New Women of the Old Faith

Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era

Kathleen Sprows Cummings

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780807871522, 9780807832493
• eBook ISBN: 9780807889848
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: North American History

American Catholic women rarely surface as protagonists in histories of the United States. Offering a new perspective, Kathleen Sprows Cummings places Catholic women at the forefront of two defining developments of the Progressive Era: the emergence of the "New Woman" and Catholics' struggle to define their place in American culture. Cummings highlights four women: Chicago-based journalist Margaret Buchanan Sullivan; Sister Julia McGroarty, SND, founder of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., one of the first Catholic women's colleges; Philadelphia educator Sister Assisium McEvoy, SSJ; and Katherine Eleanor Conway, a Boston editor, public figure, and antisuffragist. Cummings uses each woman's story to explore how debates over Catholic identity were intertwined with the renegotiation of American gender roles.

CHAPTER ONE Chiefly among Women

THE OLD FAITH, THE NEW WOMAN, AND THE CREATION OF A USABLE PAST

In 1875, “An American Woman” published an article in the Catholic World that represented an outraged response to a comment made by William Gladstone, the former (and future) prime minister of Great Britain. Speaking of the growth of the Catholic Church in England, Gladstone had observed that “the conquests have been chiefly, as might have been expected, among women.” Across the Atlantic, “An American Woman” bristled at the insult, interpreting Gladstone’s comment as “an indirect and ungraceful way of saying that the Catholic Church brings conviction more readily to weaker than to stronger intellects, and that because the ‘conquests’ are ‘chiefly among women,’ the progress of the church among the people is not substantial, general or permanent.”¹

“An American Woman” was the pseudonym of Margaret Buchanan Sullivan, an Irish-born Roman Catholic then in the early stages of a successful career as a journalist. An ardent Irish nationalist, Sullivan was poised to disagree with Gladstone on just about any subject, but she found his assumptions about Catholicism and women particularly agitating.² Marveling at the thoughtlessness that enabled him and other “well-read men” to misinterpret the place of women within the church, Sullivan turned Gladstone’s insult on its head: nineteen centuries on, she argued, the Catholic Church was flourishing precisely because it had appealed so successfully to women. To support her case, Sullivan “offered in evidence” a litany of examples of accomplished women who professed the Catholic faith, ranging from the first-century apostle Thecla of Iconium, to the sixteenth-century French foundress Jane de Chantal, to the nineteenth-century American nun Elizabeth Ann Seton. Noting that “religion alone supplied their motive,” Sullivan asked whether any woman in “profane history” could equal the accomplishments of these and other daughters of Catholicism. For if the church owed its success to its women, the inverse was also true: only under church auspices could women develop their “heroic characteristics” to the fullest potential.³

There are many reasons why “Chiefly among Women” should have been altogether forgotten. It was an early work of Sullivan’s, it was written anonymously, and it considered women in an age when female subjects rarely surfaced in Catholic publications. But far from fading into obscurity, “Chiefly among Women” would repeatedly receive new leases on life. Over the next four decades, it was cited, quoted, and reprinted, with the author’s identity revealed at some point along the way. Jesuit George Tyrrell, for example, referred at length to “Chiefly among Women” in his 1897 essay “The Old Faith and the New Woman,” which appeared in the American Catholic Quarterly Review. The “Old Faith” was Roman Catholicism, and Tyrrell, an Irish-born theologian, was one of many late nineteenth-century Catholic intellectuals who struggled to reconcile this ancient religion with modern rationality.⁴

Tyrrell’s ruminations on the Old Faith and the New Woman suggest that there was a significant gender dimension to what R. Scott Appleby has described as Catholic modernists’ “thoroughgoing commitment to preserving theological continuity with the fullness of the Catholic tradition as it had unfolded in history.”⁵ In contrast to the Old Faith, then a venerable nineteen centuries old, the New Woman was of far newer vintage, having arrived only recently on the American scene. Novelist Henry James had coined the phrase “New Woman” to describe wealthy widows living abroad. According to James, what made them “new” was their freedom from male control. In a variation on that theme, the American version of the New Woman derived both her newness and her freedom through her break with traditional domestic roles. By attending college, earning her own living, working in a settlement house, or otherwise participating in activities outside women’s “sphere,” she challenged the ideology of domesticity that had prevailed since the mid-nineteenth century. Financially independent from either a father or a husband, the New Woman “stood for self-development as contrasted to self-sacrifice or submergence within the family.”⁶

Catholic writers routinely castigated the New Woman as the antithesis of the Catholic True Woman. Tyrrell criticized the New Woman’s silly style of dress, her selfish disregard for family, and her pursuit of equality in marriage. Other Catholic writers agreed, accusing the New Woman of being “unpardonably ridiculous, for, unconsciously we trust, she launches forth her tiny javelin at the very corner-stone of the social edifice, which demands that for its preservation there always exist a suitable subordination of powers, the essential principle of all right order in heaven and earth.”⁷ Another writer compared the New Woman to Lady Macbeth and observed that outside the home “[a woman] is a foreign excresence [sic] ugly to behold.”⁸ The New Woman’s presumed alliance with proponents of woman suffrage earned her special condemnation. In a 1914 Catholic Encyclopedia article titled “Woman,” Augustine Rössler observed that “it is difficult to unite the direct participation of woman in the political and parliamentary life of the present time with her predominant duty as a mother.” According to Rossler, God and nature had designed the two sexes to complement each other, and “man is called by the Creator to [the] position of leader, as is shown by his entire bodily and intellectual makeup.”⁹

These critiques were fairly run of the mill; most Americans, after all, despised the New Woman for her perceived assault on the social order, her implied sexual freedom, and her demand for public influence over matters and decisions best left to men’s judgment. But among their perfunctory complaints, Tyrrell and others did raise a few distinctively Catholic objections. The New Woman was “an abomination to Catholic instincts” primarily because she was “animated by many false principles for which J. S. [John Stuart] Mill [was] largely responsible.” Tracing her antecedents to the Protestant Reformation, Tyrrell accused the New Woman of representing a type of individualism that was “essentially uncatholic and anti-catholic.”¹⁰

Tyrrell’s linkage of the New Woman to both modern liberalism and the Protestant Reformation was telling. Among her many troubling characteristics, it was the New Woman’s autonomy that proved most alarming to Catholics. It was not her financial independence from male relatives that especially concerned them. Indeed, thanks in part to enduring Irish patterns of gender segregation, unattached, wage-earning women occupied a respectable place in American Catholic culture. But because single Catholic women understood themselves to be, and were expected to be, intimately invested in the larger faith community, the New Woman’s rootlessness and “disintegrating individualism” proved anathema to many Catholics of both sexes. As the fourth chapter shows, this rootlessness was the most significant reason why many Catholic women turned a deaf ear to the cries of woman suffragists. Allying with the leaders of that movement not only would have meant rejecting the social group that claimed their primary loyalty but also would have required them to look beyond the “organic conception of society” that formed the basis of Catholics’ worldview.¹¹

The New Woman’s detachment from tradition proved equally disturbing to most Catholic commentators. Tyrrell, for example, harped on the New Woman’s very novelty: as a fleeting and inconsistent phenomenon, unmoored to any tradition, she marked an unfavorable contrast with the resolute daughters of the Old Faith. It was in this context that Tyrrell recycled “Chiefly among Women,” citing Sullivan’s meticulous “retrospect of the past” to prove that “where the Church has her way, and is not trammeled by local prejudices, she desires the fullest and possible mental and moral development of women.”¹² The “local prejudices” to which Tyrrell referred had a very particular meaning to readers of the American Catholic Quarterly Review. The journal had been founded in 1876 as a vehicle designed to mediate the uneasy relationship between Catholicism and another development that was, comparatively speaking, very novel: the United States of America. According to Tyrrell, both the New Woman and the young nation were inclined to jettison the past too easily, to their mutual detriment. By bringing the wisdom of the ancient church to bear on both of them, Tyrrell maintained that U.S. Catholics could position themselves as advocates of “sane progress” in a culture that apparently seemed to value progress only for its own sake.

As U.S. Catholics grappled with the dissonance between old and new—whether faiths, countries, or women—their conversations about the boundaries of True Womanhood intersected with debates over American Catholic identity. In this context the strategy that Sullivan had implemented in “Chiefly among Women” would be widely imitated. Indeed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American Catholics called upon an astonishing variety of female historical figures, most of whom had been named by Sullivan, to defend and define the church in the United States. Though Catholics’ collective admiration for these daughters of the Old Faith initially strikes a discordant note in an era defined by “progress,” it is clear that they used them to meet thoroughly modern ends. To better appreciate those ends, it is important to understand Margaret Buchanan Sullivan and the larger American Catholic landscape of which she was a part.

MARGARET BUCHANAN SULLIVAN AND THE CATHOLIC ANSWER TO THE NEW WOMAN

Margaret Frances Buchanan was born in Drumquinn, County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1847, the ninth child of James and Susan Gorman Buchanan. Though her birth coincided with the worst of the famine years, it is unlikely that the family’s finances suffered too much as a result of that national calamity. Of Ireland’s four provinces, Ulster was the least affected by famine, and James’s occupation as a manufacturer would have further protected them from its adverse consequences. Far more ominous for the Buchanan fortunes was James’s death, which occurred soon after Margaret’s birth. In 1851, Susan and her children immigrated to Michigan, where her two eldest sons had settled in the early 1840s.¹³

In Detroit the Buchanans attended Mass at Holy Trinity Parish, where Margaret received her first Communion.¹⁴ She attended a Catholic academy run by the Society of the Sacred Heart, a French congregation that had been established in the United States since 1818. By the mid-nineteenth century Sacred Heart sisters had opened a number of girls’ academies, many of which catered to daughters of the wealthier classes. Katherine Conway, a friend of Sullivan’s whom we will focus on in the fourth chapter, was another Sacred Heart alumna who acknowledged that the congregation attracted not only upwardly mobile Irish American girls but also non-Catholic elites. Conway speculated that many Protestant mothers sent their daughters to the Sacred Heart so “that they might not be surpassed in ladylike gentleness and reserve by the Mary O’Connors and Nora McFarlands of the new stock.”¹⁵ Margaret Buchanan Sullivan also recognized the congregation’s association with the upper class when she noted that the “accomplished women” associated with Sacred Heart possessed a “refined taste” that distinguished them “as heirs of the authentic tradition of true womanhood.”¹⁶

After her graduation Margaret Buchanan became principal of one of Detroit’s public high schools. But she had aspired to be a writer since she was a child, and in 1870 she moved to Chicago to begin a career as a journalist.¹⁷ Buchanan’s intrepid efforts to secure an editorial position later became the stuff of legend. Most accounts of her life include a variation of the following story: after she submitted a series of anonymous articles on the most pressing issues of the day, the editor of the Chicago Evening Post was so impressed with their quality that he offered the author a job before he was aware of her sex or her age.¹⁸ In short order she became “the best man on the paper,” but her sex would continue to be a liability.¹⁹ In 1872 a feature in the Woman’s Journal commended Buchanan for her habit of writing without a byline. By not identifying herself as a woman, the writer observed, Buchanan would “checkmate prejudice ... without gratifying her own vanity or decreasing the force of her press by the signature of her name.”²⁰

Margaret Buchanan Sullivan, circa 1870. Courtesy of Peter Buchanan, Berkley, Michigan.

During her early years in Chicago Buchanan lived at Sacred Heart’s convent on Taylor Street. She was reportedly delighted to be “surrounded by a greater number of cultivated, pure, and intellectual women than [she] could possibly find elsewhere. In this convent woman’s right to her own soul and body is realized and fulfilled.”²¹ Buchanan’s congenial living quarters might explain why, according to an article that appeared in the New York World in 1872, she appeared to be “a girl who seems to have never yet seriously thought of marrying.”²²

However skeptical she might have been about the married state, in 1874 Buchanan married Alexander Sullivan, an Irish American lawyer with whom she had been acquainted in Detroit. The couple settled in Chicago, where they would remain for the rest of their lives, despite subsequent attempts to lure Margaret to bigger newspaper markets in Boston and New York. But Sullivan had “cast her lot decisively with the great Western Metropolis,” and she remained active in Chicago’s civic life until her death in 1903.²³ She was also active in her local parish, Holy Name Cathedral.²⁴

By all accounts the Sullivans were happy together. The Reverend Maurice Dorney, pastor of St. Gabriel’s Parish on Chicago’s South Side and a family friend, reportedly said that “if ever there was a woman who understood what Christian sacramental marriage is, it was Margaret Sullivan.” The marriage produced no children. According to her friend, Katherine Conway, this was both a source of lifelong sorrow to Margaret and the very reason her career as a journalist continued to develop after her marriage.²⁵

Alexander Sullivan was a volatile and ambitious man best remembered for his leadership of Clan-na-Gael, the Irish revolutionary organization that had been established in New York in 1867.²⁶ In 1876, his hot temper, ignited by anti-Catholic prejudice, precipitated what certainly was the most colorful incident of Margaret’s life. At a meeting of the Chicago City Council, a letter was read that accused Margaret Sullivan of using her editorial influence to interfere with the affairs of the school board, implying that as a Catholic she had a vested interest in undermining the city’s public schools. The author of the letter was Francis Hanford, principal of Chicago’s North Side High School. Alexander Sullivan was present at the meeting and, outraged at the insult to his wife, called upon Hanford that evening to demand a retraction. The argument soon turned physical and ended when Alexander fatally shot Hanford with his pistol, reportedly in self-defense. After the first trial ended in a hung jury, Sullivan was acquitted in a second trial.²⁷ In 1889, Alexander was also implicated in the brutal murder of Patrick Henry Cronin, a member of a rival faction of Clan-na-Gael. Though he was considered a leading suspect, he was never charged.²⁸

Like her husband, Margaret Sullivan be...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• NEW WOMEN of the OLD FAITH
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Chiefly among Women
• CHAPTER TWO Enlarging Our Lives
• CHAPTER THREE The Wageless Work of Paradise
• CHAPTER FOUR The Morbid Consciousness of Womanhood
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index