Transnationalism, Gender and the History of Education

Deirdre Raftery, Marie Clarke

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367076993
• eBook ISBN: 9781315446066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the past decade, historians have begun to make use of the optic of 'transnationalism', a perspective used traditionally by social anthropologists and sociologists in their study of the movement and flow of ideas between continents and countries. Historical scholarship has adopted this tool, and in this book historians of education use it to add nuance and depth to research on gender and education, and particularly to the education experiences of women and girls.

The book brings together a group of internationally-regarded scholars, who are doing important research on transnationalism and the social construction of gender, with particular reference to education environments such as schools and colleges. The book is therefore very much at the cutting-edge of theoretical and methodological advances in the history of education.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the History of Education.

Teaching Sisters and transnational networks: recruitment and education expansion in the long nineteenth century

Deirdre Raftery

School of Education, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

This article examines the management of the education enterprise of teaching Sisters, with reference to their transnational networking. The article suggests that orders of women religious were the first all-female transnational networks, engaged constantly in work that was characterised by ‘movement, ebb and circulation’. The mobility of teaching Sisters is framed within a discussion of three interconnected features of their global networking: the management of transnational recruitment networks, the advantageous use of international travel networks, and the movement of resources around the world. The article draws on sources from convent archives in Europe, Australia, Canada and the USA that throw light on the transnational networking of women religious around the world.

Background and historiography

A historiography of teaching Sisters¹ was completed by Bart Hellinckx et al. in 2010, and published as part of the Studia Paedagogica series, under the title The Forgotten Contribution of the Teaching Sisters: A Historiographical Essay on the Educational Work of Catholic Women Religious in the 19th and 20th Centuries. It was a work that commenced by concurring with the view of Catriona Clear, that ‘Nuns have suffered the fate of historical marginalisation’.² This situation has improved since Clear published her book, Nuns in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, in 1987, and since Elizabeth Smyth commented in 1994 that ‘the research on the history of teaching Sisters is just beginning’.³ Researching teaching Sisters has occupied many international scholars in the last two decades.⁴ Prior to that, as Hellinckx et al. have pointed out, the ‘vast majority of the publications about the involvement of women religious in education [were] histories either of individual teaching orders or of individual educational establishments’.⁵ Many were written by members of convent communities, or by past pupils, and some were jubilee volumes. Having analysed a range of school jubilee publications, Frank Simon concluded that those books gave historians little reason to be jubilant.⁶ However, it is important to note that the authors of such publications often have been granted unfettered access to uncatalogued records and/or convent archives. Though ‘insider’ histories may sometimes lack analysis and objectivity, they can be useful in giving scholars an indication of the range of materials that may have survived. Some of these histories provide critical accounts and, when these are referenced fully, they can be useful for researchers.⁷ Additionally, there are many distinguished historians who are also Sisters; they are in a position to provide deeply scholarly work that benefits from their knowledge of the ‘language’ of religious life.⁸

More recently, religious orders have tended to ask professional historians to write their histories, and increasingly they are opening their archives to scholars including graduate researchers.⁹ Paul Wyants has commented on the strengths of the newer congregational histories, though Guy Laperrière has been critical of the over-familiar trajectory of the narrative in such volumes: ‘an impressive foundress, difficult beginnings, a period of expansion from the mid-nineteenth century until about 1965 … upheaval starting with Vatican Council II’¹⁰ and the decline in vocations and change in ministries that were a part of the 1970s and 1980s.

However, there is evidence of changes in methodological approaches, and an increasing engagement with theoretical issues, resulting in a much richer and more nuanced type of writing that is now positioning teaching Sisters centrally in the history of education. Carmen Mangion’s work has looked at their identity as education professionals; Rebecca Rogers has gone further by demonstrating that they contributed to the professionalisation of the teaching profession per se, while playing a major role in the emergence of the secondary school system in nineteenth-century France, and in my own work I have examined how they balanced their teaching mission (often funded by the State), and their apostolic mission.¹¹ The sources and approaches that interest researchers are becoming more varied. Jenny Collins has used collective biography to study a group of eight Dominican Sisters who worked in education from the 1930s to the 1960s, and several scholars have examined school textbooks, to write about curricula – both overt and hidden – at convent schools.¹² Stephanie Burley has used obituaries, while Kathleen Casey and Yvonne McKenna have used oral histories, and Christine Trimmingham Jack examined material sources, including convent school furniture, architecture and iconography.¹³ My own work has examined Irish-born women religious, and I have also suggested that a systematic approach to using images and oral histories of teaching Sisters is needed.¹⁴

The historian of education Richard Aldrich articulated a plea that historians of education need to pay attention to ‘those whose voices have not yet been heard and whose stories have not yet been told … because their lives have been held to be of little interest’.¹⁵ While the growth in scholarship on the history of women religious over the past decade is such that it can no longer be said that they constitute a group whose ‘voices have not yet been heard’, much work remains to be done in order to find and relate the ‘stories’, using different critical lenses with which to view archival data. This article represents an attempt at such work.

Transnational history and its utility for research on teaching Sisters

Writing the history of teaching Sisters can be enriched by deploying theoretical perspectives, which are sometimes adapted from sociology and anthropology. This article draws on discourses surrounding the concept of transnationalism,¹⁶ to argue that nineteenth-century nuns were transnational actors who must be positioned centrally in histories of transnationalism and education. While Joyce Goodman and Gary McCulloch have acknowledged ‘the difficult challenges of transnationalism’, the value of this conceptual tool for the history of education has been noted by scholars such as Lynne Trethewey and Kay Whitehead, who have argued that deploying the ‘notion of transnationalism opens the way to exploring the rotation of people and ideas beyond national boundaries’.¹⁷ Similarly, Nelleke Bakker has pointed to the importance of examining the ‘transnational circulation of pedagogical ideas and concepts’,¹⁸ reminding us that ‘ideas do not move on their own, [and] cultural intermediaries or translators are involved in this process’. Like Trethewey and Whitehead, Gabriela Ossenbach and Maria del Mar del Pozo also posit that transnational history allows ‘movement, ebb and circulation’ to provide an analytical framework for the analysis of data.¹⁹ Transnational history, they observe, ‘conceptualizes categories and identities, discovers networks united by bonds stronger than social class or ideology, and links narratives and experiences that transcend time and location’.²⁰ For these reasons, I suggest, transnationalism is an optic with which historians can most usefully examine missionary orders of teaching Sisters, who were united by the bond formed by their shared Rule and Constitutions, and whose experiences in international education were defined by their collective identity as members of an order, thereby transcending ‘time and location’. This perspective will allow for original insights into how women religious managed their global work in education, and made a sustained contribution to teaching that crossed geographical boundaries.²¹

Ossenbach and del Pozo have argued that the essence of the transnational methodology can be found in the ‘cultural transfer model … based on categories of introduction, transmission, reception and appropriation’, which allow us to ‘understand how the system of relations reaches across geographical locations’.²² I suggest that research on missionary history benefits from such a perspective, allowing equal attention to be paid to both the missionary teaching sisters and the pupils taught by them; allowing, in other words, attention to the ‘importer and exporter’ of education, ideologies, culture and faith. The problems of reciprocity and reversibility, the multi-directional flows of ideas and culture, and the ‘entangled history’ that this methodology implies are analysed by Ossenbach and del Pozzo.²³ They draw on the work of French historians Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmerman, who introduced the term ‘histoire croisée’ (entangled history), to refer to connected histories, shared histories, and ‘narratives that share strong bonds’.²⁴ Such narratives can complicate our understanding of ‘cultural transfer’, not least because they introduce the possibility of ‘cultural spaces’, where the subjects for historical analysis ‘are no longer other territorial categories but [are] rather the places and networks of cultural exchange’.²⁵ Drawing from data gathered through a transnational research project,²⁶ a number of hypotheses will now be suggested.

‘Strong bonds’ and forming relationships within networked spaces

My research indicates that convents were spaces in which – and out of which – teaching Sisters operated while connected by ‘strong bonds’ that r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Teaching Sisters and transnational networks: recruitment and education expansion in the long nineteenth century
• 2. Education for girls in Ireland: secondary and vocational curricular provision 1930–1960
• 3. Gender, cosmopolitanism, and transnational space and time: Kasuya Yoshi and girls’ secondary education
• 4. Beyond centre and periphery: transnationalism in two teacher/suffragettes’ work
• 5. Teaching morality and religion in nineteenth-century colonial Algeria: gender and the civilising mission
• 6. Our Boys: the Christian Brothers and the formation of youth in the ‘new Ireland’ 1914–1944
• 7. Mobilising Mother Cabrini’s educational practice: the transnational context of the London school of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus 1898–1911
• 8. ‘A position of usefulness’: gendering history of girls’ education in colonial Hong Kong (1850s–1890s)
• 9. Teacher mobility and transnational, ‘British World’ space: the League of the Empire’s ‘Interchange of Home and Dominion teachers’, 1907–1931
• 10. They came with a purpose: educational journeys of nineteenth-century Irish Dominican Sister Teachers
• 11. William Graham Brooke (1835–1907): advocate of girls’ superior schooling in nineteenth-century Ireland
• Index