Education, Identity and Women Religious, 1800-1950

Convents, classrooms and colleges

Deirdre Raftery, Elizabeth M. Smyth, Deirdre Raftery, Elizabeth M. Smyth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138923546
• eBook ISBN: 9781317410942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book brings together the work of eleven leading international scholars to map the contribution of teaching Sisters, who provided schooling to hundreds of thousands of children, globally, from 1800 to 1950. The volume represents research that draws on several theoretical approaches and methodologies. It engages with feminist discourses, social history, oral history, visual culture, post-colonial studies and the concept of transnationalism, to provide new insights into the work of Sisters in education.Making a unique contribution to the field, chapters offer an interrogation of historical sources as well as fresh interpretations of findings, challenging assumptions. Compelling narratives from the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Africa, Australia, South East Asia, France, the UK, Italy and Ireland contribute to what is a most important exploration of the contribution of the women religious by mapping and contextualizing their work. Education, Identity and Women Religious, 1800–1950: Convents, classrooms and colleges will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of social history, women's history, the history of education, Catholic education, gender studies and international education.

Chapter 1 Coming to an edge in history

Writing the history of women religious and the critique of feminism ¹

Phil Kilroy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315685038-2

Introduction

The history of women religious can be studied within several contextual narratives. In this chapter the narrative is placed within the perspectives of women’s and gender history, with particular reference to the history of women religious in the Roman Catholic Church in Europe and North America. This narrative forms part of the wider research of historians of women’s and gender history which demonstrates how women in general were rendered invisible in the historical record, that an ‘archaeology of exclusion’ operated with regard to them.² With some notable exceptions, women were placed within the sub-narrative, the sub-text of history, in the minor role.³ Historians of women and gender interrogate this narrative, this male model or archetype of history. Professional work of deconstruction and reconstruction of the historical record has disrupted previous, well-rehearsed narratives to the extent that radical shifts in interpretation have emerged. This historical research is supported by scholarly developments in the writing of historical biography. Biographers in particular study the interaction between the public and the private at all levels, personal, communal and institutional. These are perceived as the crossover places where major and minor narratives interact and fuller, truer pictures of individuals and their actions can be found. Until the last century these elements were largely ignored in biographical writing.⁴

Historians of women and gender show how down the centuries women have laboured within the confines of patriarchal, misogynistic societies. They were constricted in their personal lives, within the family, as single or married women, as mothers and widows, as women religious individually or as communities. Men assumed the right to control women with regard to money and property, to marriage and widowhood, single life and religious life. Undoubtedly some women fought with some success to assert their rights with regard to their property as landowners, as rulers and widows, as educators and healers. But these were exceptional, usually aristocratic, privileged women. The vast majority of women had no voice, no power, no position, and they lived in constant danger of violence and death, a condition described in early Christian Ireland by Adomnán in 697 CE in his Cáin (Law).⁵

Belief in the inferiority of women and their subordinate position to men pre-dated Christianity, but it was further deepened when the Christian Church evolved into a strongly hierarchical, clerical institution, especially after 300 CE. When patriarchal and misogynistic views were articulated within a religious context, within Christianity, by the institutional Church, by clerics, these increased anti-woman prejudices. The verdict of the Church was that all women were born inferior. They had weak minds, were led by emotions and sexual temptations, and they should be ruled and controlled by men. These judgements have had devastating effects on all women down the ages.⁶

The image of woman in Christianity

Negative, condemnatory views on women permeated the institutional Church from the earliest years of Christianity.⁷ The Apostle Paul declared:

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.⁸

Tertullian (160–225 Ce) saw all women as Eve, and responsible for the death of Christ:

Do you not know that each of you is Eve? The sentence of God on your sex lives in this age; the guilt must of necessity live, too. You are the Devil’s gateway. It was you who first violated the forbidden tree and broke God’s Law. You persuaded him [Adam] whom the devil did not have the strength to attack. With what ease you shattered the image of God: man! Because of the death you deserved, the Son of God had to die.⁹

Similarly John Chrysostom_

Yes, indeed: they are all weak and frivolous. For we are told, not that Eve alone suffered from deception, but that ‘Woman’ was deceived. The word ‘Woman’ is not to be applied to one, but to every woman. Thus all feminine nature has fallen into error.¹⁰

Men and women internalized these attitudes towards women and these were transmitted down the generations. An Irish eleventh-century poem reflected the views of a cleric, and expressed through the voice of a woman:

I am the wife of Adam, Eve;

For my transgression Jesus died;

I stole Heaven from those I leave;

’Tis me they should have crucified.

Dreadful was the choice I made,

I who once a mighty queen;

Dreadful, too, the price I paid

Woe, my hand is still unclean!

I plucked the apple from the spray

Because of greed I could not rule;

Even until their final day

Women will still play the fool.

Ice would not be anywhere

Wild white winter would not be;

There would be no hell, no fear

And no sorrow but for me.¹¹

Two centuries later Abbot Conrad of Marchtal (1226–75) expressed fears of women, of their danger to men:

We and the whole community of canons, recognising that the wickedness of women is greater than all the other wickedness of the world, and that there is no anger like that of women, and that the poison of asps and dragons is more curable and less dangerous to men than the familiarity of women, have decreed for the safety of our souls, no less than for that of our bodies and goods, that we will on no account receive any more sisters to the increase of our perdition, but will avoid them like poisonous animals.¹²

Similar attitudes towards women were shown when English seminarians in the seventeenth-century, in a direct attack on women’s bodies and sexuality, and especially on motherhood, were taught to revile the manner of their birth:

For the manner of thy begetting is so foul that the name, nay the lightest thought of it, defiles the purest mind, so that our Blessed Saviour refused none of our miseries, but only that; and the matter so horrid, so foul, that all other dung is pleasant and grateful in respect of it; nay we dare not in discourse give it a name, for our own shame and others’ offence. … I cannot imagine any prison so dark, so straight, so loathsome, as the womb of a woman, in which the child is enclosed and enwrapped … for no less than nine whole months; so straightened and pressed, that neither hand nor foot can he stir or move; his food, the filthy menstrual blood of his mother, a thing so nasty and poisonous as that whatsoever it touches it infects, like the plague or leprosy.¹³

Such outright disdain of the processes of motherhood and birth reflected debates among theologians who wondered if woman was actually human, if she possessed a soul.¹⁴ For example, Thomas Aquinas, the foremost theologian of the thirteenth-century, following the views of Aristotle, suggested that woman did not take part in the creation of the child but was merely the passive vehicle that brought the child to birth. Moreover, a female child was the result of a flawed process:

For the active power in the seed of the male tends to produce something like itself, perfect in masculinity. But the procreation of the female is a result either of the debility of the active power, of some unsuitability of the material, or of some change effected by circumstances, like the south wind, for example, which is damp.¹⁵

Such negativity towards women was only further reinforced by the lofty position given to the Virgin Mary and the lowly one attributed to Mary Magdalene.

The Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene

The perception of woman as Eve, the representative of evil in the world, found its polarity in the elevation of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The clerical Church placed Mary on a pedestal of unimaginable heights. She was the pure and immaculate Virgin and Mother. In the measure that woman, Eve, was reviled, the Virgin Mary was venerated and removed from the human condition. She alone was the ‘immaculately conceived and conceiving’, completely untouched by original sin. In effect, Mary was an archetype created by the clerical Church for its own worship, a goddess constructed by the world of patriarchy and misogyny.¹⁶ She became the object of devotions, of hymns, of art and cathedrals, pilgrimages and liturgies down the ages. In polarity to the Virgin Mary, a composite figure of woman, Mary Magdalene the sinner, was created from three women in the Gospels: the woman who washed the feet of Jesus; Mary of Bethany; and Mary Magdalene, the first witness to the Resurrection.¹⁷ This fiction, known as Mary Magdalene, became the clerical projection of women as evil, weak and sinful. And like the Virgin Mary, down the centuries Mary Magdalene also became, for different reasons, the object of devotions and hymns, of art and cathedrals, pilgrimages and liturgies.¹⁸ Within the world of patriarchy and misogyny women were trapped between these two archetypes of the feminine: between Mary, the Virgin Mother, and Mary Magdalene, the sinner. Mary, the Virgin Mother, however attractive, was an unreachable model for women. Mary Magdalene, the sinner, signalled perpetual condemnation, at several levels. The body of woman was degenerate, she was a flawed being, and inferior to man and to be used as he thought fit.

Armed and justified by these theological constructions men assumed rights over women. Women’s lives were firmly controlled in the family by fathers, sons, brothers, uncles and guardians, and in the institutional Church by popes, bishops and priests. An open door to shocking violence in word and deed had been created and indeed rationalized on religious grounds. In every age women have lived within the strictures of this patriarchal, misogynist world. Their experiences were largely undocumented and unacknowledged by chroniclers, unless they served to support the institutions of power in Church and in society, usually as examples of submission and humility. The archives of women religious contain vast material on the reactions of Church authorities to their initiatives and to their way of life. Until the advent of feminism and of women’s and gender history, developed over the last 300 years, this situation remained unchallenged.

The impact of patriarchy and misogyny on women religious

Since the foundation of Christianity, women religious in every age have sought places and spaces where they could live their vision of the Gospel, of the following of Christ. Each community created its own narrative regarding how and why it was founded, its purpose and idealism, its rights to land and finance, and how the members wished to live within the Church and in society. Common to women religious was a life of personal and community prayer, singing of the Offices of the Church and attending the liturgy of the Mass. The culture surrounding these religious practices gave women religious access to basic education; to reading and writing; to music, especially singing; and to the decorative arts of painting, printing, sculpture, woodwork, dressmaking and embroidery. They held some endowments and dowries but tended to support themselves as much as possible economically as farmers and gardeners, as weavers and homemakers, as healers and cooks. Most communities had two ranks, that of Choir Sisters and Lay Sisters, reflecting the social norms of the time. Some communities were fully monastic and lived an enclosed life of prayer. Others were more oriented towards a visible service in society, especially in the sphere of education and health. All, however, underwent crises of reform and change, and either moved into new phases of growth or quietly disappeared, sometimes without trace.

Communities of women religious tended to have four features in common, often with different accents on one or other in any given time and place. First, they shared a common vocation and vision of life based on the following of Christ. With this as their focus they committed themselves to an agreed Rule of Life (sometimes called Constitutions), which was their commentary on and application of the Gospel to daily life. Second, communities of women religious usually acquired land and endowments (at least initially) which enabled them to live together with a certain autonomy and independence. Third, they watched over and developed their properties, took care of one another’s material and spiritual needs, and were inventive in generating income from their own work which helped them become self-sufficient. In this way they created a monastic life with its rhythm of prayer and work and where each one in the community had her task and place. Finally, women religious sang the Offices and celebrated the feasts of the liturgical year. They expressed their religious culture in their buildings, their food, their art, music, dress, language and way of life.¹⁹

Impact of families and clergy on communities of women religious

However, communities of women religious lived within the wider social, political, religious and economic realities of their day. Families and clergy paid particular attention to them. Families became involved with communities and with individual members with regard to dowries and gifts of land. They also intervened in land disputes and succession rights. In the context of needing to secure large dowries for those daughters destined for dynastic marriages, families could force some daughters, sisters or aunts to join a community. This was an inexpensive way of providing for them, especially if they were unlikely to marry or if they were a financial burden on the family. On the other hand, if a woman in t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword by Carmen M. Mangion
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Coming to an edge in history: writing the history of women religious and the critique of feminism
• 2 From Kerry to Katong: transnational influences in convent and novitiate life for the Sisters of the Infant Jesus, c. 1908–1950
• 3 Continuity and change within the Toronto Convent Academies of the Sisters of St Joseph and the Loretto Sisters, 1847–1950
• 4 Sister-physicians, education, and mission in the mid-twentieth-century
• 5 Sisters as teachers in nineteenth-century Ireland: the Presentation Order
• 6 Sisters and the creation of American Catholic identities
• 7 ‘Have your children got leave to speak?’: the teacher training of New Zealand Dominican Sisters, 1871–1965
• 8 Great changes, increased demands: education, teacher training and the Irish Presentation Sisters
• 9 The situational dimension of the educational apostolate and the configuration of the learner as a cultural and political subject: the case of the Sisters of Our Lady of the Missions in the Canadian Prairies
• 10 A path to perfection: translations from French by Catholic women religious in nineteenth-century Ireland
• 11 Loreto education in Australia: the pioneering influence of Mother Gonzaga Barry
• Index