (New York: Crossroad, 1989), and Mary J. Oates, The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

4 Mary Denis Maher, To Bind up the Wounds: Catholic Sister Nurses in the U.S. Civil War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989), 27-33; Carlan Kraman, “Women Religious in Health Care: The Early Years,” in Stepsis and Liptak, Pioneer Healers, 26; Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), 34-38; Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 88-89; Starr, Social Transformation, 154-57. For a list of activities of Catholic and non-Catholic sisterhoods see Evangeline Thomas, ed., Women Religious History Sources: A Guide to Repositories in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker Co., 1983).

5 This nursing was done at a great human cost to the small and struggling community, which lost three of its members to the disease. It was a particularly devastating loss because the three sisters were all American-born (therefore English-speaking) sisters between the ages of eighteen and thirty-two. CSJ Profession Book, ACSJC-G; 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), 100-101; Christopher J. Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning: A Religious History of Catholic Health Care in the United States (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 52, 60-61. Kauffman states that because cholera strikes the poor in much higher numbers, “nearly eighty percent of those who died of cholera in St. Louis were Catholic.” For a detailed analysis of the cholera epidemic and the social, religious, and medical responses to the disease see Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

6 Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 68-74; Maria Kostka Logue, Sisters of St. Joseph of Philadelphia: A Century of Growth and Development, 1847-1947 (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1950), 49-56; Rose Anita Kelly, Song of the Hills: The Story of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Wheeling (Wheeling, W.Va.: Mt. St. Joseph, 1962), 179-90. For information about the Canadian CSJs and their activities see Mary Agnes Murphy, The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph: Le Puy-Lyons-St. Louis-Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). Mother Delphine Fontbonne, one of the six original CSJs who came to the United States, died in 1856 while nursing epidemic victims in Toronto. Although the Canadian foundation separated from Carondelet after general government took effect, in the 1890s they founded St. Michael’s Hospital, the first Catholic hospital in Toronto and the first Catholic school of nursing in Canada. See Irene McDonald, For the Least of My Brethren (Toronto: Dundern Press, 1992).

7 Helen Angela Hurley, On Good Ground: The Story of the Sisters of St. Joseph in St. Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951), 75-79; Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning, 60. See also O’Grady, Catholic Charities, 187-88. Other orders provided emergency or temporary care, but O‘Grady writes that the CSJs were the third group of women religious to organize a Catholic hospital in the United States, with Sisters of Charity and Sisters of Mercy first and second, respectively.

8 Nutting and Dock, History of Nursing, 2:366; Kraman, “Women Religious in Health Care,” 21-38, and Ursula Stepsis, “Statistics,” 287, in Stepsis and Liptak, Pioneer Healers; Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning, 50-81; Maher, To Bind up the Wounds, 38-40.

9 Maher, To Bind up the Wounds, 69-70. This is an excellent source on sister-nurses during the Civil War. Maher states that of the 600 or more sisters, over 200 were estimated to be Daughters of Charity, whose headquarters was in Emmitsburg, Md. The Holy Cross sisters were second, with Sisters of Mercy and Sisters of Charity also highly represented. When the CSJs established general government and received papal approbation in 1867, the Philadelphia and Wheeling sisters became diocesan and were no longer a formal part of the CSJs of Carondelet. We included them in this discussion, however, because the communities, their nursing activities, and many of the individual sisters involved were from the Carondelet group and still technically part of the community until 1867. See Chapter 2 concerning papal approbation and separate diocesan communities.

10 Cited in Ellen Ryan Jolly, Nuns on the Battlefield, 4th ed. (Providence, R.I.: Providence Visitor Press, 1930), 45. Convent archives are strangely silent on the experiences of these sisters. Unfortunately, secular newspapers tended to call all nursing sisters “Sisters of Charity” or “Sisters of Mercy.”

11 “Copy of a Letter from Mother St. John Fournier to the Superior General of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Lyons, 1873,” in Logue, Sisters of St. Joseph, 128, 132-33. 335-36, 351-52. See also Jolly, Nuns on the Battlefield, 158-69.

12 Kelly, Song of the Hills, 213-22. This information is taken from Keating’s war journal located in the CSJ archives in Wheeling. See also Jolly, Nuns on the Battlefield, 170-80.

13 See note 12. Mother de Chantal Keating received the Grand Army of the Republic bronze medal for her service, and she wore it on her habit each memorial day until her death.

14 Maher, To Bind up the Wounds, 148-49; Carr Elizabeth Worland, “American Catholic Women and the Church to 1920” (Ph.D. diss., St. Louis University, 1982), 72-75; Mary Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 240-45. Ewens’s book analyzes nineteenth-century perceptions of American nuns as described in literature.

15 Kate Cumming, Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse, quoted in 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), 271.

16 Judith Metz, “In Times of War, in Stepsis and Liptak,” Pioneer Healers, 39-68; Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning, 82-95; Maher, To Bind up the Wounds, 148-49; Oates, Catholic Philanthropic Tradition, 47-48; Ewens, Role of the Nun, 240-45.

17 James L. Soward, Hospital Hill: An IllustratedAccount of Public Healthcare Institutions in Kansas City, Missouri (Kansas City: Truman Medical Center Foundation, 1995), 15-16.

18 “Accounts of the Yellow Fever in Memphis,” ACSJC-SLP; Sr. Giles Phillips, “St. Joseph Hospital School of Nursing,” SJHA-KC. See also Leo Kalmer, Stronger Than Dearth: Heroic Sacrifices of Catholic Priests and Religious during the Yellow Fever Epidemics at Memphis in 1873, 1878, 1879 (Memphis: n.p., 1929). For an account of the yellow fever epidemic in Charleston, N.C., and the response of the Sisters of Mercy see 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), 137-38.

19 Although some of the sister-run hospitals did not survive, women’s congregations established almost 500 hospitals between 1860 and 1920. In 1872 approximately 178 hospitals existed in the United States, 75 of which were under Catholic auspices. By 1910 there were over 4,000 American hospitals, and approximately 400 were Catholic, most under the direction of women religious. For a compilation of data on this subject see George C. Stewart, Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 1994), 330; Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning, 130; Ewens, Role of the Nun, 252; Starr, Social Transformation, 73; Stepsis, “Statistics,” 287; and Historical Statistics of the U.S. : Colonial America to the Present (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, 1975), 79.

20 St. Mary’s Hospital in Tucson became highly successful, but with the loss of the railroad money and after eight unsuccessful years, St. Joseph’s Hospital in Prescott closed and the building was converted into an academy. The Georgetown hospital prospered until the mining boom collapsed; the CSJs closed the hospital in 1914. For additional information on Georgetown see Chapter 4. Other communities of nuns staffed “frontier” hospitals that served mostly male populations in the American West. See Edna Marie Leroux, “In Times of Socioeconomic Crisis,” in Stepsis and Liptak, Pioneer Healers, 118-26, and Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning, 96-128.

21 CSJ Constitution (1884), pt. 4, pp. 96-97, and CSJ Manual of Customs (1917), 117-18, ACSJC-SLP. Apparently this policy of tolerance did not extend to race. Mary Oates states that as late as 1922, of the 540 Catholic hospitals in the United States, not one was for or admitted African Americans (Catholic Philanthropic Tradition, 64-65).

22 Advertising booklet for “St. Joseph’s Hospital, St. Paul, Minn.” (1908), p. 5, ACSJC-SPP.

23 St. Joseph Hospital-Patient Ledger Books, Georgetown, Colo., 1880-89 and 1890-1913, ACSJC-SLP. This diversity was also evident in other hospitals in the trans-Mississippi West, such as St. Joseph’s Hospital in Kansas City, Mo. (see Patient Ledger Books, 1875-94, SJHA-KC); Ann Thomasine Sampson, Care with Prayer: A History of St. Mary’s Hospital and Rehabilitation Center (Minneapolis: St. Mary’s Hospital, 1987), 5; and Alberta Cammack and Leo G. Byrne, Heritage: The Story of St. Mary’s Hospital (Tucson: St. Mary’s Hospital, 1981), 17.

24 Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning, 129-67; Mary Carol Conroy, “The Transition Years,” in Stepsis and Liptak, Pioneer Healers, 86-117; Starr, Social Transformation, 145-62; Oates, Catholic Philanthropic Tradition, 39-45, 63-65.

25 Caring for special groups usually in separate facilities or separate wings of the building, these Kansas City hospitals divided patients by religion, race, class, ethnicity, gender, age, and specific infirmities. This eclectic mix of hospitals also included the “city pest-house boat” for smallpox patients, emergency hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, an eye and ear infirmary, and a tuberculosis hospital. Soward, Hospital Hill, 20-21, 34-35, 52-53, 68. Two other CSJ hospitals also specialized in type of patient care—a maternity and infant hospital in Troy, N.Y, and a large tuberculosis clinic at St. Mary’s in Tucson.

26 All quoted material comes from a series of twenty-three letters written to the St. Louis motherhouse between October 5, 1898, and April 22, 1899. Except where indicated, the letters were written by the group’s superior, Liguori McNamara (ACSJC-SLP).

27 Letter from Sr. Bonaventure Nealon (Nolan) at Camp Hamilton, Kentucky, to Rev. Mother Agatha Guthrie, October 1898, ACSJC-SLP.

28 Ibid.

29 Letter from Sr. Liguori McNamara to Sr. Lucida Savage, November 1, 1918, ACSJC-SLP.

30 Metz, “In Times of War,” 65-66. Metz writes that the Daughters of Charity were sent to the Italian front in 1918. Other orders of nuns were not commissioned overseas but helped to staff “emergency” hospitals at training camps (in the United States) to nurse the large numbers of soldiers during the flu epidemic.

31 “General Statistics—Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph,” May 1920, ACSJC-G.

32 Savage, Congregation of St. Joseph, 3 27; Dolorita Dougherty et al., eds., The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1966), appendix 5. George Stewart’s recent analysis of the years 1866 to 1917 placed the Sisters of St. Joseph (which include the Carondelet CSJs and other affiliated groups) as fourth in hospital founding behind the Sisters of Mercy (79 hospitals), Daughters of Charity (58), and Franciscans (57) (Marvels of Charity, 329).

33 Protestant nurse Jane Woolsey expressed the sentiments of some Protestant women when she stated, “[We] might have had an order of Protestant women better than the Romish sisterhoods, by so much as heart and intelligence are better than machinery.” Hospital Days (New York, 1868), 44, as quoted in Maher, To Bind up the Wounds, 132.

34 “Copy of a Letter from Mother St. John Fournier,” 335-36.

35 Letter from Sr. Liguori McNamara to Sr. Lucida Savage, November 1, 1918, ACSJC-SLP.

36 Memoirs of Sr. Mary Thomas Lavin, ACSJC-LAP.

37 Letter from Sr. Liguori McNamara to Rev. Mother Agatha Guthrie, October 13 and 22, 1898, ACSJC-SLP.

38 The number of nursing schools in the United States had increased to 432 by 1900 and 1,129 by 1910. Starr, Social Transformation, 155-56, and Jo Ann Ashley, Hospitals, Paternalism, and the Role of the Nurse (New York: Teacher College Press, 1976), 20. By 1915 there were 220 Catholic nursing schools run by thirty different orders of nuns (Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning, 154-67).

39 Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning, 158. Kauffman also states that in secular nursing schools, the “convent metaphor” was used to foster the idealism of heroic, religious self-sacrifice (156-57).

40 “Application for Admission to Training School for Nurses—Hulda Olivia Larson” and “Circular Containing Terms of Admission,” n.d. (probably around 1915), ACSJC-SPP. Other CSJ nursing brochures have similar requirements and regulations. See also “St. John’s Hospital Nursing School—Fargo, N.D.,” ACSJC-SPP; “St. Joseph’s Hospital—St. Paul, 1908,” ACSJC-SPP; Sampson, Care with Prayer, 10-14; Phillips, “St. Joseph Hospital School of Nursing”; and Cammack and Byrne, Story of St. Mary’s, 24-26. St. Mary’s Hospital School of Nursing in Amsterdam, New York, opened in 1920. Although few records are available, since the early sisters received their training at the CSJ hospital in Kansas City, their training school probably looked very similar.

41 St. Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis began its program in 1900, and St. Joseph’s Hospital in Kansas City began in 1901. Laywomen were admitted to these schools from their inception. For additional information on the history of these three early programs see John M. Culligan and Harold J. Prendergast, “St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul,” Acta et Dicta 6, no. 2 (October 1934): 1-16; Sampson, Prayer with Care, 10-12; and Phillips, “St. Joseph Hospital School of Nursing.”

42 Sampson, Prayer with Care, 17.

43 This information on Sr. Giles Phillips is taken from a letter written by Sr. Anne Catherine McDonald to “My Dear Friends,” soon after the death of Sister Giles (letter dated November 27, 1962, SJHA-KC). Phillips was also the first sister-nurse on the State Board of Nursing of Missouri and an officeholder in the Kansas City district of the American Nurses Association and the National League of Nursing.

44 The smaller hospitals located in North Dakota, Tucson, and Amsterdam, N.Y., began their nursing schools later and had the benefit of expertise from the St. Louis and St. Paul provinces. The “Standard Curriculum for Schools of Nursing” was introduced in 1917 by the National League of Nursing Education (Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning, 161).

45 “St. Mary’s Hospital—Amsterdam, N.Y.,” ACSJC-AP. Although Fr. William Browne purchased the original property and equipment in 1902, the CSJs paid $7,000 to acquire the propery and added $10,000 in improvements. Some sisters were sent to Kansas City for nurses’ training. The hospital was incorporated in 1909. It was not unusual for some early hospitals to have a garden and chickens on the premises to supplement food for the hospital.

46 Letter from Dr. J. D. Griffith to Rev. Mother Agnes Gonzaga Ryan, February 27, 1914, SJHA-KC. There are two other surviving documents on this issue, one unsigned and formatted more like a petition, and another from a physician, Dr. J. N. Scott. The CSJs did build a new hospital three years later (see SJHA-KC).

47 Sr. Evangelista Weyand was a founder of the Arizona State Nurses Association and campaigned to establish a statewide certification board. She became a charter member of the State Board of Nursing Examiners. Sr. Giles Phillips was the first sister-member and later president of the State Board of Nursing of Missouri. The National League of Nursing Education included many CSJs and other sisters. Approximately 10 percent of its membership collaborated to form a Sisters’ Committee within the league. Sr. Esperance Finn was elected and served as a founding member and second vice president for the Catholic Hospital Association.

48 Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning, 171.

49 Ibid., 171-92, 230-32.

50 Letter from Apostolic Delegate D. Falconio to Rev. Mother Agnes Gonzaga Ryan, November 10, 1909, copy in ACSJC-AP; letter from St. Paul province (probably Mother Seraphine Ireland) to Falconio, December 12, 1909, ACSJC-SPP.

51 For data on specific Catholic sisterhoods and their social service activity see Dehey, Religious Communities of Women.

52 Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Two Political Cultures in the Progressive Era: The National Consumer’s League,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Ferrzinist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 37. There is a plethora of sources discussing American women’s organizations and benevolent activity. For excellent examples see chapters by Linda Gordon and Estelle Freedman in Kerber et al., U.S. History as Women’s History. See also Mary P. Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change, Rochester, New York, 1822-1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); 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); Kathleen D. McCarthy, ed., Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Pomer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelly and the Nations’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

53 Scott, Natural Allies, 2.

54 For sources that discuss women’s organizations but also examine the important religious motivations for women’s activities see Scott, Natural Allies; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Ruth Bordin, Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University 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); and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

55 Scott, Natural Allies, 14-15. Scott writes that the “deserving poor” were the “working poor” who were considered “respectable” but had fallen on hard times. The “undeserving poor” were those who seemed “unembarrassed by their poverty” or who drank and seemed “unworthy”. She adds that foreigners were often viewed with suspicion. For a discussion of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French ideas and policies on this issue and how they affected nuns see Chapter 1. For a discussion of the perceptions of the European poor over centuries and the Catholic Church’s responses see Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

56 Hewitt, Women’s Activism, 237; Ginzberg, Women and Benevolence, 8.

57 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 16. For a discussion of Protestant attitudes toward Catholic immigrant children see Priscilla Ferguson Clement, “The City and the Child, 1860-1885,” and Ronald D. Cohen, “Child Saving and Progressivism, 1885-1915,” in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook, ed. Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 235-72 and 273-310. Protestant cleric Charles Loring Brace created the Children’s Aid Society, which took children from orphanages and sent them on trains to be adopted in the West. For a description of the “Orphan Trains” that took urban (and many Catholic) children to Midwestern and Western states for adoption by “farm families” see Marilyn Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing out in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). Since the prior religious training of the children was ignored, many Catholic children were “lost to the faith” through this type of adoption.

58 Maureen Fitzgerald, ”Irish-Catholic Nuns and the Development of New York City’s Welfare System, 1840-1900” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1992), 395.

59 Oates, Catholic Philanthropic Tradition, 7-8, 21.

60 Fitzgerald, “Irish-Catholic Nuns,” 29-33. Cities that had large Catholic populations and powerful political machines often provided nuns with more autonomy and influence in conducting their welfare activities.

61 “General Chapter Summary—Sisters of St. Joseph,” 1893 and 1920, ACSJC-G. Besides the five listed states, the CSJs had an orphanage in Marquette, Michigan, but it closed in 1902. In the 1920 report seven of the nine institutions are listed as orphanages in the summary, but two, a “Home for the Friendless” and an “Infant Home,” provided for large numbers of orphaned children also. The term “half-orphan” was used to designate a child who had one living parent who, because of poverty or illness, could not care for the child. There were over 300 Catholic orphanages by 1900, caring for over 80,000 children. By 1920 institutional care had peaked and a steady decline began in favor of foster care (Stewart, Marvels of Charity, 3 34).

62 Papers from the St. Joseph Orphan Home for Boys, St. Louis, ACSJC-SLP.

63 “Thousands of Children Have Been Cared for in Orphanage,” The Tucson Citizen, May 23, 1920. All surviving record books document the variety of ways that children came to the CSJ orphanages. These include the Record Book of St. Joseph’s Orphan Home for Girls—Kansas City, 1890-1917; Papers from the St. Joseph Orphan Home for Boys, St. Louis; Record Book for the St. Bridget’s Half-Orphanage —St. Louis, 1862-1885; and First Annual of St. Joseph’s Home for the Friendless—Chicago, 1912, ACSJC-SLP.

64 Record Book for St. Bridget’s Half-Orphanage.

65 Letter from J. A. Charlebois to Archbishop J. E. Quigley, Chicago, Ill., March 14, 1911, ACSJC-SLP.

66 Record Book of St. Joseph’s Orphan Home for Girls, January 31, 1910.

67 FirstAnnual of St. Joseph’s Home for the Friendless—Chicago, 1912.

68 Record Book of St. Joseph’s Orphan Home for Girls, 1880-1917.

69 Ibid., August 4, 1892.

70 Claire Lynch, St. Joseph Home for Children, 1877-1960 (St. Paul: North Central Pub. Co., 1982), 21. Although this institution and the author of the book are Benedictine, there is some discussion of the CSJs’ orphanage, and the state regulations are included in her description.

71 Aida Doyle, The History of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (Troy, N.Y.: Srs. of St. Joseph, 1936), 203-4; Emily Joseph Daly, “The Albany Province,” in Dougherty et al., Sisters of St. Joseph, 277-78.

72 “Sr. M. Incarnation McDonough’s account of the Chicago Fire,” ACSJC-SLP. The children and sisters walked for three hours until they reached the outskirts of town, where, out of sheer exhaustion, they rested. They were found five hours later by Jesuits from Loyola University who took the nuns and the children back to the college and temporarily housed them in classrooms.

73 Some constitutions of Catholic sisterhoods barred them from teaching or caring for males of any age. Although the CSJs had traditionally worked with females in France, their constitution did not expressly forbid working with males, so they taught and cared for American boys, but in most cases only until the boys became adolescents.

74 “Chapter Summary Data, 1920” for the Troy and Los Angeles provinces, ACSJC-G.

75 ”Chapter Summary Data, 1887, 1893, 1908, 1920” for the Troy, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and St. Paul provinces, ACSJC-G. In New York orphanages there was one CSJ per eleven children, and in Arizona the adult-to-child ratio was approximately one sister to thirteen children. Missouri and Illinois orphanages averaged one sister per eleven children, with two orphanages having as few as seven children per sister. Minnesota orphanages averaged one sister per eight or nine children.

76 Nurith Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). Zmora concludes that orphanages were not isolating agencies of social control but provided for the multiple needs of nineteenth-century children.

77 Papers from the St. Joseph Orphan Home for Boys.

78 Record Book of St. Joseph’s Home for Girls—Kansas City, June 5, 1883. Although this was a home for girls, the thirteen-year-old brother was allowed to work at the orphanage. He stayed with his three younger sisters for seven years. The CSJ orphan records, where available, provide interesting anecdotal information on the follow-up status of children who stayed for any length of time.

79 “Copy of a Letter from Mother St. John Fournier,” 345.

80 Lelia Hardin Bugg, “Catholic Life in St. Louis,” Catholic World 68, no. 403 (1898): 14-30. See also Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1983), 132. CSJ archives have no surviving documents from this institution, which Bugg reported served over 1,500 girls and women each year.

81 First Annual of St. Joseph’s Home for the Friendless—Chicago, 1912, and Third Annual Report—St. Joseph’s Home for the Friendless—Chicago, 1916, ACSJC-SLP.

82 “Masterson Day Nursery,” Diamond Jubilee History (n.d.), 104-5, ACSJC-AP. See also Daly, “Albany Province,” 281-83.

83 Fitzgerald, “Irish-Catholic Nuns;” 301-81. Fitzgerald provides extensive detail on the work of Irish orders and their support of single women in spite of clerical disinterest. See also Diner, Erins’s Daughters, 130-38.

84 Diner, Erin’s Daughters, 132. For a discussion of CSJ demographics, ethnicity, and the Irish influence see Chapter 3.

85 Oates, Catholic Philanthropic Tradition, 75-76, 87-89.

86 Jessie Benton Fremont quote cited in Florence B. Yount, “Hospitals in Prescott,” Arizona Medicine, August 1976, 837-42. Jessie Fremont, wife of the military governor John C. Fremont, met the CSJs in St. Louis during the Civil War.

87 Arizona Miner, September 2, 1881.

88 Sr. Magdalen Gaffney, “History of St. Joseph’s Home,” ACSJC-LAP; Thomas Marie McMahon, ”The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet: Arizona’s Pioneer Religious Congregation, 1870-1890” (master’s thesis, St. Louis University, 1952), 115-16. Gaffney wrote that on one trip the conductor either did not believe that Sr. Angelica had permission to ride in the caboose for free or was hostile to nuns, but he stopped the train, making her and her orphan girl walk three miles through the desert to Tucson.

89 Yount, “Hospitals in Prescott,” 838; Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, “‘Pray for Your Wanderers’: Women Religious on the Colorado Mining Frontier, 1870-1917,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 15, no. 3 (1995): 36.

90 St. Paul Dispatch, December 29, 1876.

91 “St. Michael’s Hospital—Grand Forks, N.D.,” ACSJC-SPP, and “Sisters’ Hospital—Georgetown, Col.,” ACSJC-SLP. Both towns helped acquire property and begin the hospitals, but the nuns were expected to administer them, financially and practically.

92 “St. Mary’s Hospital—Amsterdam, N.Y.”

93 “St. Mary’s Hospital—A Few Highlights,” ACSJC-AP.

94 “The Sisters’ Hospital and ... a New Asylum for Homeless Children,” Tucson Daily Star, December 25, 1889.

95 “St. Mary’s Hospital—Amsterdam, N.Y.”

96 Although it was typical for sister-nurses to work in orphan homes, sisters working in orphanages in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Kansas City, Tucson, and Troy were particularly fortunate because they had CSJ hospitals close by or available in the same city. Sisters who worked in orphanages in cities that did not have CSJ hospitals had to depend on the generosity of doctors who donated their time to see the children.

97 “St. Mary’s Home—Binghamton, N.Y.” and the “History of St. Mary’s Home —Binghamton, N.Y,” ACSJC-AP. By the time Kennedy died in 1911, she had nearly repaid the entire debt.

98 Marian Devoy, “The Catholic Boys’ Home: History of the Minneapolis Catholic Orphan Asylum” (master’s thesis, University of Minnesota, 1944), 81.

99 “History of St. Joseph’s Home for Boys—St. Louis, Mo.” and “St. Joseph’s Orphan Home for Girls—Kansas City,” ACSJC-SLP. Donnelly had purchased the property for the cemetery. After he died in 1880, Sr. Alicia McCusker solicited food and clothing for the next six years. It was not until Sr. Alicia’s death in 1886 that Hogan honored Donnelly’s request and gave the asylum $100 a month. “A few years later this amount was reduced to fifty dollars per month,” and the July picnic was the only other source of income until 1913, when a new bishop, Thomas Lillis, “relieved the sisters from soliciting funds” by providing diocesan funds.

100 “History of St. Mary’s Home—Binghamton, N.Y.” The Binghamton orphanage was not unusual. Every history of CSJ orphanages includes mention of door-to-door soliciting and begging for food, clothing, and money. One or two sisters would be assigned to this job, and some nuns spent years performing this task.

101 Third Annual Report—St. Joseph’s Home for the Friendless—Chicago and Annual Reports, Home for the Friendless, 1912-17. The list of benefactors and lay groups is impressive and includes the St. Vincent de Paul Society, the Ladies Aid Society, St. Catherine’s Conference, Knights of Columbus, Ladies of Isabella, and the St. Thomas Aquinas Council.

102 O’Grady, Catholic Charities, 318-42; Oates, Catholic Philanthropic Tradition, 3, 13, 21-23, 87.

103 Devoy, “Catholic Boys’ Home,” 63.

104 Phillips, “St. Joseph Hospital School of Nursing.” Phillips writes that St. Anthony’s Maternity Hospital was really just a large residence and a hospital in name only.

105 Devoy, “Catholic Boys’ Home,” 37-84. The author obtained all information from official meeting minutes from February 18, 1878, and August 10, 1894.

106 Oates, Catholic Philanthropic Tradition, 26-28, 71-97.

107 Ibid., 81-84. For a discussion on “scientific charity” and the loss of autonomy for laywomen and nuns see Fitzgerald, “Irish-Catholic Nuns,” 477-95, 567-69; Debra Campbell, “Reformers and Activists,” in American Catholic Women: An Historical Exploration, ed. Karen Kennelly (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 152-81; James Kenneally, The History of American Catholic Women (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 89-112; and a special edition on social activism in U.S. Catholic Historian 13, no. 3 (Summer 1995).

108 Oates, Catholic Philanthropic Tradition, 92. Oates writes, “Hospitals, more than other institutions, resisted oversight by central charitable bureaus.”

1 George Stewart, “Sister-Population Statistics, 1830-1990,” in George C. Stewart, Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 1994), 565.

2 The Second Vatican Council (October 1962 to December 1965) “is regarded by many as the most significant religious event since the 16th Century Reformation and certainly the most important of the twentieth century” (Richard P. McBrien, ed., Encyclopedia of Catholicism, [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995], 1299-1306). Attended by 3,000 people (mostly bishops) from all over the world, the council’s goal was “to promote peace and the unity of all humankind.” The end result was dramatic changes in all aspects of Catholic life. Although only ten nuns were allowed to be present, the changes enacted by the council had significant effects on life for women religious, who were encouraged to reexamine all aspects of their constitutions and practices in light of contemporary needs and issues.

3 Mary Ewens, “Women in the Convent,” in American Catholic Women: An Historical Exploration, ed. Karen Kennelly (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 33, and “Removing the Veil: The Liberated American Nun,” in Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Chrzstian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 273; Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 613-14; Susan Carol Peterson and Courtney Vaughn-Roberson, Woman wish Vision: The Pre-sensation Sisters of South Dakota, 1880-1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 224-26.

4 Mary Jo Weaver, New Catholic Women: A Continuous Challenge to Traditional Religious Authority (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), 35-36.

5 Ewens, “Removing the Veil,” 273.

6 Ibid., 272-74; Ewens, “Women in the Convent,” 33-37; Peterson and Vaughn-Roberson, Women with Vision, 226-27; McNamara, Sisterf in Arms, 616.

7 Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y: Image Books, 1985), 192. See also Leslie Woodcock Tentler, “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (March 1993): 112-13.

8 McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 616-17. For information concerning Protestant women’s status in the church see 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), 91.

9 Braude, “Women’s History,” 102; 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), 111-26. For examples of secular women’s organizations that lost autonomy when combining with men’s organizations see two essays: Estelle Freedman, “Separatism Revisited: Women’s Institutions, Social Reform, and the Career of Miriam Van Waters,” 171, and 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.

10 Ewens, “Removing the Veil,” 272; McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 613.