
Habits of Compassion
Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York's Welfare System, 1830-1920
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Habits of Compassion
Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York's Welfare System, 1830-1920
About this book
The Irish-Catholic Sisters accomplished tremendously successful work in founding charitable organizations in New York City from the Irish famine through the early twentieth century. Maureen Fitzgerald argues that their championing of the rights of the poor—especially poor women—resulted in an explosion of state-supported services and programs.
Parting from Protestant belief in meager and means-tested aid, Irish Catholic nuns argued for an approach based on compassion for the poor. Fitzgerald positions the nuns' activism as resistance to Protestantism's cultural hegemony. As she shows, Roman Catholic nuns offered strong and unequivocal moral leadership in condemning those who punished the poor for their poverty and unmarried women for sexual transgression. Fitzgerald also delves into the nuns' own communities, from the class-based hierarchies within the convents to the political power they wielded within the city. That power, amplified by an alliance with the local Irish Catholic political machine, allowed the women to expand public charities in the city on an unprecedented scale.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Republican Mothers and Brides of Christ
- 2. Good Girls, Bad Girls, and the Great Hunger, 1845–70
- 3. Placing-Out and Irish Catholic Cultural Reproduction, 1848–64
- 4. Saving Children from the Child-Savers, 1864–94
- 5. “The Family” and “the Institution”: The Roads to the White House, 1890–1909
- 6. The Immaculate Conception of the Welfare State, 1895–1920
- Notes
- Index
- Series Page