2014 Priyor Sandra P

THE WORLDS OF CATHOLIC LAYWOMEN

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: BELIEF AND BEHAVIOR

Sandra Strohhofer Pryor

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History

Winter 2014

UMI Number: 3617885

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THE WORLDS OF CATHOLIC LAYWOMEN

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: BELIEF AND BEHAVIOR

Sandra Strohhofer Pryor

Approved: ______Arwen Mohun. Ph.D. Chairperson of the Department of History

Approved: ______George H. Watson, Ph.D. Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

Approved: ______James G. Richards, Ph.D. Vice Provost for Research and Graduate Studies

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Signed: ______Anne M. Boylan, Ph.D Professor in charge of dissertation

Signed: ______Christine Heyrman, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

Signed: ______Rebecca L. Davis, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

Signed: ______James P. McCartin, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The most rewarding and enjoyable aspect of writing a dissertation is the opportunity at the end of the long process to thank those without whose help the project would never have come to fruition. My greatest debt is to my advisor, Anne

M. Boylan. From the beginning of the project to the final stages, she has been the best possible advisor, from offering suggestions on even the most unfocused drafts to helping me refine my writing and arguments, offering the ideal balance of encouragement and constructive criticism at every step of the way. With any other advisor, I doubt that I would have completed this degree. She epitomizes the ideal of the scholar-teacher.

Of course, I am also very grateful to the other members of my dissertation committee. Christine Heyrman provided valuable suggestions from the earliest stages of the project; her comments encouraged me to focus on gender, identity, and respectability. As the dissertation neared completion, Rebecca L. Davis commented and critiqued my work in depth. Her time and effort enabled me to greatly refine my arguments and improve my writing in the final draft. My outside reader, James P.

McCartin, generously offered his expertise in Catholic history and beliefs; I will be referring to his comments in the future. Sadly, Tamara Hareven, originally a member

of my committee, did not live to see the dissertation completed, but the influence and example of her scholarship in family history, and her faith in me and in my work, continue to inspire.

Through the long process of research and writing, members of my dissertation group provided valuable comments, criticisms, and suggestions: Jalynn Olsen Padilla,

Marie Laberge, Adrienne Berney, Jan Davidson, Katina Manko, Katie Leonard-

Turner, Bob Schoone-Jongen, Megan Jones, Hannah Kim, Hillary Murtha, and especially my dear friend Patricia Dockman Anderson. To our community of scholars, my deepest thanks. Outside of the group, I would like to thank others who read and commented on parts of this work in its various stages, especially Ann

Kirschner, Carolyn J. Lawes, Jake Murray, and Joseph Mannard. I am greatly indebted to Jennifer Grindle Dolde, who generously shared her transcriptions of the letters of Julia Compton. Participants at conferences at the Society for the History of

Childhood and Youth, the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, the Society for the History of the Early Republic, and the Conference on the History of

Women Religious gave me valuable comments and criticisms.

The University of Delaware provided an ideal community for study and research, as well as generous financial support for which I am very grateful. In addition, I would like to thank the staff of the Department of History, especially Pat

Orendorf, who welcomed me to the department, Diane Susan Clark, and Karen Kraul of Information Technology, who guided me through the use of formatting macros with

preternatural patience. I would also like to thank colleagues at Old Dominion

University, especially Carolyn Lawes, Jane Merritt, Maura Hametz, and Michael

Hucles, for their continued support. Librarians and archivists at the Library of

Congress, Kent County Historical Society, the Maryland Historical Society, the

Archdiocese of Baltimore, and Special Collections at the University of Delaware, were very patient and helpful. The Interlibrary Loan department at Old Dominion

University processed my numerous requests quickly and efficiently and forgave my late fees.

Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family, without whose support and encouragement this dissertation would never have been completed: Michelene

Murawski, Anne Marie Landrineau, Annessa Babic, Elizabeth Hoag-Carhart,

Catharyna Vail Britt, Kimberley Reed, Ruth Snow, Andrew Gold, Bill Sturman, Jake

Murray, Meri Axinn, Anne Williams, Cate Crow, Shirley Haddad McGurr, Russell

Scott Donda, Douglas Fredericks, Arielle Cunnea, Janet Dlugos, Lolen Wendy

Daugherty, Lisa Carratini Rapp, May Britton, Carrie Newman, and others too numerous to mention. You know who you are, and you know that I love you all.

My family has been an ongoing source of support and encouragement. My mother, Jane Strohhofer, helped ways too numerous to mention. Without her help caring for my daughter, I would not have attended graduate school. Over the long course of this project, my daughter Carla grew from listening to bedtime stories to sending me texts from the University of Miami encouraging me to keep working on

the dissertation. My father, Anton Strohhofer, M.D., Ph.D., shared his love of history, philosophy, and literature, and read everything I ever wrote, from kindergarten through the dissertation prospectus. My greatest regret is that he did not live to see the completion of this project, but his faith that I would finish, and memories of the times we shared, sustained me through to the end. It is to my family that this dissertation is dedicated.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... x

INTRODUCTION...... 1

Chapter

1 “THE ALMIGHTY HAS SENT THEM TO ME””: RELIGION, BENEVOLENCE, AND GENDER IN ANTEBELLUM GEORGETOWN IN THE LETTERS OF JULIA COMPTON ...... 12

“Ever Your Friend”: Julia as Teacher and Mentor ...... 19 “I Have Had Much Fatigue Both of Body and Mind”: Life as a Spinster Teacher ...... 24 “A League of Friendship”: The Laywoman and Visitation Nuns ...... 26 “My Little Girl”: Julia as Mother ...... 32 “Remember Mr. Mate is Head of Your family”: Julia’s Ideas abut Courtship and Marriage ...... 40 “A Candidate for Heaven”: Raising Catholic Children ...... 51 “A Most Lamentable State of Things”: Julia’s Criticisms of Protestantism ...... 55 “The Homeless Being Must Have a Refuge”: Private Catholic Benevolence ...... 58 “. . . [H]eaven Help wHis Preaching:” Church, Public Piety, and Sermons ...... 66 “Always Wear Your Medals”: Meanings of Julia’s Private Piety ...... 78 “How Wrong to Defer Our Preparation for Death” ...... 89

2 PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC DEATHS: OBITUARIES OF WOMEN AS REPRESENTATIONS OF MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY CATHOLIC IDENTITY ...... 100

Early Piety, Early Death ...... 107 The Domestic Ideal ...... 111 Benevolent Women ...... 119 Unmarried Women ...... 126 Genealogies of Respectability ...... 130

viii

Those from a “Humbler State” ...... 136 Obituaries as Conversion Narratives ...... 140 Redemptive Suffering and the “Good Death” ...... 157 The Obituaries of Women ...... 163

3 GENDER, ETHNICITY, AND RESPECTABILITY IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY CATHOLIC NOVELS ...... 165

Catholic and Protestant Sentimentalism ...... 169 The Lives of Mary Sadlier and Anna Dorsey ...... 174 Mary Sadlier’s Respectable Irish-Catholic Immigrants...... 180 The Perils of Ambition and the Lure of Apostasy ...... 182 Working-Class Catholic Respectability in a Catholic Captivity Narrative ... 193 Anna Dorsey, German Ethnicity, and Elite Catholic Respectability ...... 203 The Trials of Converts, Holy Contagion, and the Agency of Objects ...... 215 Representing Catholic Respectability ...... 222

4 TRUE MEN, TRUE WOMEN, TRUE RELIGION? GENDER, RESPECTABILITY, AND NINETEENTH CENTURY CATHOLIC PRESCRIPTIVE LITERATURE ...... 229

Nostalgia for an “Age of Faith” and the Critique of the Success Ethic ...... 241 Single Women, Respectability, and the Critique of Industrialization ...... 250 Representing Catholic Marriage: Masculine and Feminine Domesticities .... 256 Catholic Motherhood and Gendered Childrearing ...... 265 Devotions, Holy Objects, and Feminized Worship ...... 272 Home, Family, Church against the Destructive Influences of “the World” .. 280 The [Catholic] “Woman Question”: Remonstrance and Rights ...... 300

5 CONCLUSION ...... 310

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 315

ABSTRACT

Through a process of creative engagement with the dominant culture, nineteenth-century American Catholic laywomen developed their own understanding of themselves and helped shape a distinctively Catholic gender system. This dissertation analyzes the beliefs and behaviors of Catholic laywomen as represented in four different source types: the letters of spinster-teacher Julia Compton, published obituaries, the popular novels of Mary Anne Sadlier and Anna Dorsey, and prescriptive literature. The sources reveal how the cultural systems of gender, religion, social class, ethnicity, and race interacted in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. For Catholic women writers in particular, the lived experience of their faith and concern about their marginalization both as women and as Catholics, led them to develop concepts of domesticity that privileged belief systems and behaviors over ethnicity and economic status.

There were several avenues leading towards respectability and, in their imaginations, middle-class status. For them, the Catholic gender system was flexible and fluid, subsuming differences of marital status, ethnicity, and economic condition into domestic religious respectability. Catholic writers accepted and adapted some aspects of Protestant domesticity, such as the importance of education and charitable works, but challenged others, celebrating the use of Catholic devotional objects, and

x even granting a kind of agency to them. Outside of formal institutional channels, yet within the structure of their faith and the constraints of their society, Catholic laywomen practiced a kind of theology as they interpreted domestic ideology in ways that they perceived as empowering them as Catholics and as women.

INTRODUCTION

Belief systems of nineteenth century Americans were complex, and even contradictory, yet amidst many variations, the ideology of women’s domestic sphere seemed to remain fairly constant. The American gender system interacted with the other major cultural systems of race, ethnicity, class, and religion. Although

Protestants outnumbered Catholics, in terms of sheer numbers, Catholicism was the single largest Christian denomination; however, culturally Catholics were still marginalized, frequently encountering nativism and hostility, as well as ethnic stereotypes. In the antebellum era, as the number of Catholics expanded significantly, largely due to Irish immigrants fleeing famine at home, many middle-class, native born Protestants conflated the identities of “Irish” and “Catholic” while regarding the religion itself as somewhat less than respectable, and after the Civil War again

Catholics responded to social, economic, and political changes as well as to controversies and new developments within the Church.1 Catholic laywomen

1 The classic history remains Sidney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), for Catholicism specifically see Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992) and James Hennessey, American Catholics: A History of the American Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); for Baltimore see Thomas W. Spalding, The Premier See: A History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1789-1989

1 creatively engaged with the dominant culture and their church, creating respectably domestic identities.

Piety was a key element in the ideal of private domesticity for both Catholics and Protestants in all their variety. Historians have analyzed both the ideology of

“separate spheres” and diverse interaction between the ideal and the reality of labor for working-class women, as well as the reality of flexible boundaries between middle- class women’s private family lives and their public benevolent activities in their churches and social reform in their communities, which many saw as an expansion of women’s domestic sphere. Most studies emphasize Protestant women and studies of

Catholic women focus on nuns, who were involved with operating orphanages, parochial schools, and hospitals.2 Some studies suggest that, unlike Protestant women,

Catholic laywomen not only did not become active in social reform movements such

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). The classic work on nativism and anti-Catholic stereotypes remains Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism, rev. ed (Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1963); see also Robert Francis Hueston, The Catholic Press and Nativism (New York: Arno Press, 1976); Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986). 2 The historiography of the nineteenth century gender system is vast, but see for example Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: the Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75 (1988), 9-13; Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” American Quarterly 18 (1966), 151-74; Nancy Hewitt, “Taking the True Woman Hostage,” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 156-62; Tracy Fessenden, “Gendering Religion,” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 1, (Spring 2002), 163-69; Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) and Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). For “republican motherhood” see Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: Norton, 1986) and No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (October 1987), 689-721. For women and social reform movements see especially Anne M. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Nancy Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1877 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Carolyn J. Lawes, Women and Reform in a New England Community, 1816-1860 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000). For gender in the Civil War era see Anne Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Colleen McDannell compares Catholic and Protestant domesticity in The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); for Catholic laywomen see James J. Kenneally, The History of American Catholic Women (New York: Crossroad, 1990); Dierdre M. Moloney, American Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. For Catholic piety see Ann Taves, The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars who Study Them (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005); Joseph P. Chinnici, Living Stones: The History and Structure of Catholic Spritual Life in the United States (New York: MacMillan, 1989); James P. McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful: the Shifting Spiritual Life of American Catholics (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2010). For women’s history and religious history, see Catherine Brekus, “Introduction: Searching for Women in American Religious History,” in Brekus, ed., Religious History of American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 1-50; Amy Hollywood, “Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography,” Journal of Religion 84 (October 2004), 514-28; Merry Wiesner- Hanks, “Women, Gender, and Church History,” Church History 71, no. 3 (September 2002), 600-620; Ann Braude, “Religious History IS American Religious History,” in Thomas Tweed, ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87-107.

3 as abolitionism and women’s rights, but also were slower to adopt an explicitly stated ideology of domesticity. Others address the role of religion in reform movements and in the opposition of many Catholics to women’s suffrage.3

Through creative engagement with Protestant ideals of domesticity, Catholic women and their male advisors created an alternative gender system, based in a uniquely Catholic version of domesticity, which in their imagination was interwoven with respectability and middle-class status. Their literary productions, including letters, obituaries, novels, and advice literature reveal their understanding of domesticity and of laywomen’s roles in the Church. By focusing on laywomen as writers, thinkers, and doers, this study offers a new perspective on the construction of

Catholic identities through religious beliefs and practices. It examines the complex interrelationships among the cultural systems of gender, class, ethnicity, and religion,

3 The study of American nuns is growing; important works include Barbara Misner, Highly Respectable and Accomplished Ladies: Catholic Women Religious in America, 1790-1890 (New York: Garland, 1988); Joseph Mannard, “Maternity...of the Spirit: Nuns and Domesticity in Antebellum America, U.S. Catholic Historian 5 (1986), 305- 24; Bernadette McCauley, “Who Shall Take Care of Our Sick”: Roman Catholic Sisters and their Hospitals, New York City, 1850-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Development of New York City’s Welfare System, 1840-1920,” (University of Illinois Press, 2006); Suellen Hoy, Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago’s Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). While focusing on the only order of African-American nuns, which was in Baltimore, in Persons of Color and Religious at the Same Time: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1828-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), Diane Batts Morrow also discusses their interactions with the lay community. Kathleen Sprows Cummings analyzes how nuns and laywomen empowered themselves through the church in New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

4 and reveals how women negotiated the boundaries of domesticity. 4 Catholic print culture played a significant role in constructing an American Catholic identity that could transcend ethnic, linguistic, and class divisions. Women, through public writings, private letters, and benevolent activities, contributed to the creation of an

American Catholic identity as part of the respectable middle class, attempted to move their religion from the margin to the mainstream of American culture, and represented

Catholicism as Americanism and the Catholic Church as the guardian of women’s true rights.

Although laywomen could never be church leaders in a formal sense, their contributions to a vibrant print culture through penning of novels, obituaries, saints’ lives and devotional literature encouraged adherents to remain steadfast in their faith and contributed to the development of a religious identity that (at least in theory) transcended ethnic and class divisions. Although in the antebellum era there was no

Catholic equivalent to Godey’s Lady’s Book and no Catholic women writers produced

4 The Catholic Almanac regularly notes this fact. For a content analysis of prayer books see Ann Taves, The Household of Faith; for a Catholic domesticity see McDannell, Christian Home. Technically, because women could not receive the sacrament of holy orders, all Catholic women, including nuns, were laywomen. In this dissertation, I use the term in its popular, rather than theological meaning. The social meanings of biographies are analyzed in Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). In “Private Lives, Public Values: Historic Newspaper Obituaries in a Changing American Culture,” (Ph.D. diss, University of Missouri, 1997), Janice Rose Hume has described how the content of the obituary, as “a commemoration, a representation of an ideal,” changed to reflect social values at key “turning points” in American history (7-9).

5 works analogous to those of, for example, Catharine Beecher or Lydia Maria Child, undoubtedly Catholic women were reading such works, and they were writing novels and contributing to general interest Catholic periodicals. Laywomen may not have written systematically within the genre of domestic ideology until after the Civil War, yet by engaging with Protestant sources, they created representations of Catholic womanhood that subsumed differences of class and ethnicity into domestic respectability. At the same time, often drawing on historical examples from an idealized medieval past, they addressed contemporary concerns of women like themselves in their literary productions.

As they created and represented varieties of Catholic domesticity and respectability, laywomen articulated and attempted to live their understanding of

Catholic ideals. The letters that Julia Compton, a Catholic laywoman and teacher, wrote between 1836 and 1858 to a former student who became a friend and surrogate daughter, demonstrate how single laywomen envisioned themselves within a flexible, expansive version of Catholic domesticity. Compton, who never married (although she had the opportunity), established a school, cultivated close friendships with the nuns of the Georgetown Visitation convent, cared for an elderly, ailing mother, took in a young girl who had nowhere else to go, and grounded all of her activities in a rich devotional life. Her life course may have been different from that of most Catholic laywomen, but other antebellum Catholic women shared the new ideals of Catholic domesticity and respectability. Her letters express many of the same values and concerns found in newspaper obituaries for laywomen, echo the advice given in

6 overtly Catholic prescriptive literature, and represent religion, class, respectability, domesticity, and ideal marriage in ways very similar to the versions found in novels written by laywomen such as Mary Anne Sadlier. Because they encompass advice on courtship, marriage, childrearing, and devotional practices (which were extremely important to her), and were shared, the letters can be viewed as a type of prescriptive literature. Compton’s letters also document how antebellum Catholic laywomen engaged in parish-based benevolent and individual charitable acts. Her devotional life encompassed regular attendance at the liturgy; at the same time her letters reveal that, if anything, she paid more attention to the sermon than to the ritual of the mass. Her detailed reports on the sermons suggest that to Catholics as well as Protestants, “the word” was an extremely important part of their devotional lives and religious identities.

Obituaries of Catholic women from 1850 to 1870 in the official newspaper of the Baltimore Archdiocese, the Catholic Mirror (which also had a national circulation) portray multiple versions of respectable Catholic domesticity.5 While they have not

5 Spalding, Premier See. For reading in America see, for example, Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Cathy N. Davidson, ed. Reading in America: Literature and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989); James L. Machor, ed., Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993); for nineteenth-century women’s novel reading see Mary Kelley, Private Women, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Nina Baym, Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America, 1820-1870 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction (New York: Oxford

7 been studied as extensively as have novels and advice literature, obituaries provide snapshot portraits of ideal laywomen’s lives. By their nature, obituaries commemorated the lives of the deceased; they were not intended as full biographies.

Still, they express the authors’ views of exemplary womanhood and reveal much about the values of those who hoped to influence other Catholics. The writers of obituaries combined elements of biography, devotional works, and prescriptive literature to produce idealized versions of Catholic womanhood. Undoubtedly, many women who read the obituaries also obtained inspiration by reading about the lives of saints, or by reading historical works about exemplary women in the past. Obituaries are significant because in presenting the biographies, however idealized, of contemporary women, they provided accessible representations of exemplary, but still attainable, lives.

Significantly, there was no one “ideal” life path for Catholic women to follow.

University Press, 1985) Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1973). In “Private Lives, Public Values: Historic Newspaper Obituaries in a Changing American Culture,” (Ph.D. diss, University of Missouri, 1997), Janice Rose Hume has described how the content of the obituary, as “a commemoration, a representation of an ideal,” changed to reflect social values at key “turning points” in American history (7-9). For religious print culture, see Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789- 1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), quotes p. 7, 2. Brown regards the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers as a key to the development of evangelical print culture, and especially for women’s role. “Evangelical assumptions about the priesthood of all believers opened some room for participation in a textually defined community by members of politically disempowered groups such as women and African Americans” (183). However, I find a parallel development in Catholic print culture.

Obituaries more often took laywomen rather than nuns as their subjects, perhaps because the respectability of nuns was assumed and the authors (many of whom were friends or relatives of the deceased) wished to demonstrate different versions of ideal Catholic womanhood. The detailed obituaries of converts suggest that perhaps they functioned as conversion narratives. By presenting women who converted as intellectually independent women who challenged Protestant orthodoxy, the obituaries undermined the stereotype of Catholics as ignorant and superstitious.

Obituaries of domestic wives and mothers appeared, but so too did obituaries of unmarried women, many of whom were praised for their charitable works. Not all were financially or socially secure; obituaries of women who faced financial difficulties appeared with those of well-off women. Some of Irish immigrants were also published alongside those of native-born, suggesting that there was more than one path to Catholic domesticity and respectability. The inevitability of death, the purpose of life as preparation for death, the promise that families would be reunited in heaven, the piety of young women who died at an early age, and the image of elderly women surrounded by loving families were frequent themes.

Writers of obituaries and novelists shared similar concerns about domesticity, respectability, and defense of their faith. Mary Anne Madden Sadlier and Anna

Dorsey were two of the most popular, and prolific, Catholic writers of the nineteenth century. The content of their novels reflected their personal histories. Sadlier, an Irish immigrant herself, frequently wrote of impoverished immigrants struggling to maintain their faith while adapting to life in their new country. Dorsey, a convert,

9 presented conversion to Catholicism as a fulfillment, not a repudiation, of Protestant ideals. Both writers used fiction for didactic purposes. Women could never become priests, but they could, and did, preach through the press by trying to prevent apostasy and encouraging those of their readers who had Protestant family members to encourage them to convert; women writers thus placed themselves in a quasi-priestly role. As did writers of obituaries, Sadlier represented devotion to Catholicism, rather than economic status, as the key to respectability, thus extending to the immigrant

Irish working class the ideal of middle-class respectability. Dorsey portrayed bourgeois converts to Catholicism as the epitome of American respectability.

Although both novelists represented industry, thrift, and sobriety as crucial elements of that work ethic, they criticized excessive materialism and ambition, especially if it led to apostasy. Both novelists defended the use of holy objects, which many

Protestants regarded as one of the most repellent aspects of Catholic practice. Both authors implicitly reversed the paradigm of associating impoverished Catholic immigrants with disease by endowing material objects with agency, a form of holy contagion. Although in reality nineteenth-century Protestantism was very diverse, both authors ignored the regional, ethnic, class, and theological differences among

Protestants, instead representing Protestantism as monolithic and even anachronistically referring to them as “Puritans,” constructing a monolithic Protestant

“other” as they presented Catholicism as the genuine, mainstream Americanism.

Writers of obituaries and novels represented Catholic domesticity and respectability in the era before authors of prescriptive literature emerged to give

10 explicit advice to Catholic women. Saints’ lives, sermons, obituaries, and novels functioned as prescriptive literature, albeit less directly than did works such as Father

Bernard O’Reilly’s Mirror of True Womanhood (1876) and True Men as We Need

Them (1877) and some of the articles in the Catholic World, the literary journal founded by Isaac Hecker. Such writers attempted to reposition Catholicism in the

American mainstream by presenting Catholic gender relations as normative at a time when Protestant concerns about gender were as significant a source of anti-Catholic ideology as were political questions. Writers like O’Reilly were responding to

Protestant criticisms that the celibacy of Catholic priests and nuns undermined the family, and the confessional threatened female purity. While he emphasized the ideal of female domesticity, O’Reilly addressed some of the social problems of his day, including the plight of wage-earning single women toiling in factories for a pittance.

Yet his representation of married women as having lives of middle-class domesticity and single women as impoverished workers, ignoring the reality of destitute married women and affluent single women, revealed his concerns more than social reality. To be sure, some of those themes were also present in Protestant advice literature. Those that were not, such as advice on the use of holy objects and rituals, nostalgia for what he represented as medieval organic unity over Protestant fragmentation and excessive individualism, the necessity for church hierarchy and respect for clerical authority, were uniquely Catholic. These themes were deployed to create a Catholic ideal of respectability that was flexible enough to incorporate all who diligently followed the faith.

Taken together, the obituaries, novels, and letters suggest a process of mutual interaction in cultural production: when Catholic writers of prescriptive literature presented their ideas about respectability, domesticity, and piety systematically, they were reflecting ideologies that laywomen had already created and practiced. Although women may not have developed church doctrines in any formal way, through the medium of Catholic print culture they represented an ideal Catholic domesticity to the reading public. Practicing theology outside of formal institutional settings, they attempted to reposition their faith from the margin to the American mainstream.

Moreover, women writers of obituaries, novels, and letters presented versions of respectable domesticity that were sufficiently flexible and fluid to incorporate all

Catholic women who attempted to adhere to the ideal, whether those women were wives and mothers, spinsters, or nuns, impoverished Irish immigrants, or affluent women descended from the elite colonial Calverts.

In theory the ideal of a life of respectability and piety was open to all women.

Perhaps paradoxically, the ideal obscured very real ethnic, social, and economic differences among Catholic women. The construction of social class was different for men and women, in that women (at least married women) were economically dependent on men. With the periodic economic depressions, or “panics” of the nineteenth century (the name itself is revealing), economic status could change virtually overnight, so maintaining a middle-class status in the face of financial

12 reversals was a concern of many women.6 Indeed, it may be more accurate to regard domesticity in the plural, as a theme with many variants in religion, class, ethnicity, and marital status, but one available to all. The creation of an image of a Catholic middle class grounded in representations of respectability based on social behaviors rather than on economic status was inextricably interwoven with the Catholic gender system.

6 For example, the title of Child’s, The American Frugal Housewife Dedicated to those Who are not Ashamed of Economy (New York: Wood, 1835) is revealing, and she included a chapter entitled “How to Endure Poverty.” The creation of middle-class identities has received less attention from historians than has the working class. In The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experiences in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Stuart Blumin emphasized the distinction between manual and nonmanual employments as central to defining the middle class, along with factors such as residence patterns and benevolent activities. Richard Bushman argued in The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992) that as a “cultural system” which expanded geographically from city to surrounding areas and from east to west, and economically down the scale, refinement contributed to the “denial of social class” in America (322).

Chapter 1

“THE ALMIGHTY HAS SENT THEM TO ME””:7 RELIGION, BENEVOLENCE, AND GENDER IN ANTEBELLUM GEORGETOWN IN THE LETTERS OF JULIA COMPTON

On June 28, 1846, Julia Compton, a single, middle aged Catholic laywoman, wrote to her friend and former student Anna Martha Willson about a change in her circumstances. Julia, already caring for her elderly mother and a young orphan named

Jenny while conducting her own small private school in Georgetown, found herself with two new additions to her busy household: two boys, ages nine and seven, who had nowhere else to turn. Julia wrote to Anna

You said in one of your late letters that something strange was always happening...did you foresee that I should have two boys added to my household. Well here they are...motherless boys raised by their father in a garrison. They are not however the worst boys in the world...8

7 Julia Compton to Anna M. (Young) Willson, January 1, 1847. I thank Jenifer Grindle Dolde for generously sharing her transcriptions of some of the Compton-Willson correspondence, unpublished paper “‘My Dear Nannie’: Society and the Role of Women in Nineteenth Century Maryland and Washington D.C. through the Letters of Julia R. Compton to Anna Martha Young,” and information on the Willson family in A Legacy of Land on the Chesepeake: Three Centuries of Farming and Family in Kent County, Maryland, forthcoming. Photocopies of he letters are available at the Kent County Historical Society, Chestertown, Maryland; the originals belong to Mildred Strong, Trumpington, Rock Hall, Maryland. 8 Julia Compton to Anna Willson, June 28, 1846.

Julia explained that when the unfortunate half-orphans’ father first asked her to take his sons, she “positively refused,” but when he came two days later with the boys, she

“could not say ‘they shall not stay.’” The boys’ father “took his leave...he belongs to the army now [and is] expected to accompany the troops to Texas [to fight in the

Mexican-American war] in a few days.” While Julia accepted her new responsibility, she was far from enthusiastic about assuming the additional duties of caring for the two “incessant talkers,” telling Anna “I hope the war may be speedily terminated and some other arrangement made for the boys, poor children, they are as destitute for the time being as poor Jenny.”9

Two months later, the father had returned, but the boys remained with Julia.

“The two boys are still with me and heaven only knows when they will be removed — their father is poor or they would not now be with me — he is in no business and has no energy to procure any.” Often in such cases, members of the extended family would assume responsibility for their poor relations, but these unfortunate boys had no sympathetic relatives. Their stepmother had “every convenience” but refused to take them, and “one grandma was anti Catholic the other anti kindness so the boys had to go with strangers.”10 Nearly six months after their arrival, Julia’s hopes for “some other arrangement” for the boys had not been fulfilled. In the context of describing the

9 Ibid. The term “half-orphan” was frequently used to refer to children who had only one parent. Many half-orphans were children whose fathers had died or deserted and were left with an impoverished single mother who was unable to care for them. 10 Compton to Willson, August 13, 1846.

13 situation and updating her friend, Julia explained her philosophy of benevolence, as inspired by her religious beliefs:

The boys are still with me...[their father] was quite sick he looked as if he had been drunk...he waits in expectation of an office which perhaps will never be given to him and neither grandmother extends any kindness though both are in easy circumstances. The Almighty sent them to me and in his own time he will provide some other place for them. I ought not to complain...but you must continue to pray that I may persevere in all the duties which Almighty wisdom assigns me.11

Julia was prepared for the boys to remain with her as long as necessary, regarding this act of charity as a responsibility given to her directly by “the Almighty.”

Surrogate mother was only one of the manifold aspects of Julia’s identity. In the midst of her busy life teaching her students, caring for her elderly, infirm mother, fulfilling her religious obligations, and engaging in charitable and benevolent activities, between 1836 and 1858 Julia wrote many letters to Anna Young (Anna

Willson after her marriage). Like other women in the antebellum period who frequently formed close, affectionate friendships, Julia and Anna highly valued their connection and regarded it central to their lives. Writing to “My Dear Nannie” over the course of 22 years sustained their relationship as it changed from one of surrogate mother and teacher to becoming a friendship of equals.12 Julia developed her

11 Compton to Willson, January 1, 1847.

12 The literature on the relationships among gender ideologies and the development of benevolent activities and social reform movements is vast; see for example Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence; Lawes, Women and Reform; Boylan, Origins of Women’s Activism. According to Nancy Cott, women’s diaries indicate that the ideal

14 understanding of a uniquely Catholic gender system over the twenty-odd years of her correspondence with Anna on diverse themes including piety, benevolence, and marriage. Julia’s concerns changed over time with Anna’s changing life, emphasizing first courtship, then marriage and childrearing, but also changed with Julia’s own experiences. Yet all were informed by Julia’s pious religious perspective and demonstrated her focus on the Bible and on sermons, as well as on the specific rituals of Catholic practice. Although Julia, unlike writers or advice literature, did not explain her ideas in a systematic manner, she clearly articulated her views on middle class respectability, the meaning of family, and how she never considered her work inferior

of the “separate sphere” of domesticity for women both restricted women and gave them opportunities form close personal relationships with other women, which in turn were essential prerequisites for the rise of organized feminism. Carroll Smith- Rosenberg discusses how the letters of nineteenth century women reveal how they constructed a world of intense, affectionate personal relationships that, in many cases, were more emotionally compelling than the women’s marriages. The Bonds of Womanhood; Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). The classic discussion of the ideal of “separate spheres” for women, who were expected to be pious, pure, domestic, and submissive, remains Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood;” for critiques of the arguments and analysis of the historiography see Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds,” Nancy Hewitt, “Taking the True Woman Hostage;” Tracy Fessenden, “Gendering Religion,” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 1, (Spring 2002), 163-69. For a study of a leading Protestant advocate of domesticity, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton, 1973); for a study of both Catholic and Protestant domesticities see McDannell, Christian Home, especially. 56-76. Jeanne Boydston provides an intriguing discussion of the market revolution and domesticity and how the unpaid domestic work of women came to not be considered real work in Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

15 to that of nuns. In this sense, through her letters she was practicing a theology embedded in her lived experiences.13 Her letters suggest that Catholic laywomen practiced theology in a broader, less formal and systematic sense than the term usually implies, that theology and religious practice were mutually constitutive, and that women were active subjects in negotiating the gender system. The letters were not purely private communications; unless Julia specifically requested that “this note not be shown to any,” one may assume that others read them.14 Although her letters

13 Susanna Morrill analyzes how Mormon women novelists were practicing “popular theology…outside of the institutional structure”; I suggest Julia Compton also engaged in theological “meaning-making” in writing her letters. Morrill, “Women’s Popular Literature as Theological Discourse,” in Brekus, ed., Religious History of American Women; quote p. 200. For the agency of women in patriarchal religions more generally, Wiesner-Hanks, “Women, Gender, and Church History” and M. Christine Anderson, “Negotiating Patriarchy and Power: Women in Christian Churches,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 3 (2004), 197-96. On the interrelated discourses of women’s history and religious studies Brekus, “Introduction: Searching for Women in Narratives of American Religious History,” in Religious History, 1-50. Among the vast literature on approaches to religion, my discussion of religious belief as lived experience draws upon Martin Riesbrodt’s emphasis on “the promise of salvation” in religion rather than structural and functional approaches, on the works of Robert Orsi, Ann Taves, and James McCartin on the significance of relationships between the human and supernatural realms, on Clifford Geertz’s analysis of religion and ideology as cultural systems, and Rudolf Otto’s classic study of “the ‘numinous’ state of mind” in religious feeling. Martin Riesbrodt, The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion (trans. Steven Rendell. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth; McCartin , Prayers of the Faithful; Taves, Household of Faith; Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System” and “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87-125, 193-233; Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey, 2nd. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 7. 14 In one letter, Julia asked that “this note not be shown to any,” while years later, when Anna was on a retreat at the Visitation convent, Julia wrote “I do not know how many of the sisters have read your letters.” Compton to M. and A. Young, 1837 (no

16 conveyed news to Anna about family and friends in Georgetown, and provided advice, in them Julia revealed much about her life as a single woman, her roles as teacher, mentor, and surrogate mother, her relationships with the nuns of the nearby Visitation convent, her views on courtship, marriage, and childrearing, her benevolent activities, her responses to sickness and death, and her religious ideas and practices. The letters open a window into the world of an under-studied group: nineteenth century Catholic laywomen15 and suggest that, through a process of creative engagement with

date); Compton to Willson, June 23, 1843. At least one novel in the early republic is written partially in the form of letters circulated among students in a fictional boarding school, who shared the letters among themselves, creating a sphere of semipublic communication neither wholly public nor wholly private. Hannah Webster Foster, The Boarding School; or Lessons of a Preceptress to her Pupils: Consisting of Information, Instruction, and Advice, Calculated to Improve the Manners, and Form the Character of Young Ladies. To Which is Added, a Collection of Letters, Written by the Pupils to their Instructor, their Friends, and Each Other. By a Lady of Massachusetts, Author of the Coquette. Published According to Act of Congress (Boston: I. Thomas and E.t. Andrews, 1798). 15 See for example Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion; McCauley, Who Shall Take Care of Our Sick; Morrow, Oblate Sisters; Moloney, American Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform; Misner, Catholic Women Religious in America; Mary Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Arno Press, 1978); Mannard, “Maternity...of the Spirit;’ Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1830-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). For popular Catholic piety, see Ann Taves, The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid- Nineteenth Century America (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986). For studies that examine aspects of interactions between Protestants and Catholics, see Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). For ideological and literary encounters and analysis of the appeal of Catholicism for Protestants see Fessenden, “The Convent, the Brothel, and the Protestant Women’s Sphere” and Daniel Cohen, “Miss Reed and the Superiors: The Contradictions of Convent Life in Antebellum America, Journal of Social History 30 (Fall 1996), 149-84 on young

17 mainstream (Protestant) sources, antebellum Catholic women developed an ideology of domesticity unique to them, and in the process, claimed respectable middle class status and a place in the American cultural mainstream. Julia’s letters offer an opportunity to examine how one never-married laywoman understood the varieties of

Catholic womanhood; they show that her religion shaped her identity and gave meaning to her experiences. Her awareness that she influenced Anna, and that others would read the letters, shaped Julia’s portrayals of her daily life and her representations of her beliefs, ideals, and values. Although Julia’s letters cannot be read uncritically as direct presentations of her life and identity, they are a valuable source for understanding how she understood herself and represented her multifaceted identities, all of which she portrayed as grounded in her religious beliefs and practices.

Her letters, which she shared with other women, can be seen as are representative of ideas of Catholic laywomen of her time, ideas that could be found in a variety of subsequent published Catholic writings, including obituaries, novels, and advice literature.

Laywomen themselves helped to create Catholic versions of domesticity that were important aspects of their identities. Antebellum domesticity was a versatile

women who entered the convent seeking upward mobility rather than a religious life. Anne C. Rose, Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001) analyzes marriages between Protestants and Catholics. William W. Warner, At Peace with All Their Neighbors: Catholics and Catholicism in the National Capital, 1787-1860 (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1994) describes tolerance and mutual respect between elite “Maryland tradition” Catholics and Protestants.

18 cultural system, encompassing variations based on religion, ethnicity, and social class.

Non-Protestant women, immigrant women, and women of more marginal economic status than the idealized middle-class norm could, by creating variations on the theme of domesticity, position themselves within an American mainstream. Categories such as, for example, “Catholic,” “Irish,” and “working class” could be subsumed and dominated by the encompassing category of “woman.”

“Ever Your Friend”: Julia as Teacher and Mentor16

When Anna was no longer her student, Julia continued the relationship as

Anna’s friend and mentor, writing in one of the early letters “I have not yet resigned my office of Mentor in your regard, but indeed you are as dear to me now as when I first saw you a little pale orphan in your mourning habiliments.” Thus, the close relationship between the two probably began after the death of Anna’s mother, when in the absence of a mother or an aunt who could assume a maternal role, Julia took on the role of surrogate mother.17 Many of the letters include detailed information about mutual acquaintances and family members, especially during the “season” for visiting.18 The letters suggest that their close relationship combined that of

16 For example, Compton to Young, September 13, 1836 17 Compton to Young, September 23, 1838. After the death of her mother, Anna Young lived with her uncle, Notley Young, at Elmly, his estate in Prince George’s County, Maryland. She later obtained a position as a governess and married Richard Bennett Willson, a son of her employer. I am indebted to Jenifer Grindle Dolde for providing information on the family. 18 In 1841, Julia reminisced about when Anna first came to her, calling Anna “my own

19 teacher/mentor and student, close and loving friends, and mother and daughter. She encouraged Anna to write more frequently, in rhetorical flourishes that also expressed a real fear that silence meant illness or the presence of epidemic disease.19

In her ongoing role as Anna’s teacher, Julia advised Anna on how to

“continue” her education after leaving school, expressed “delight” when her former student read Homer, asked about Anna’s “literary meetings,” commenting on prospective literary circle members, and encouraged her to continue reading French and Spanish.20 While acknowledging implicitly that many antebellum Americans found novel reading trivial at best and morally pernicious at worst, Julia viewed some novels quite favorably; for example, she regarded Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey as

“perfectly innocent.”21 Julia shared the concerns of her Protestant counterparts who found it necessary to defend reading and writing novels, and of Mary Sadlier, who defended her novels as providing a good Catholic religious instruction for those young people who did not read devotional works, in the guise of entertainment. However,

Julia was unlikely to approve of novels with little didactic or moral content. Through

little pale faced Nannie.” Compton to Young, December 18, 1841. 19 For example,“What on earth has prevented you from writing...many unpleasant conjectures are forced upon me.” Compton to Young, August 11, 1839. 20 One girl would “be unable to confine herself to silent study” while a young man would be “quite an acquisition to your society as he is so fond of history.” Compton to Young, April 9, 1838; June 16, 1838; January 11, 1840. 21 Compton to Young, June 16, 1838.

20 education, antebellum women were claiming moral leadership and a place in civil society.22

Julia commented on, and advised Anna about, a wide range of topics, including fashion, health, proper decorum, courtship, and Anna’s decision to become a governess and leave her uncle’s estate. She even suggested which pets to avoid, advising Anna “never to keep a useless pet that requires much time or attention.”23 She also advised Anna to eat “a good Christian-like meal, not that I’m an advocate of gluttony either.”24 Here, Julia counseled moderation and temperate behavior in all realms of everyday life.

When Anna was considering leaving her uncle’s estate and becoming a governess, Julia provided advice on the difficulties and rewards she would encounter.

From “ignorant parents” to “the unmanageable disposition of the children” and the

“little personal annoyances” of servants and visitors, Julia knew from her own experience that the life of a governess would not be easy. However, the “improvement and affection of the little ones” would provide much enjoyment and satisfaction, and becoming a governess would offer Anna spiritual, as well as material, rewards.

Throughout, Julia included Biblical references to underscore her point.25 Most

22 Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 23 Compton to Willson, August 7, 1843. 24 Compton to Young, August 25, 1839. 25 Compton to Young, October 5, 1838. In the parable, a “good and faithful servant”

21 allusions were to the New Testament rather than the Old. Antebellum Catholics knew

“the word,” heard it read at mass, and turned to it for guidance.

Advising Anna on her employment as a governess, Julia commented on the need to “earn our bread by the sweat of our brow,” and revealed her understanding of a Catholic work ethic. Regardless of the prevailing ideology of domesticity, paid employment was often an economic necessity for many women. To Julia, behavior and religion, not economic status, determined respectability, and wage earning could provide spiritual, as well as economic, rewards; no doubt, her own experience influenced her perspective. Anna’s situation was more complicated than that of women who had no choice but to work for wages, because she could have chosen to stay with her uncle. Indeed, Julia generally did “not approve of such conduct,” referring to two young women who, disapproving their widowed father’s decision to remarry, left home to become governesses.26 But in advising Anna, she did not direct

Anna’s actions, but simply offered support:

...were the case mine, I would not hesitate, for I believe that we are all condemned “to eat our bread in the sweat of our brow”...those who

doubled the “ten talents” with which his master entrusted him; as did a servant who had five. “Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord I knew thee that thou art a hard man... And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth; lo, there thou hast that is thine. His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant..unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he has.” (Matthew 25:14-29, KJV). 26 Compton to Young, October 28, 1838. After Anna’s marriage, Julia noted that “it is quite fashionable now to become a governess.” Compton to Young, August 27, 1843.

have wealth must take care of it and this requires anxiety; those who are denied wealth must supply their wants by their own industry and they are not in the least degraded by so doing...all are admitted to an inheritance hereafter if they keep his commandments.27

Julia assured Anna that she was “fully competent,” would “not regret the sacrifice,” and advised Anna on how to encourage her uncle to accept this course of action.28 Once Anna had made her decision, Julia reminded her that “the little mortifications you may meet will be fully balanced by the satisfaction derived from feeling that you are not leading a useless life.” This both cautioned Anna that while caring for children could be fraught with hardships, the rewards might be numerous, implying that suffering would have a purpose. The phrase “little mortifications” often referred to Catholic practices (the “mortification of the flesh”), so her use of it here implies a spiritual dimension to work, implicitly expressing a uniquely Catholic work ethic in keeping with the belief that salvation was through both faith and good works; her employment could be part of the “good works” mandated for Catholics. Once

Anna secured a position, Julia counseled her to be cautious and remember the fragility of life, yet also to enjoy her young charges; she would “derive more pleasure observing their little pranks, and occasionally joining them, than you would from all the elite of Washington.”29

27 Compton to Young, October 5, 1838. 28 Ibid. 29 Compton to Young, October 28, 1838; July 29, 1839; August 25, 1839.

“I Have Had Much Fatigue Both of Body and Mind”:30 Life as a Spinster Teacher

Priests and nuns generally ran schools for Catholic students.31 As a laywoman,

Julia found her work rewarding, and she considered herself part of the respectable middle-class. Still, there were financial and other difficulties that preoccupied her.

When first establishing her school, she had difficulty finding a house she could afford and was forced to rent one that was “particularly inconvenient as a residence and school.”32 After five years, she could finally move to better quarters, but was then responsible for many distracting and annoying repairs as she wrote Anna:

On October 1 [1845] we moved into the house...It has been occupied by careless people who have injured it so much that it was scarcely habitable...but with the help of the mason and carpenter I can get along this winter...rent for the whole tenement is but fifty dollars a year. I am quite pleased but I have had much fatigue both of body and mind you know how little calculated I am for making bargains with landlords, workmen, & etc., yet there is no one to do it for me.33

Julia depended on the earnings from her school, and although she had enough pupils, she found that “collecting the payment is difficult,” a common lament of teachers in the area. While taking “a charitable view” of those who were truly having financial

30 Compton to Willson, November 15, 1845. 31 Yet there were “a surprising number of secondary schools operated by laypersons” in the 1830s and 1840s; Baltimore had three for girls and one for boys; one accepted both. Spaulding, Premier See, 131. Julia wrote about one other such school: “R. Has made up a pretty good school..and she had room at home and is far more agreeably situated than she was with Miss F.” Compton to Willson, March 25, 1843. 32 Compton to Young, October 28, 1838. 33 Compton to Willson, November 15, 1845.

24 difficulties, she noted that “some things can be spared for almost everything else but the just payment of the teacher’s bills.” If a particularly recalcitrant father still refused to pay, “the children must be sent to some other school.”34

Economic necessity led Julia to take in boarders. One of them was especially annoying. In 1849, Julia wrote of “the holy Protestant who occupies a room in our dwelling, her father was a preacher and she must needs be one also — I am as mad with her right now as I can be with anyone.” Taking in boarders was common; one third to one half of nineteenth century households “had boarders and lodgers at some point.”35 Julia probably tolerated the interminable preaching of “the holy Protestant” because of financial necessity. Although Julia and other single women faced financial hardship, married women were financially dependent on their husbands, widowhood frequently entailed poverty, and even an affluent husband could face bankruptcy during the “panics.”36 Julia referred to herself as a “daughter of poverty,”37 but viewed

34 Compton to Willson, August 7, 1843. Julia rarely discussed financial matters with Anna and gave her reasons: “I am getting into reflections on bills which will by no means conduce either to my piety or your edifications so I will take leave of the subject, it is not a cheering one.”

35 Compton to Willson, January 6, 1849; Hareven, “History of the Family,” 105. 36 Some Protestant authors of advice literature addressed the problems of families whose financial situation was not commensurate with their status; Lydia Maria Child addressed one of her books to The Frugal Housewife and even provided advice on “how to endure poverty”:...when poverty comes (as it sometimes will) upon the prudent, the industrious, and the well-informed, a judicious education is all-powerful in enabling them to endure the evils it cannot always prevent” [emphasis in original]. Child, Frugal Housewife, 111-13, quote p. 111. 37 Compton to Willson, January 1, 1847; Child, Frugal Housewife, 112.

25 of herself as eminently respectable and, implicitly, of middle-class status. Such representations of a uniquely Catholic respectability contributed to, in essence, an erasure of social class in her imagination and that of other Catholics who, despite their economic travails, claimed domestic respectability and status.

“A League of Friendship”38: The Laywoman and Visitation Nuns

Julia and the nuns of the Georgetown Visitation Convent were both running schools. Julia had close relationships with the nuns, who established the Young

Ladies’ Academy, a boarding school that attracted as many Protestant as Catholic girls from elite families, and the convent was a source of spiritual solace. 39 Her letters reveal that in many ways she viewed herself as the spiritual equal of the nuns, and that they had much in common, although they also suggest some ambivalence in her views

38 Compton to Young, November 17, 1839. 39 The convent was one of the first to be founded in the United States. The foundress, Alice Lalor, was an Irish immigrant who met two widows who also desired a religious life; the three helped the French Poor Clares with their school. When the Poor Clares returned to France in 1804, “the pious ladies” took over the school. Pope Pius VII approved solemn vows in 1816, which were taken on the 194th anniversary of the death of St. Francis de Sales, co-founder of the European Visitation order. An indication of the prestige of the Young Ladies’ Academy is that in 1828 John Quincy Adams “presided over commencement ceremonies.” Like other teaching nuns, the Visitation sisters established a free Benevolent School for poor girls, supporting the school with revenues from the Academy. Although they owned slaves, the nuns assisted Maria Becroft, a free black woman who established a “boarding andday school for colored girls across the street from the convent. Rev. Joseph Code, Great American Foundresses (1929; Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 180-87; Catholic Encyclopedia (1912; http://www.newadvent.org), s.v. “The Visitation Convent, Georgetown” and “The Visitation Order”; Spaulding, The Premier See, 131; Evens, Role of the Nun, 66-70; quote p. 67; Misner, Highly Respectable and Accomplished Ladies, 18-27.

26 of the status of nuns and laywomen. Generally she deferred to the nuns, but in some cases questioned their views on matters such as whether or not a young girl should enter the convent, suggesting that she saw any hierarchy of nuns over laywomen as flexible and negotiable. Nor did she believe that being a nun was necessarily a higher calling than marriage, or for that matter, her own life as a spinster teacher.

Most of the nuns also had elite backgrounds, and the curriculum of the

Academy appealed to the upper classes.40 Although Julia never entered the convent, at times she longed for its spiritual community. While walking through the convent cemetery, she wished that she could be buried there, writing that “there seemed to exist a sort of communication between the living and the dead.”41 She frequently mentioned her visits to the convent, and regretted when circumstances did not permit visits, and was especially close to some of the nuns.42 In 1839, Julia wrote “Sister

40 In 1827, the curriculum included history, mythology, rhetoric, French, music, dancing, drawing, painting, algebra, elocution, metaphysics, logic, and “domestic economy”. Misner calculated that before 1850, the families of 10.1% of the nuns were “planter”, 29.2% “established family” and none “artisan” or “farmer”. In contrast, among the Sisters of Charity (the order founded by Elizabeth Seton at Emitsburg), the family background was 11.5% “artisan” and 17.1% “farmer” with only 1.3% “planter” and 3.1% “established family. Misner, 108-09, 272-73. For the growth of female academies, their curricula, and education as the grounding for women’s public life see Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, esp. ch. 3. 41 Compton to Young, September 27, 1840. As F. W. Feber explained the “communion of saints” in All For Jesus (1854): “We [Catholics] are not stopped by death...we are not separated from our dead...we go up and down staris, in and out, to each other’s rooms, just as it may be, there is no constraint about it at all.” Quoted in Taves, Household of Faith, 48. 42 For example, “I have just returned from the convent” (Compton to Young, August

Borgia and I have entered into a league of friendship and are on quite an intimate footing.” When Julia had not been able to visit the convent for a time in 1843, Sister

Isidore “sent an invitation.”43

While Julia could be outspoken with nuns to whom she felt especially close, in other instances she deferred to them. Julia was quite frank with her friend Sister

Borgia. When the nun thought that Aloysia, a student at the convent, was “becoming a very good girl” and would become a nun, Julia replied that she “feared she would not be a good one,” which “silenced the debate for that time.44 Yet at other times, Julia deferred to the nuns. For example, when Julia expressed her doubts about the suitability of the convent academy for a very young girls, a Sister Clare replied that

“there were some nearly as small [young as Aloysia] as she there.” Julia thought “they had much better be at home but no more was said on the subject.”45 Likewise, when

Anna had asked “for an explanation of ‘Christian simplicity,” Julia wrote “I am unable to give the proper definition and think you had better inquire of Str. Stanny or May

Ellen,” suggesting that, especially in matters of religious instruction, Julia deferred to

11, 1829); “I went to the Convent on Sunday” (Compton to Young, March 14, 1841); “I cannot go this evening to the Convent it is now too late, but tomorrow I will see all” (Compton to Willson, January 7, 1843); “I have not been to the Convent but once during the vacation” (Compton to Willson, August 27, 1843). Compton to Willson, November 30, 1843. 43 Compton to Young, November 17, 1839; Compton to Willson, November 30, 1843; Compton to Willson, August 12, 1844. 44 Compton to Young, November 17, 1839. 45 Compton to Young, August 25, 1839.

28 the nuns. However, she did answer Anna’s question, writing about the need for prayer and mass attendance, which indicates that Julia was rather confident in her own theological knowledge.46

Sometimes the Visitation sisters asked Julia for help; for example, “[t]he sisters at the convent sent for me one evening in great haste and on my arrival I found they wished me to receive a little girl as boarder for a year.” Julia made “arrangement” to take the girl, who was “considered too small for the Academy” but the nuns placed her with a Mrs. Ford, which was “no loss” to Julia, “but it appeared strange that they should so speedily change their minds.”47 That the nuns placed young girls with laywomen suggests that they were practicing a type of informal foster care system.

Perhaps the nuns preferred to place children with married (or widowed), rather than single women, which suggests that, to the nuns, married women had higher status than single women (or Julia’s house may have been too crowded).

Julia’s descriptions of her relationships with the nuns suggest that, more often than not, laywomen deferred to nuns. While Julia did not hesitate to express her views to a nun who was apparently a rather close friend, and even had the last word in their discussion on a girl’s suitability to become a nun, this was not the case when Julia

46 Compton to Willson, June 23, 1843. Julia wrote “my idea is it means... not being mealy mouthed uttering the truth without any covering telling a plain unvarnished tale but in my opinion a disagreeable truth may in some respects be softened and covered so that the truth still remains.” 47 Compton to Willson, October 14, 1844.

29 expressed her reservations about placing little girls in the academy to Sister Clare.

Julia’s letters show hierarchies of nuns over laywomen, and married over single women; however, these hierarchies were, flexible and fluid.48

Julia attended many church services with the nuns. When few people attended church on a day that “three lay sisters were professed” to the Visitation, Julia speculated that “had the ladies been young and pretty the ceremony would have had, in my opinion, a finer effect, so much power has the imagination on such occasion.” 49

The situation was very different on a day when two nuns “received the black veil.”

Perhaps because lay sisters and those who took solemn vows were different in canon law, and the latter were of more elite social status, “immense crowds attended and a few witnessed the ceremony.” While the sermon was “very appropriate, though in an old fashioned style,” Julia criticized the “spectators” who stood up in their pews.50

Deploring the unruly behavior of the congregants, Julia implicitly noted social class issues, associating disorder with lower status and proper decorum with respectability, a formulation of class structure that was implicitly democratic and meritocratic:

48 Jen Dolde suggests that Julia was confident both in her own virtue and Sister Borgia’s respect for her. Similarly, in her study of nuns in New York, Maureen Fitzgerald did not find a hierarchy of nuns over laywomen. However, Anne Boylan found that in addition to nuns over laywomen, Catholic women experienced the same hierarchies of age and marital status as did their Protestant counterparts (with married women of higher status than spinsters). Dolde, “‘She that is not Married;” Boylan, Origins of Women’s Activism, esp. 61-64. 49 Compton to Young, August 11, 1839. 50 Compton to Young, November 17, 1839.

30 conduct, not economic status, ethnicity, or family background, indicated membership in the respectable middle class.

Julia did not approve of girls entering the Visitation order for reasons other than a true religious calling. “It has become so fashionable to enter the Convent,” she wrote to Anna. Moreover, she noted that education at the academy was not best for some girls; one “profited very little by her sojourn at the Convent” and another became “increasingly ungovernable.”51 Much as Julia admired the nuns and the

Academy, she recognized that the convent school was not always the best place for some girls. Julia also described how some girls attended Catholic academies or became nuns for social, rather than religious, reasons; for example, one young woman entered the convent due to the impending marriage of her widowed father.52

According to Julia, young Martha was “solicitous to steer clear” of the future wife. Martha “only seeks refuge for a time,” wrote Julia. “I don’t think she has any vocation...I don’t like this running off to the convent whenever a difficulty is encountered.”53 Not all were suited for the religious life; indeed, Julia preferred marriage to the convent for a young girl who had considered both. To an acquaintance who was “disappointed” in the choice of one her nieces, one she “had thought...was going to be a sister — but no — she is to be married,” Julia responded “[w]ell I

51 Compton to Young, March 1, 1840; March 22, 1840. 52 Compton to Willson, January 8, 1845. The “Emmitsburg school” probably refers to the elite St. Joseph’s Academy. Spalding, Premier See, 97. 53 Ibid.

31 applauded the girl and told Miss Sally I believed this was rather a pleasing disappointment.” Still, the day a girl who had a true “vocation” entered the convent was her “happy day.”54 Julia did not believe that convent life was superior to marriage; all depended on the individual and her motives.

“My Little Girl”: Julia as Mother

To Julia, all Catholic women, nuns, married women, all spinsters, assumed a maternal role, an assertion that subtly undermined hierarchies of nuns and laywomen, married women and spinsters. Although Julia never had children, she assumed the role of mother, as well as that of friend and mentor. As nuns assumed the maternal role in teaching, and in caring for orphans, so too did Julia in her relationship to Anna, in her teaching, and in her informal adoption of a young orphan girl she raised to adulthood.

In one letter, Julia referred to herself as “the aunt Compton” to Anna’s boys, implying a view of family that transcended biological kinship.55 Although nuns usually provided care for impoverished and orphaned children, and they, rather than laywomen, founded orphanages,56 Catholic parish-based charity existed in the antebellum era, and some benevolent Catholic laywomen, acting as individuals, took in children. Julia

54 Compton to Willson, May 14, 1845; Compton to Young, July 5, 1840. 55 Ibid. 56 According to Anne Boylan, “Two exceptions to that concession underscore the rule” of nuns, rather than laywomen, establishing orphanages and schools; both of these were fund-raising organizations founded by New York City laywomen. Boylan, Origins of Women’s Activism, 41-43; quote p. 42.

32 became a surrogate mother to the child she called “my little Jenny” in 1841, when the five year old’s mother was dying of consumption. Jenny’s siblings were placed with others: “there is one smaller that Mrs. Nancy Clark has adopted, cousin Mary took an older sister and somebody in the country has taken the boy, the oldest girl will remain with her mother as long as she wants her assistance so the whole family is dispersed.”57

Perhaps significantly, Julia used the word “adoption,” rather than the usual term “placing out” (which may have been the situation for Jenny’s brother, as many orphan children were sent to farm families, who generally regarded them more as a source of cheap labor than as new additions to the family). At the time Julia took in

Jenny, adoption as a legal procedure for transferring the custody of a child from one individual (or an institution) to another did not exist.58 Yet informal adoptions, where

57 Compton to Young, January 4, 1841. 58 In 1851, Massachusetts became the first state to pass an adoption law which became the model for the “best interests” doctrine, terminating the biological definition of parenthood, substituting a legal bond, and mandating that the adoptive family be able to care for the child properly. Prior to this, the only legal method of transferring governance from one individual or family to another was indenture, which did not necessarily end the bond between biological parent and child. Indenture was widespread in the colonial period and did not end until the late nineteenth century. For adoption, see E. Wayne Carp, ed., Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). For colonial indentures, which often required the employer to provide an apprenticeship, see John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). For indenture of female orphans in by the Boston Female Asylum see Susan L. Porter, “Victorian Values in the Marketplace: Single Women and Work in Boston, 1800-1850,” in Porter, ed., Women of the Commonwealth: Work, Family, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Boston: University of

33 families raised orphan or unwanted children as their own, with a bond based on emotional attachment rather than the desire for labor, certainly took place; it may have been a transitional stage between indenture and adoption.59 Julia’s adoption of Jenny provides a window into an informal adoption, how Julia constructed a view of

“family” that transcended biological kinship, and into the complexities of her views of

Catholic motherhood.

When Jenny’s mother died, Julia wrote that “my little girl has no more inkling or care than the yellow kitten,” but she “can’t help loving...the little boisterous romp

Massachusetts Press, 1996), 17-42. For Protestant reformer Charles Loring Brace, who founded the New York Children’s Aid Society, which favored placing children with midwestern farm families see Marilyn Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). Linda Gordon presents a fascinating exploration of the meanings of religion, class, and ethnicity through a study of white Catholic orphans placed in middle-class Mexican Catholic homes, and the white Protestants who interfered in The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 59 State legislatures passed private adoption acts, which changed the name of the child and provided for inheritance from adoptive parents. Before 1851, Massachusetts passed over 100 of these laws, which legalized a relationship that was already present. For the development of adoption law, see Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 234-85. Julie Berebitsky documents how the discourse of adoption helped to shape ideas about the family in Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000). Tamara K. Hareven discusses the complexity of defining “family” and the need for historians to incorporate those on the “edges” of family life into the history of the family in “The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change,” American Historical Review 96 (February 1991), 95-124, especially 123. Berebitsky, “Like Our Very Own,” 19-23; Grossberg, 269-70. Berebitsky regards informal adoption as a transitional stage, and notes that parents of limited means might be unwilling or unable to go through a possibly convoluted legal process when there would be little, if any, property to bequeath.

34 though I should be well better pleased if she were milder and possessed more sensibility.” Apparently, Julia enjoyed her students’ interest in her new charge:

Jenny calls me sister Julia do you think the title a little ominous. The school girls who take a most lively interest in all her concerns wished to know what she was to call me, mother they thought unsuitable, aunt Julia they thought was the proper title, however I left the whole concern to Jenny who for some time called me “July” this after awhile struck her as an impropriety and she prefixed sister to my name so I am now dubbed “sister July.”60

Julia’s repeated use of the possessive “my” (four times in one letter) suggests that

Julia, realizing that Jenny now had no living relatives, recognized that she would be solely responsible for raising the child. Unlike the boys that Julia cared for, who had a living father who (at least in Julia’s hopes) would eventually assume responsibility for his children when he returned from the Mexican-American war, Jenny was alone in the world. While Julia deferred to her students’ belief that for Jenny to call her

“mother” would be “unsuitable,” apparently she had considered assuming the name, knowing that she would be a mother in behavior and attitude. Julia never became a nun, but was called “sister” by her surrogate daughter; by informally adopting Jenny,

Julia was demonstrating a “maternity of the spirit” similar to that of nuns who assumed a quasi-maternal role in caring for children.61 Perhaps Julia’s students also realized that in calling her “sister Julia,” they were acknowledging that their teacher

60 Compton to Young, January 4, 1841. 61 The phrase is Joseph Mannard’s, “Maternity...of the Spirit.”

35 was assuming a role, albeit on a smaller and more private level, similar to that of nuns who taught and cared for the sick and destitute.

Jenny could be a difficult child, but if Julia ever considered finding another

“situation” for her, as she had hoped to with the boys, she gave no indication in her letters. A year after Jenny’s arrival, Julia told Anna that raising Jenny was difficult, but “nonwithstanding her forward pertness I am obliged to love her a little.”62 As she would have with a biological child, Julia felt “obliged” not only to care for her, but to

“love her,” too. At times Jenny was “boisterous and rude”; in 1843 Julia lamented that the child was “a sad plague” to Julia’s elderly mother.63 A year later, Julia lamented that Jenny “is as bad as she can well be... but in time she may be better I wont despair.”64 Apparently, Julia accepted a child who could be destructive and always hoped that, given a proper Catholic upbringing, Jenny would improve her attitudes and behaviors.

Julia was faced with the challenge of raising a child who was often ill, as well as unruly. She frequently described caring for Jenny in times of illness.65 Julia

62 Compton to Young, July 4, 1842. 63 Compton to Willson, August 7, 1843; Compton to Willson, November 30, 1843. 64 Compton to Willson, August 8, 1844. 65 For example, 1843 Julia wrote “I fear the old malady will return”; in 1845 Jenny contracted whooping cough, and in 1847 Julia wrote “Jenny now has some fever too much to allow her to go to church. I have tried many outward applications without effect and she has had no return of deafness.” Compton to Willson, March 25, 1843; August 3, 1845; January 1, 1847.

36 agonized over how to correct and discipline an unruly child in fragile health. On one occasion, she confided that she had resorted to corporal punishment: “Jenny has been quite sick for a few days past, she becomes faint and looks as if she had no blood left in her veins and she is so obstinate...I do now not know what to do except I gave her a whipping and that I don’t like to do as she is not well.”66

Above all, Julia wanted to inculcate piety and obedience (the same virtues that, after Anna married, she urged Anna to foster in her young son) in Jenny and feared that her efforts were of little avail: “I am afraid for Jenny — she learns her book rapidly, but this I consider the least part of a child’s education she may change as she becomes older at least I hope she will.”67 At least some of Julia’s hopes were realized as Jenny grew older. By 1847, as the health of Julia’s mother declined, Jenny assumed more household responsibilities, including going to market.68 Ten years later, Julia’s hopes were only partially realized; while Jenny engaged in some benevolent activities, she did not emulate Julia’s piety. Julia complained that Jenny was “proud and ambitious,” and would not join her in a novena, but Jenny cooked a roast for dinner and “helps me with the school and after school hours our household us occupies

66 Compton to Willson, June 28, 1846. 67 Compton to Willson, May 15, 1845. 68 Compton to Willson, May 29, 1847.

37 much.” Now too, Jenny followed in Julia’s benevolent footsteps: she had “gone in to see one of our sick neighbors.”69

Jenny herself wrote a few notes to Anna, whom she called “My Dear Mrs.

Willson,” a salutation that suggests respect. After Christmas in 1857, Jenny attached a letter to Julia’s, writing “Sis Julia has been very sick but is now right smart,” and discussing her spiritual life: “I confess I have so little Charity...I make Novena for myself and get nothing, and make for others they get what I ask for.”70 In 1858, Jenny revealed that she may have felt that she was competing with Anna for Julia’s attention and affection: “Sis Julia is well and sends her best love to you and kisses to the wee ones she often speaks of you so much that I am jealous...I really believe she loves you more than me or anyone else.”71 This suggests that Jenny was well aware of Julia’s relationship with Anna, and realized that “Mrs. Willson” might be Julia’s favorite.

Certainly, Julia’s correspondence to Anna about Jenny indicates that the child was not used as a source of domestic labor, but was cared for much as a mother would a biological child. That Julia persisted despite Jenny’s “bad” behavior and frequent illness demonstrates a charitable and maternal attitude grounded in her religious

69 Compton to Willson, December 30, 1857. Jenny’s year of birth can be dated 1836, because she was five years old when she came to Julia, so she would be about 21 now. A novena is a series of prayers said for a specific time period, usually in hope of obtaining something desired through the intercession of the Virgin Mary or a saint. For a discussion of novenas and cures attributed to them, see Taves, Household of Faith, 41-42, 57-60. 70 Jenny to Willson, December 28, 1857. 71 Jenny to Willson, May 18, 1858.

38 beliefs. Alternatively, Julia could have recognized that, as a childless spinster she might need someone to care for her in old age (as Julia did for her own mother), and

Jenny would be the most likely candidate. Indeed, this appears to have happened, for in 1874, Julia and Jenny together wrote Anna, suggesting that a now middle-aged

Jenny was tending an elderly Julia.72

Whether Julia regarded herself as adoptive mother or simply as a woman trying to do her Christian duty to the orphan, her experiences document how some single Catholic laywomen cared for and raised children. Like nuns who diverted revenues from their elite academies to charity schools, Julia received payments from her students that helped to pay for provisions for Jenny and the two boys. By caring for orphan children much as she would a biological child, creating a family as bound to one another by affection and duty as others were by blood, Julia could enact, as did nuns, that most important role for a Catholic woman: motherhood.73

72 According to Carolyn Lawes, the advice of John Abbott suggests that ostensibly self-sacrificing mothers were, in reality, “domestic Napoleons” who were thinking of their own interests as well as those of their children. Tamara Hareven notes that in the nineteenth century, one child, often the youngest daughter, would frequently remain to care for aging parents. Lawes, “Capitalizing on Mother: John S. C. Abbott and Self- Interested Motherhood,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 108 (1998), 343-95; Hareven, “Aging and Generational Relations,” in Families, History, and Social Change, 127-39. 73 Apparently Jenny cared for Julia in her old age. The 1870 census shows a 90-year old Julia Compton living in the District of Columbia with “Jennette Deeth” (born in the District of Columbia and presumably Jenny) with her husband and three children. I am indebted to Anne M. Boylan for bringing this to my attention.

“Remember Mr. Mate is Head of Your family”:74 Julia’s Ideas abut Courtship and Marriage

Julia had not remained single because of lack of opportunity to marry. In 1825, she received an impassioned proposal of marriage from one H. W. Peterson:

I will legally maintain you & your worthy parent, — or, in other words — I will lawfully marry you — and you shall be my dear & loving wife, and I certainly will be your affectionate husband — and the cheerful protector of both you and your mother, until death shall separate us!!! [emphasis in original]75

However, she rejected the proposal, for his next letter informed her that he was to be married, but desired “one more correspondence” from her.76 Although without Julia’s response it is impossible to determine why she rejected his proposal (which was meaningful to her, otherwise she would not have kept the letter), religious differences may have been a factor. Peterson may have hoped that Julia would overlook what he considered insignificant denominational differences:

May it not be; yea, is it not probable, that tho’ born in different climes; educated in somewhat different principles; (which, however, do not alter our just views of the Almighty and the economy of Heaven) — that God, in mercy, has created us for each other?77

74 Compton to Willson, August 23, 1843. 75 H.W. Peterson to Julia Compton, April 9, 1825. I have been unable to obtain any information about Julia’s suitor; the postmark suggests that he lived in Wilmington, Delaware. 76 Peterson to Compton, June 6, 1825. 77 Peterson to Compton, April 9,1825.

Peterson was far from alone in his belief that mutual respect of partners and faith in

God were more important in a marriage than partners adhering to the same denomination. Interfaith marriage was “a powerful expression of social liberty,” and although the Catholic church officially censured such marriages, bishops issued dispensations and priests performed them, while the church “nurtured Catholic wives and children, and waited for the conversion of Protestant men.”78 The pious Catholic wife would, ideally, lead her husband to convert.

Rather than fearing marriage to a Protestant, perhaps Julia adhered to “the cult of single blessedness.”79 She may have not wanted to surrender her cherished independence to a convent or a husband, and may have feared that, even in the most companionate of marriages, wives were economically dependent upon husbands and were expected to submit to them. Also, her age could have been a factor (she would have been in her forties) or she may have thought that marriage would have interfered

78 Rose, Beloved Strangers, 1-57, quotes p. 16, 55. 79 For the antebellum “cult of single blessedness” see Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty: A Better Husband (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); for the development of “affective individualism” and the ideal of companionate marriage, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); for a uniquely American adaptation, see Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (October 1987), 689-721. Anya Jabour analyzes the contradictions between the companionate ideal and the inequality entailed by the wife’s economic dependence through the extensive letters of one couple in Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). For the private and political aspects of marriage, see Cott, Public Vows.

41 with her filial duties. Julia cared for her widowed mother, who was frequently ill, a situation that led Julia to resign a desirable position as a governess and start her own school in 1838.80

Like Catherine Beecher, who never married or had children but wrote books advising women how to raise a family and run a household, as mentor, friend, and surrogate mother, Julia had few qualms about advising Anna on courtship, marriage, and childrearing. She provided Anna with specific advice concerning various suitors; for example, warning her about a man of high status, she wrote “if the Count is still with you, guard well your hearts, his I believe is encased in some horny substance.”81

However, she also advised Anna not to ridicule rejected suitors: “Some young ladies consider the rejection of an admirer as a subject for witticisms and sport but there are few circumstances in which such conduct would be allowable indeed I may say none in which I should consider it so.” In Julia’s moral perspective, ridiculing a disappointed suitor would be inexcusable. Moreover, although Julia considered this man as “innocent and good,” with “prospects not unfavorable,” she believed that he

80 Julia’s situation with her mother was somewhat exceptional, as usually adult children and parents maintained separate households until the aging parent became too debilitated to live alone, while Julia and her mother coresided even while the mother was relatively healthy. The usual pattern in the nineteenth century was for one child, usually a daughter, to remain in the parental household. Still, Julia’s support of her mother “expressed an overall principle of reciprocity over the life course and across generations.” Hareven, “Aging and Generational Relations,” in Families, History, and Social Change, 127-49, quote p. 143. 81 Compton to Young, August 13, 1837.

42 lacked the ambition Anna would desire in a husband. Believing that respectability and compatibility were important, but not sufficient, Julia advised her young friend that

“you must look up to the man you marry or be miserable;” she accepted the antebellum gender system entailed wifely submission.82

Julia also advised Anna on proper etiquette; for example, during a “season” for visiting in 1838, she encouraged Anna to be more friendly and open, and to listen to individuals whom she may have been inclined to dismiss at first: “If you...would be a little less reserved you would find your visitors more amusing.”83 However, almost three years later, Julia counseled Anna to

“a modest reserve in your pleasure...I too was called ‘a prude’ when of your age but was not the less respected...”84 Apparently, Anna had been called a “prude” after being reluctant to engage a flirtation that, in Julia’s perspective, was not quite proper. Julia noted that true friends, rather than mere acquaintances, would respect Anna more. Because a respectability based on benevolence and fulfilling her duties was a key part of Julia’s identity, she advised Anna that behaving in a way that would avoid future regrets was much more important than yielding to some dubious, momentary social pleasures.

Not surprisingly, given that marriage was a central event in the lives of young women, one which could very well determine their future happiness as well as their social status and economic well-being, Julia urged restraint in courtship and praised women who took great care in selecting a husband from among their suitors. She

82 Compton to Young, September 23, 1838. 83 Compton to Young, June 18, 1838. 84 Compton to Young, March 14, 1841.

43 admired both the circumspection and the character of Anna’s uncle’s “lady love,” who had rejected several suitors, and related anecdotes “which do credit both to her heart and judgment.”85 To Julia, both affection and practical considerations were important in choosing a mate. On another occasion, Julia noted that a young man in the throes of infatuation “must reckon four weeks absence from his fair little lady love as the same number of years,” and she advised Anna that “the raptures of one hour should never be so great as to exclude enjoyment of those that succeed.”86

After Anna married, Julia continued to advise her. When Anna and “Mr. Mate” wanted to move into their own home, Julia recognized that “young people always like to be in some place they can call their own;” having their own household was “an almost sacred goal” for young couples. However, Julia cautioned Anna to place religion first, voicing a criticism of the American gospel of success which was strikingly similar to that in some of the novels of Anna Dorsey and Mary Sadlier and the advice of Father Bernard O’Reilly: “Foreigners say, that the main point among

Americans is the making of money — my meaning, however, is what Christians consider the main point. Depend upon it, the money matter will thrive quite as well where the chief business is not neglected.”87 Here, Julia used “Christian” to mean

“Catholic, although she may have believed that Catholics and Protestants shared

85 Compton to Young, Palm Sunday, 1838. 86 Compton to Young, August 13, 1837. 87 Compton to Willson, January 8, 1845; Hareven, “Family Change and Historical Change: An Uneasy Relationship,” in Families, History, and Social Change, 303.

44 values, such as childrearing practices which favored nurture rather than will-breaking, parental affection balanced with a demand for obedient children, an educated mother who emphasized piety and morality, and proper wifely submission, and regarded these values, rather than acquiring wealth, as the source of true respectability. 88

Julia frequently referred to upcoming marriages in her letters. Because it was the future of most women, and so crucial to happiness and identity, marriage was a central event in their lives. Such discussions were not simply gossipy reports, but warnings of the many things that could go wrong during the process of courtship, discussions of the qualities that would make a good husband, and advice about how to maintain a happy, or at least tolerable marriage, which was a central concern given that Catholic marriages were indissoluble. Sometimes wedding plans were canceled for reasons that were never revealed. A Miss Carson “had been twice engaged and on one occasion the day was fixed...when a letter from some friend in the south, caused a cessation in the whole proceeding.”89 The lack of specific information would leave the reader to speculate on the many possible problems that would not be mentioned in polite society, as well as serve as a warning that even the most carefully planned

88 Julia, like Father Bernard O’Reilly, uses “Catholic” and “Christian” interchangably. O’Reilly titled his advice manuals Mirror of True Womanhood and True Men as We Need Them; “Catholic” is not in the title but throughout the books, he reminds his readers that the advice is meant for Catholics. Similarly, Dorsey and Sadlier represent Catholicism as true Christianity, as did many Catholics since the Protestant Reformation. 89 Compton to Young, August 13, 1837.

45 marriage might not take place. Conversely, some marriages were arranged with great haste: “Miss Lizz was converted into Mrs. Lloyd without any ceremony saving the marriage ceremony.”90 Again, the reason is left unstated, the reason for the hasty union could be anything from parental disapproval to an unplanned pregnancy, and the letter did not state whether or not the rapid marriage was something the former Miss Lizz desired; perhaps her wishes were not even considered. (If this ceremony were performed in a Catholic church, it would be rather irregular, as canon law required that banns of marriage be posted before the nuptial mass). The lack of specific information, and the absence of comments about not knowing the reason for the marriages, perhaps implies that, at least for some women, becoming married was more a fate than an option.

Although single, Julia was well aware that the reality of marriage did not always measure up to the ideal. After the 1841 wedding of her godchild Rebecca

Stewart and Charles Jones, a couple who were deeply infatuated with one another,

Julia let Anna know that romance inevitably yields to quotidian realities, but predicted that they would be “happy enough.”91 However, the couple disagreed over childrearing. In 1857 Julia wrote that “Rebecca Jones is getting along very well

90 Compton to Willson, January 8, 1845. For the history of marriage in the United States, see Cott, Public Vows; Henrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); for laws pertaining to courtship and marriage in the nineteenth century Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 33-102; for interfaith marriages in the nineteenth century Rose, Beloved Strangers. 91 Compton to Young, December 5, 1841.

46 though she considers her husband anything but a Solomon — however, he is head of the house.” Their oldest child was sent to school at Emmitsburg because the father believed that “[t]he nuns [of the Visitation convent] in Washington exhibited too much pride,”92 which implies criticism of the upper class origins of most of the nuns, as opposed to the family’s own middle-class status. The father made the final decision about the daughter’s fate despite the mother’s wishes, and whether or not she agreed, the mother was expected to acquiesce. Julia’s discussions of courtship and married life resemble those of women who regarded marriage, and its attendant submission to the wishes of the husband, as something of a disappointment after the emotional closeness and intensity of their intimate, affectionate friendships with other women.93 In contrast to the mutuality in a friendship between women, a wife was expected to submit to her husband’s decisions and, when feminine “influence” failed, to accept them without complaint.

Some marriages were deeply troubled; Julia forthrightly told Anna that “Sally

Young’s husband was something of a tyrant.”94 Another young couple were, according to Julia, too immature to be married: “...Parson Smith first performed the ceremony —

92 Compton to Willson, December 30, 1857. 93 According to Smith-Rosenberg, “Female World of Love and Ritual,” some women also lamented the difficulties they faced in maintaining their romantic friendships with other women after marriage. These relationships between women were not homosexual in the modern sense; because of “separate spheres” women created their own social and emotional world. For`some women, leaving this “world” led to a very real sense of dislocation and loss after marriage. 94 Compton to Willson, August 23, 1847.

47 it was an elopement they were received by Mophead and the ceremony was repeated by Rev. P. O’Flanagan. I don’t know how the foolish young creatures will get on.”95

This union also illustrates the flexibility some priests demonstrated in marrying interfaith couples; this couple experienced two services, one by a Protestant “Parson” and the second by a Catholic priest. Older couples, too, found that marriage failed to meet their expectations. The father of a girl who was entering the convent married “a very smart old girl but not exactly suited to the old gentleman’s fancy — they both expected wealth and are both disappointed.”96 By describing the plight of the unhappily married, Julia’s letters functioned as prescriptive literature and as cautionary tales, and also reveal the centrality of marriage to the happiness and identity of a middle-class woman97.

Although she usually disapproved of elopements, Julia was “much amused” at one. The bride’s sisters were students of Julia, and apparently this was an interfaith marriage. Julia gave Anna an entertaining explanation of the joyous event:

...the only objections her parents had were on account of religion — he being a Catholic. Jane had no objections whatever, so after waiting two years for her parents’ consent without being able to gain it, she left her

95 Compton to Willson, October 14, 1844. 96 Compton to Willson, January 1, 1847. 97 For example, see Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little Brown, 1980) for the centrality of marriage in the lives of middle-class women and Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic on how the letters of Elizabeth Wirt documents how the idealized views of marriage frequently presented to young women and how the realities of marriage fell far short of her expectations.

paternal shelter...in her go to work dress while her watchers were at market, met gallant Lewis...routed up Father O’Flanagan and the ceremony was performed in the Sacristy of Trinity Church with much caution and...rather hastily.98

Julia may have hoped that “gallant Lewis” would encourage Jane to convert (which seems likely, as Julia was giving a lively account) and that Jane’s sisters would follow, much like the characters in Anna Dorsey’s novels, in which a cascade of conversions follows the first. Julia depicted Jane as a determined, independent woman, whose patience with her parents, under the circumstances, could not be expected to last forever. While she expressed no doubts about this marriage, Julia thought differently about a Catholic woman who married a man who “professes no religion” but whose

“father and second stepmother are zealous Methodists;” she would, Julia concluded, be “less happy than she expects.”99

Julia approved of Anna’s marriage, drawing on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins to assert that Anna had made the necessary preparations.100 Consistent with her advice when Anna was single to “look up to the man you marry or be miserable,” in 1845 Julia encouraged wifely submission, reminding Anna to

“Remember Mr. Mate is head of your family and dont [sic] you strive for the upper hand.” Perhaps Anna had expressed some nostalgia for the single life she had left

98 Compton to Willson, August 3, 1845. 99 Compton to Willson, May 29, 1847. 100 The wise virgins “took their lamps and went forth to meet the bridegroom.” The foolish “took no oil” for their lamps while the wise did (Matthew 25:1-7).

49 behind, or possibly she admired or envied the lives of nuns, because Julia admonished her to “never talk about wishing for a nun’s vocation.”101 Two years later, she still counseled Anna to defer to her husband.102 Only in religious matters did Julia modify the gender hierarchy enough to advise both Anna and her husband on religious matters, recommending specific devotions: “Give my respects to Mr. Bennett, I hope he continues to recite his rosary and remembers me when he comes to the barrel,” alluding to a beer barrel and his tendency to overindulge.103 For Julia, in the Catholic gender system, women could assume religious leadership in the home.

Yet Julia was aware that some wives tried to maintain impossibly rigorous standards of domesticity. “I congratulate you on your housekeeping prospects,” she wrote Anna, “but don’t be oversolicitous, nor annoy yourself about little deficiencies.”104 Julia also consoled Anna when she heard rumors that Dr. Willson, her husband’s father, had not approved of the marriage, writing that “if the Dr. was unwilling for his son to marry a portionless girl, it was only the prudence of a worldly person...you were a treasure in yourself without wealth.” Julia had asked a nun, “Str.

Stanny” about the rumors; but the nun heard “nothing injurious,” and thought Anna

101 Compton to Willson, November 15, 1845. 102 “Give my respects to Mr. Willson, I hope he finds you a pattern of meekness and obedience.” Compton to Willson, May 29, 1847. 103 Compton to Willson, May 14, 1845. Mr. Bennett refers to Anna’s husband. 104 Compton to Willson, May 8, 1847.

“had too much sense to let the idle rumors of silly people annoy you.”105 Apparently, the good doctor had wanted his son to marry a young lady of equal social position, endowed with a dowry, and Anna was distressed by rumors that he disapproved of her and of his son’s choice in marrying her. While the nun denied any knowledge of the rumors, Julia’s asking indicates both her close relationship with some nuns and shows that some of the nuns of the Visitation gossiped. More importantly, the letter demonstrates Julia’s view that true respectability was not based on wealth and social standing, but rather on piety, morality and, for women, being a deferential wife and devoted mother. Although Julia accepted the bourgeois values of industry, honesty, sobriety, and thrift, she refused to value wealth as an end in itself, and implicitly critiqued the practice of making “a good match” based on the social status, rather than moral qualities, of a prospective spouse.

“A Candidate for Heaven”:106 Raising Catholic Children

As a teacher, and as adoptive mother, Julia was raising Catholic children.

Given the belief that salvation was through both faith and good works, motherhood and teaching could assume quasi-priestly functions. Because Julia, as both mother and teacher, could write from a position of authority on both motherhood and teaching, she is emblematic the key roles of respectable women in the Catholic gender system.

105 Compton to Willson, August 12, 1844. 106 Compton to Willson, November 30, 1843.

When Anna was expecting her first child, she named Julia godmother, which delighted Julia, who was now designated to play a key role in the child’s life, especially his religious education. Anna’s choice of Julia instead of a blood relative suggests the closeness of their relationship and Anna’s respect for Julia’s wisdom and religious devotion. Indeed, Julia may even have had a role in naming the child: “...you afford me much pleasure by selecting me Godmother for the expected little girl, but I think the little being is to be called Thomas and of course must be a boy,” and a boy he was. Likewise, when a second son was born, Julia wrote “another candidate for heaven...I suppose little Willie will be christened at the first visit of the padre.”107 Yet although religion was Julia’s foremost concern, she also provided more general advice, such as not “to lose your rest and become a slave to him” and to insist on

“obedience from the very offset” to avoid “many dangers” later. Above all, Anna was to take her responsibility for the care of her son’s soul: “Thomas is a candidate for heaven not merely your plaything and you his mother must lead him hither.”108 Julia’s advice emphasized the mother’s role in the religious instruction of her children.109

107 Compton to Willson, August 27, 1843; August 3, 1845. 108 Compton to Willson, November 30, 1843. 109 William G. McLaughlin describes “will-breaking” in “Evangelical Child-Rearing in the Age of Jackson: Francis Wayland’s Views on When and How to Subdue the Willfulness of Children,” in N. Ray Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes, eds., Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). For attitudes toward children and the shift to a more affectionate form of childrearing in the antebellum era, see Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia: University of

Indeed, the Catholic mother who “must lead” her children to heaven performed a quasi-priestly function as intermediary between child and salvation. Julia’s letters also resembled the emphasis that Catholic advice givers and novelists placed on the mother’s duty to inculcate early piety. Viewed in the context of laywomen’s obituaries, which also emphasized maternal and wifely duties for married women,

Julia’s letters suggest that some Catholic women, in their private lives developed their own ideas about religious domesticity, ideas that Catholic writers presented in more systematic form in print. Domesticity was both a unitary ideological system,

Pennsylvania Press, 1968); Daniel T. Rodgers, “Socializing Middle-Class Children: Institutions, Fables, and Work Values in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Hiner and Hawes, eds., Growing Up in America, 119-32; Ruth M. Bloch, “American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785-1815” Signs 13 (1987), 37- 58; Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992); Rosemarie Zagarri, “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44 (June 1992), 192-215; Jacqueline S. Reinier, From Virtue to Character: American Childhood 1775- 1850 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996). For the presence of different philosophies of childrearing at the same time, see Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Childrearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1978). For the social history of girlhood, see Anne Boylan, “Growing Up Female in Young America,” in Hawes and Hiner, American Childhood, 153-84. According to McDannell, mid-nineteenth century Protestants emphasized “family worship” and Bible reading, unlike Catholics, who, except for rituals such as saying the rosary, focused their religious life on the church. However, by the late nineteenth century, “religious instruction” by the mother was important to both (Christian Home, esp. 77-107). For Protestant women and their ministers see Douglas, Feminization of American Culture; for Protestant religious education, see Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of An American Institution, 1790- 1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); for evangelical women see Susan Juster, Disorderly Conduct: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997).

53 subsuming many groups of women under the category of respectable woman, wife, and mother, and was also a plural discourse, for there were many variations, such as, working-class domesticity, aristocratic domesticity, and Irish domesticity. Ordinary

Catholic women, whose writings were never published but were shared with one another, creatively engaged mainstream (Protestant) sources of domestic ideology and created their own version of the ideal. In the process of sharing news and gossip, they both expressed and developed these ideas and ideals and, without challenging the ideal itself, acknowledged how the reality of marriage and family life could fall far short of the ideal.

Julia’s news about mutual acquaintances could provide advice and support, but news and gossip also served prescriptive and cautionary purposes. In giving information about another young mother’s travails, Julia implied that Anna should not let her mother-in-law make decisions about childrearing:

Becky’s baby keeps her awake nearly all night and she cannot have the entire management. The grandmother makes the greatest ado if it cries and gives it laudanum. Becky would prefer its taking teas — the old lady declares she will poison it so the little thing will be nervous, if it should live, like its grandma.110

Since for a time Anna and her husband resided with his father and his second wife,

Julia may have implicitly encouraged Anna to trust her own judgment and not defer to her mother-in-law. despite the latter’s higher social status. Naturally, Julia added new

110 Compton to Willson, January 4, 1844. In the nineteenth century, laudanum, or tincture of opium, was freely available without prescription, often as an ingredient in patent medicines (many of which also contained alcohol).

54 advice as little Tom grew older. She reminded Anna that the boy would have “many a fall” as he learned to walk, cautioned her to “keep him as much as you can from the servants” and urged her “to instill obedience, it will not make him mean or servile and in future so much misery may be prevented.”111 Despite hierarchies of age and status,

Julia regarded Anna as just as respectable as her mother-in-law. The caution to keep the child away from servants, though, indicates that Julia wanted to shield the child from servants she deemed less respectable.

“A Most Lamentable State of Things”:112 Julia’s Criticisms of Protestantism

As a devout Catholic, Julia regarded both her belief system and practices as essential to salvation, and could be quite critical of evangelical Protestantism and its adherents. She took her responsibilities to her students very seriously, and was appalled when some of her students appeared to succumb to what she considered its specious charms: “what revivals, baptizings, night meetings are carried on...I thought my pupils were good girls and would have been preserved from such folly but would you believe nearly all the older girls have ‘got religion’ so they express it and have become so conceited that I can do nothing with them.” The girls refused to study their lessons because they did not return until “eleven evening.” However, Julia appeared to believe that the girls were following a transient, albeit silly, fashion. “To be sure,” she wrote, “I hear many instances concerning ‘experience meeting, love feast, etc,’ which

111 Compton to Willson, October 14, 1844. 112 Compton to Willson, March 8, 1843.

55 would be amusing in other circumstances and though I can detect myself laughing...yet I feel that it a most lamentable state of things.”113 Julia had both Catholic and Protestant students, and she did not indicate whether the girls were Catholics or mainline Protestants converting to evangelicalism. Her amusement at the shenanigans suggests that they were Protestants, for had her Catholic students attended camp meetings, placing themselves in danger of apostasy, Julia would have been alarmed and appalled.

When an acquaintance converted to Methodism during a revival in 1843, Julia was confident that it would be temporary: “poor child she went to the Methodist meetings during the excitement and was greatly distressed but she is of too gay a temperament to remain under conviction and...she feels now disposed to become a

Catholic and you know I will aid her in all her power.” However, Julia expressed concern about another woman who converted, Sarah King, because a mutual friend

“believed she [Sarah] would get crazy for she could not define her feelings.”114 In these two anecdotes, which serve as mini-conversion narratives, Julia described a uniquely

Catholic view of the process of conversion. Like later writers of obituaries who

113 Compton to Willson, March 25, 1843. 114 Ibid. Virginia Brereton argues that in Protestant women’s stories of their conversions, although the “surface” narrative was religious belief and submission to God (and by extension, to expectations of proper obedience to fathers and husbands), a “submerged” narrative permitted women to choose obedience to God rather than to men. Brereton, From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women’s Conversions, 1800 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

56 celebrated independent-minded Protestant women who converted to Catholicism after long and thoughtful investigation, and novelists like Anna Dorsey who filled novels with conversions, Julia positioned a potential convert to Catholicism as a thoughtful individual who would allow Julia to “aid her” in becoming Catholic. Certainly, given the opportunity, Julia would have summoned her considerable knowledge of the Bible to defend “Catholicity.” Conversely, she portrayed Sarah King as flighty, impulsive, even “crazy.” In contrast to popular Protestant stereotypes of Catholics as ignorant, superstitious and “priest-ridden,” Julia represented a convert to Methodism as unduly influenced by the emotionalism of revivals, and with little genuine understanding. Just as encounters with Catholicism influenced the ideas of antebellum Protestants,115

Protestantism, especially evangelicalism, shaped Catholicism in both its realities and representations.

On a later occasion, Julia described what must have been almost a religious brawl. When a new “Radical Methodist” church opened in 1849, it held “a sort of fair” in Georgetown as a fundraiser. Significantly, “a converted Trappist monk” preached the revival “to the amusement of some, the edification of others, and anger and contempt” of others. The Catholics present were not amused, for the result was “much cursing and a little fighting [and t]he holy convert is not satisfied with the disturbance of Sunday & issued handbills on Saturday inviting the rubble to attend a lecture

115 Franchot, Roads to Rome; Ahlstrom, Religious History, 615-32.

57 concerning papacy.”116 Both Catholics and Protestants enjoyed seeing converts to their faiths and could become quite competitive. In describing the disorder of the evangelicals, Julia implicitly criticized the new church and the behavior of its adherents; proper decorum was an important part of Julia’s concept of respectability.

“The Homeless Being Must Have a Refuge”:117 Private Catholic Benevolence

Benevolence was a key aspect of Julia’s identity as a respectable Catholic woman. To Catholic women, one of the most important causes was providing education for their future pastors, a practical necessity in the era of an “immigrant church” with a severe shortage of priests due to a rapidly expanding Catholic population.118 Drawing on the longstanding ideal of charity, a riverboat “excursion” was organized “for the benefit of the Trinity church library, indicating that collecting devotional works was important to at least some Catholics. Julia did not approve of all such activities, however. In the same letter, she described a rather unusual interfaith venture: “the Methodists went for some pious purpose to collect a sum and a party of

Catholics went along as they did not wish to appear illiberal and moreover loved excursions.” Unfortunately, the dancing and disorderly behavior of the Catholics

116 Compton to Willson, January 6, 1849. 117 Compton to Willson, October 14, 1844. 118 Compton to Young, March 1, 1840. For the expansion of the Catholic church in the antebellum period, see Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 127-261; Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); Ahlstrom, Religious History, 527-54; Spalding, Premier See, 123-229.

“shocked, scandalized, and disedified” the pious Methodist minister. Julia decided that she did “not like fairs, excursions and such like things to acquire money for pious purposes but such is the order of the day.”119 To Julia, such disorder undermined

Catholic respectability.

Julia engaged in other charitable activities purely as an individual; her association with Trinity Church and the nuns of the Visitation were not factors. When she encountered someone in need, Julia helped if she could. For example, she bought a dress for one of her impoverished students and when in church she met an “Irish maiden...living for the present with a Protestant family — knew no one here, felt very lonely,” Julia accompanied her to a funeral, and told Anna of how she hoped to find a better living situation for the girl. “I am so old fashioned that I can’t help caring for young people who have no one else to care for them.”120

Julia’s maternalism was also evident when she moved into her new house and, much to her surprise, found “the room upstairs” was already occupied by a destitute young mother, and drew on her knowledge and understanding of the Bible to reveal a deity more merciful than judgmental, which moved her towards understanding and compassion, rather than condemnation: “the Almighty…will not suffer his creatures to perish who can distrust his power to relieve or his mercy to receive. 121 The girl had

119 Compton to Willson, September 17, 1847. 120 Compton to Young, January 8, 1838; Compton to Willson, May 14, 1845. 121 Compton to Willson, November 15, 1845.

59 been raised a Methodist “wholly ignorant of everything good.”122 Julia did not believe that the Methodists provided what she would consider true religious, or moral, education. While she understood the reluctance of moralists who did not wish to

“encourage vice” by assisting the starving single mother, Julia criticized their failure to adhere to what she considered the higher commandments of kindness and charity to those in need, believing the young mother was not beyond redemption, and that good

Christians were obligated to provide a means for that. Here, Julia represented herself, a nun, and a priest as the agents of “God himself” a portrayal that implicitly encouraged others to emulate such benevolence and contrasted her views of Catholic charity with the negative example of some Methodists, who had not helped the young mother.

Julia also assisted, and developed a friendship with, an impoverished Irish immigrant to whom she almost always referred as “poor Miss O’Reilly,” whose story demonstrates some of the difficulties female immigrants encountered in America.

Miss O’Reilly had left her previous employer “not entirely voluntarily” and was now adrift “with but little money and no friend whatever in Washington, an utter stranger, with sensitive feelings, much pride, and a lamentable ignorance of our manners and customs.” Significantly, Julia was sympathetic to Miss O’Reilly for her attitude to the

“haughtiness” of her employer’s wife, and noted that Miss O’Reilly’s “prospects are

122 Ibid. When the infant was six weeks old, the mother left to join her brother in Virginia.

60 certainly of a gloomy nature but they will change.” Perhaps Julia believed that as her friend assimilated, her situation would improve, and tried to help her find a job. 123

Miss O’Reilly was in dire financial straits. In 1840 Julia reported that the immigrant was “expecting a remittance from her Irish friend for some weeks but she has to wait till hope has become almost exhausted.”124 Apparently, the unfortunate

Miss O’Reilly also exhausted her hopes of finding a position in Georgetown, for she went to Baltimore, Julia wrote, “after making her will leaving to me whatever she may possess.” The immigrant had few, if any, worldly possessions, but “she wanted to express her gratitude and had no other means.”125 Julia, apologizing to Anna for the tardiness of her letter, explained that she felt “obligated” to answer a letter from Miss

O’Reilly first,126 which indicates that to Julia charitable obligations were of paramount importance.

123Julia asked Anna [i]f you should hear of some situation on the E[astern] S[hore] I wish you would write to me, although I don’t think there is much probability of it.” Compton to Young, November 17, 1839. 124 Compton to Young, March 22, 1840. 125 Compton to Young, November 27, 1840. 126 Miss O’Reilly did not stay in Baltimore, but moved to Philadelphia, and wrote in 1844 that she “expected to go to Virginia.” Later, she was “teaching [at] a public school in Albany, but feeling incompetent to the charge.” Compton to Willson, January 1, 1844; October 14, 1844. For the experiences of Irish immigrant women, especially the tendency for many to migrate as single women, often working as domestic servants, and for their daughters to work as schoolteachers, see Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

In addition to befriending an immigrant, assisting a single mother, and providing a home for orphaned Jenny and the two boys, in 1844 Julia also took in a new “addition to our family in the person of Mrs. Mary White.” The unfortunate widow had migrated westward, but was forced to return to Georgetown and when her sister, a physician’s widow, was unable to help Mrs. White, “who is a harmless good natured, inactive being.” Upon her return, apparently having nowhere else to go, Mary

“asked for refuge” with Julia, who wrote: “My means are scarce but the homeless being must have a refuge till something else offers...she is not one after my own heart but is not the less entitled to pity.127 Several months later, Mrs. White’s departure was

“a great relief” to Julia. In 1847, perhaps trying to find a solution to her difficulties,

“Mrs White made application to the nuns of the Visitation was immediately received...but you will not be astonished when I tell you that after a stay of three days she found she had no vocation and resigned all pretense to nunship.”128 The sad tale of

Mary White demonstrated the limits of Julia’s benevolence in taking a homeless widow for whom she felt little affection, and shows why some women may have sought to enter the convent for reasons, such as security, other than a religious calling.129

127 Compton to Willson, October 14, 1844. 128 May 14, 1845; January 1, 1847. 129 While Mrs. White attempted to enter the convent to escape economic hardship, others may have done so in hope of obtaining an education and social status that would have been impossible otherwise. Protestant Rebecca Reed converted and

Rather than questioning the social structure and working for social reform,

Julia responded to poverty and slavery with acts of private charity. Like most antebellum white women in slave states, she never questioned the institution of slavery; her comment that “[b]ig Mary has followed little Polly’s example and increased the number of slaves”130 revealed her understanding of owning slaves as, in part, an economic transaction. Yet her writings reveal her views were complex. Julia accepted the antebellum planter ideology of paternalism, writing that Sarah, a slave she hired, “has been miserably neglected [and] her feet have been frostbitten,” and telling Anna that “if it should ever be your lot in life to own any I hope you will consider yourself obliged to instruct them in Christian principles and attend to their...comforts likewise.”131 Julia expressed concern for Sarah when the young slave’s

entered the Ursuline convent for such reasons; see Cohen, “Miss Reed and the Superiors.” 130 Compton to Young, December 1, 1839. 131 December 25, 1842. The classic analysis of planter paternalism remains Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974). The best overview of slavery and its historiography is Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). An important classic study of slave families and communities is John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the American South (New York: Oxford, 1975); for a contrasting argument that young slaves had no childhood, see Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in the Antebellum South (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); see also Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); for plantation mistresses and their slaves, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); for enslaved women, Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1999); for free black women, Suzanne

63 father died, but was annoyed at “the death of Sarah’s daddy” “from Mr. White when I went to leave payment for Sarah’s hire.”132 Julia expressed annoyance with the young slave’s behavior and character, but considered her “a strong lazy girl.” Still, as a paternalistic, or rather maternalistic mistress, Julia tried to follow her ideals of benevolence and what she considered good conduct.133 Julia wrote letters for slaves and/or free blacks who had enslaved relatives, and regarded this charitable work as an important responsibility, even writing such letters before replying to Anna. As she explained in 1842:

I am obliged to curtail my letter or you will arrive ere you receive it. I really expected to finish it on the 4th but a “lady of colour” who has a daughter in Louisiana, ignorant of the fate of her child who went out as she told me “in Freeman’s drove” request[ed] me to write a letter for her. You know I could not refuse in such a case and your letter dear Nannie had to be put away.134

Julia felt she had immediately to write the letter for the African American woman who so wanted to communicate with her daughter; her maternalism may have led her to

Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York: Norton, 1984). Two studies of free blacks in the mid-Atlantic region during slavery are Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) and Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860 (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

132 Compton to Willson, January 1, 1844. 133 Compton to Willson, March 5, 1843; November 30, 1843; January 1, 1844. 134 Compton to Young, July 4, 1842.

64 view the woman as, above all, a mother. As a surrogate mother to Anna and adoptive mother to Jenny, Julia may have felt that she and this woman shared a common bond; in the Catholic gender system, motherhood was of paramount importance.

Writing for African Americans was an ongoing endeavor. In 1844, Julia wrote that “I have been writing for wives whose husbands have been sent to Louisiana, children whose mothers have been separated from them and mother whose daughter has been sent away. I have witnessed much that has not tended to elevate my spirits.”135 These few short lines suggest Julia’s compassion for the sufferings of slaves whose families were broken apart by sale. Yet, with slaves as with single mothers, poor widows, and impoverished immigrants, Julia seemed to regard their difficulties as of an individual nature, to be remedied by private, religiously motivated acts of charity. This was consistent with how, although they operated a Saturday school that black girls could attend, the nuns of the Visitation owned slaves.136

135 Compton to Willson, January 1, 1844. 136 John Sharp scanned and transcribed from the National Archives Records Administration microfilm “Petition Number 569” from the Visitation Convent for compensation for twelve slaves under the 1862 Emancipation Act, which provided up to $300 for each slave of a Unionist. The 1850 Census of Gerogetown, District of Columbia, lists 17 slaves owned by the sisters. Slaves were sometimes given to the convent school: Rich landowner Notely Young gave his daughter, who became Sister Mary Ellen, four slaves. It seems this is Anna’s “Uncle Notely.” Accessed October 4, 2013, www.geneaologytrails.com/washdc/slavery/sisterspetition.html. The Historic American Buildings Survey notes among the twenty buildings of the complex, a late eighteenth-century “slave cabin”, but according to the surveyor, “was more probably the overseer’s office” for a nearby estate. HABS no. DC-211 Geo 147, Historic American Buildings Survey, Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, National Park Service, Department of the Interior, accessed October 4,

“. . . [H]eaven Help wHis Preaching:”137 Church, Public Piety, and Sermons

Julia clearly expressed her views of the Catholic gender system in her letters.

Yet some focused more explicitly on religious issues, to the point that, albeit in an informal way, she was writing theology. Like her Protestant counterparts, Julia believed church attendance was very important, as was reading the Bible and applying its teachings to everyday life. She continually emphasized the importance of going to church, reporting her attendance in ways that seem calculated to encourage Anna. 138

Indeed, Julia instructed Anna in religion, and sometimes even referred to the lessons in her letters as sermons: “I feel the spirit of preaching seizing me and in friendship would I spare you a sermon tonight, knowing the profound discourse you will hear tomorrow on Catholicity and Apostolicity.”139 Although a laywoman, she felt comfortable casting herself in the role of preacher (as did later Catholic novelists and writers of obituaries). Catholic women could never be priests, but they could and did negotiate the constraints of the gender system to practice a type of informal theology.

2013, lcweb2.loc.gov/prp/habshaer/dc/dc0100/dc0122/data.pdf. 137 Compton to Young, March 22, 1840. 138 For example, in 1839 Julia went to church “nonwithstanding the rain” and after Christmas 1857 she “did not return to church after the early masses” only because “it commenced snowing.” Compton to Young, April 9, 1839; the Misses M. & A. Young (no date, included in Compton to Aloysia Young, 1836); Compton to Willson, December 28, 1857. The “girls” to whom Julia refers in the earlier letter are Anna’s sister and cousin. 139 Compton to Young, April 9, 1839.

Her letters discussed the substance, as well as the style, of Catholic religious observances.

Not all Catholics took their faith seriously. Julia compared churches, especially the Visitation convent church and Holy Trinity church in Georgetown, both of which she attended regularly; Trinity was the closest geographically.140 For example, once she wrote “I sincerely wish there was church more frequently, however I do not like the appearance of the congregation as well as that of Marsh;” moreover, the music

“could not be less melodious.”141 On another occasion, Julia commented on the style of the service in a way that implicitly criticized another church: “the ceremonies were shorter and in my opinion less solemn than usual.”142 Apparently, Julia preferred longer and “solemn” services; the style, as well as the ritual of the mass, was important to her. Significantly, Julia commented more on the style and length of the services, and even on the quality of the music, than she did on the liturgy itself.

Julia regarded proper decorum as a hallmark of respectability and, by implication, middle-class status. The behavior of some Catholics at mass left much to be desired. For example, of St. Patrick’s (in Baltimore) she wrote that while going to confession she “was really sent with such force by some who were in greater haste

140 Jen Dolde, “Society and Religion in Town and Country,” ch. 6 in “A Legacy of Land,” forthcoming. 141 Compton to Young, December 2, 1837; January 8, 1838. “The Marsh” refers to White Marsh, Prince George, Maryland, where Anna was living on her uncle’s estate. 142 Compton to Young, April 9, 1838.

67 than myself sideways against a bench that it was nearly overturned & after recovering from this unexpected shock I was again thrust forward against the door, where I remained literally jammed in until the door was opened.”143 Despite this enthusiasm for confession, Julia noted that many Catholics were more interested in socializing and in displaying their fine clothing than they were in listening to an edifying sermon. During the Christmas season, “as usual an immense crowd attended, some of whom conducted themselves with proper decorum, others thinking of eggnog and fun, gaped, laughed and amused themselves in the best manner they could, during the long discourse of Mr. Kroes.”144

After experiencing this disorder, Julia retreated to the quiet, contemplative atmosphere of the Visitation convent church, which was a refuge to her. Indeed, Julia was so appalled by the behavior of parishioners at Trinity that she wrote to Anna, who at the time was living in Rock Hall, Maryland, with her employer’s family, “I am so sorry you are among so ungodly a race...but you will suffer less than if you were in the tents of the self righteous, the psalm singing hypocrites.”145 Here Julia was drawing on the gospel: “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may

143 Compton to Young, January 8, 1838. 144 Compton to Young, January 11, 1840. 145 Compton to Young, March 22, 1840.

68 be seen of men.” 146Julia drew on her own reading and understanding of the Bible to reach the conclusion that doing without mass was no worse than attending church with parishioners who were more interested in socializing and displaying their fine new clothing than in genuine piety.

While Julia was critical of disorderly Catholics as well as Protestants, sometimes she was unable to restrain her amusement at the antics of Mrs. Sewal, a self-appointed guardian of church decorum who “undertook to turn out a poor terror stricken lost animal, whilst pere Kroes was preaching,” much to the amusement of the churchgoers and priest. The “old lady” was constantly plagued by “the terror of church going dogs and laughing girls.”147

Julia clearly preferred the quiet dignity of the Visitation convent church to the noisy disorder of Holy Trinity, but the social class of the congregants (at least as defined by economic status) was probably not the key factor. Trinity Church had a long and venerable history148 and given the financial difficulties Julia faced, it seems probable that the “belles” of Trinity and the married ladies were more affluent and of

146 This was a direct reference to Matthew 6:5. 147 Compton to Willson, March 25, 1843; August 7, 1843. 148 Spalding, Premier See, 34, 141-42. Trinity Church was built “in 1791-94 for those who attended mass at Georgetown College.” It was the first Catholic church built in the District of Columbia, and in 1834 was only one of three churches in the area to support a parish school (as distinguished from a charity school). Trinity’s parish school was for boys only; St. Patrick’s in Baltimore had separate schools for boys and girls. For the development of Catholic parochial education, see Timothy Welch, Parish School: American Parochial Education from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Crossroad, 1996).

69 higher social status. At the same time, by 1840 Trinity would have some lower-class communicants. Yet to Julia, bourgeois social status and affluence did not necessarily entail respectability, nor did poverty preclude it. Sincere religious devotion, charitable works, and fulfilling one’s duty were more significant indicators of respectability than money and occupation, and to Julia, the nuns exemplified these ideals. Julia’s own reading and interpretations of the Bible informed her views of respectability.

Obviously, “belles” who were giggling and anticipating their Christmas parties, ignoring the priest’s sermon were, like inattentive lower-class attendants, not following proper etiquette. Julia’s understanding of decorum in church, was based above all on her understanding of Jesus’s instructions to the disciples to “be not as the hypocrites” who attend church only to be seen by others (or in the case of the “belles” to make a fashion statement).149

Julia often described the sermons that she heard in church, noting both their style and content, suggesting that sermons, perhaps even more than the liturgy, were central to her experience of the mass. Even during the liturgy of a Catholic mass, the style rather than the ritual itself, could elicit a response as emotional as that of a

Methodist attending a camp meeting. On Palm Sunday in 1837, Julia was so enraptured by the singing of the liturgy, that she felt herself “transported to Jerusalem” at the time of Christ.150 A few days later, “[o]n Holy Thursday Mr. Ryder proved the

149 The reference is to Matthew 6.5. 150 Compton to Young, March 21, 1837.

70 real presence in the Blessed Sacrament...his mild persuasive manner must have given universal satisfaction.” She hoped that Anna’s uncle would read a copy of the sermon

(some were published). For Julia, the style, as well as the substance, of the sermon was of central importance: “I want the Orator to interest so much with the matter of the subject...”151 Significantly, she wrote that hearing the sermon, rather than the experience of receiving the “body of Christ,” was what provided “universal satisfaction.” While she wrote about both the sermon and the Eucharist, she appeared to emphasize “the word” as of paramount importance.

Other Catholics also regarded the sermons as an important part of the mass and commented on specific priests and their sermons. When a priest visited in 1839, Julia noted that her mother liked the preaching, and in 1846 when “Mr. Coombs celebrated the first mass on C[hristmas] day and said a few words concerning the annual charity contributions,” Miss Sally Borman considered it a “charming discourse.”152

Apparently, after church Julia would talk to her friends and mother about the sermons they had heard. Nor were the Comptons and their associates exceptional; for example,

Matthew Carey, a prominent Catholic writer and publisher in antebellum Philadelphia,

“listened to the sermons” and commented on them; in 1812 he wrote that one priest

151 Compton to Young, August 29, 1837. By “real presence,” Julia was referring to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the priest’s sermon on that topic. 152 Compton to Young, August 25, 1839; Compton to Willson, January 1, 1847.

“preached a political sermon which gave uneasiness to some.”153 Because there are few private Catholic commentaries on church services, it is difficult to generalize about the attention the average Catholic paid to the sermons (and the “belles” of Trinity, for example, were probably more interested in socializing than in sermons or sacraments).

There is no reason to believe, however, that Carey and Julia were not typical devout, educated Catholics; such believers, much like Protestants, would have paid attention to the “word” as preached in a sermon. At least parts of some sermons were printed in

Catholic periodicals such as Truth Teller and The Catholic Mirror, indicating that some publishers found a Catholic readership for sermons and that some thought that publishing sermons was important.

Julia also emphasized the Bible and sermons when in 1840 there was a “revival of religion” at Trinity church. “Mr. Kroes and his assistant actually go in quest of the stray and lead them or try to lead them in the narrow path, much good has lately been effected.” After devotions to the Virgin Mary and daily religious instructions, Julia expressed a rather faint hope of no further misbehavior among the congregants: “the church is much better attended than formerly, and the Bishops have blessed the congregation, so there is no further excuse for evil.”154 Julia’s own reading and interpretation of the Bible informed her understanding of the events at Trinity.

153 Anne Rose, Beloved Strangers, 17. 154 Compton to Young, May 30, 1840; Compton to Willson, November 15, 1845; Compton to Willson, December 30, 1857. Unfortunately, the effects were temporary; in 1847 Julia lamented that “piety does not increase at Trinity Church.”

Combining references to two gospel passages (the parable of the lost sheep and a phrase from the sermon on the mount) in one sentence demonstrated Julia’s easy familiarity with the “word” and how she relied upon it to understand and interpret the events transpiring in her church.155

Apparently, in the churches Julia attended, temperance preaching accompanied waves of “Catholic revivalism.” After one sermon, Julia expressed her “hope [that] the

Temperance discourse edified the hearers and moved them to better deeds than the

Sun gives them credit.”156 A year later, Julia’s church experienced a massive revival:

...there has been a real reform in our congregation as to outward appearances and as we know the tree by its fruits we must necessarily conclude that the interior has also undergone a change — two retreats two novenas and two public Temperance meetings, in which the pledge of between 7 and 8 hundred persons have been taken or given...it is

155 Writing that the priests during the revival “go in quest of the stray” is a reference to Jesus’s parable of the lost sheep: “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after what is lost, until he find it?” (Luke 15:4, KJV). The “narrow path” refers to a passage from Jesus’s sermon on the mount: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew 7:13-14, KJV). 156 Jay Dolan, Catholic Revivalism; for Catholic temperance see Joan Bland, The Hibernian Crusade: The Story of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1951); Patricia Dockman Anderson, By Legal or Moral Suasion Let us Put it Away': Temperance in Baltimore, 1829–1870 (Northern Illinois University Press, forthcoming); Compton to Young, March 1, 1840. For class and gender, see Ruth M. Alexander, “‘We Are Engaged as a Band of Sisters’: Class and Domesticity in the Washingtonian Temperance Movement, 1840-1850,” Journal of American History 75 (1988): 763-85.

becoming rather a reproach not to be enrolled among the “friends of Temperance.”157

Again, Julia understood the events through her own reading and understanding of the

Bible, rather than simply accepting the temperance movement because it was directed by a priest. Her assessment that the “reform” was genuine was based on her application, and quotation, of the gospel.158 Yet, she believed that private prayer, rather than public temperance movements, would be a more effective way to end excessive drinking, instructing Anna to tell “Cousin Bennett” to “have more frequent recourse to his bead barrel than to any other barrel whatever...I would not insist on his joining the “temperance societies.”159

Julia criticized the preaching style of certain priests. For example, in 1839 she gently criticized the volume of one priest’s voice, noting that he delivered his sermon

“at the utmost pitch of his lungs and if the congregation is not edified, it is not for want of a Watchman to cry aloud to its members.” She also occasionally criticized the personal appearance of a priest: in 1857, she wrote about a new priest, who was “so very fat...very much for long sermons and reads them off too, which I dislike terribly.”160 This criticism of reading a long, boring discourse from a written text,

157 Compton to Willson, March 14, 1841. 158 “...for the tree is known by his fruit” (Matthew 12:33, KJV). 159 Compton to Willson, June 6, 1846. The “bead barrel” was a reference to praying the rosary, a popular Catholic devotion to Mary in which beads are used to keep track of a series of prayers recited in a specific sequence. 160 Compton to Young, December 1, 1839; Compton to Willson, December 30, 1857.

74 rather than delivering an intellectually satisfying and emotionally engaging sermon, could have been written by an evangelical.

She also criticized both content and style of some sermons. On Independence

Day in 1840 at the convent church, the priest, “Mr. Ryder selected for his text that part of Scripture, She that is unmarried seeketh how she may please the Lord.” According to Julia, he spoke “learnedly and quite elegantly,” defending the nuns “from the slanderous allegations that they were useless beings.” Yet Julia thought “there was a deficiency somewhere”; perhaps he tried to discuss too many subjects when he should have concentrated on the nuns: “many elegant encomiums were given to the

Sisterhood, American Independence, the busy tumult of the day...and many other subjects.” She also implicitly criticized his listeners, who “are generally pleased with variety as well as novelty” for preferring an entertaining sermon to one which stayed on what was, to Julia, the very important topic of defending and praising the Visitation nuns.161

Julia viewed priests as individuals apart from their liturgical role and knew some socially. Priests were moved from one parish to the next by their bishops and religious orders, and when this happened, the whole congregation took notice. “Our

161 Compton to Young, July 5, 1840. According to Jenifer Dolde, Julia thought that the priest was being condescending to the nuns: “The subtle import of Father Ryder’s words might have been lost on the congregation, but not on Julia.” Dolde, “She that is not married...”

75 good pastor has left town and his flock feel his loss most sensibly” wrote Julia.”162

However, several years later, the parish had grown attached to the new priest, Mr.

Flanagan, and when rumors spread that he would be transferred, Julia wrote that “our congregation are very sorry to part with him.” Although there was “no official order yet,” the whole congregation was speculating about the possible change.163

(Congregations could not choose their priests and had to yield to a bishop’s will when favorite individuals received transfers). To Julia, a favorite priest was irreplaceable.

Other Catholics also responded to particular priests. Some individuals even went shopping for an agreeable confessor who would not impose a draconian penance.

Julia wrote with some amusement about one of her students who “had to go to confession but declared she could not confess either to Father Flanagan or good Father

Kroes so she sent for Mr. Vespre and intends to be very, very good next year.”164

Father Kroes was also close to the Willson family; Julia, Anna, and the priest were all concerned about the spiritual welfare of “Mr. Mate” and subscribed to the idea that the pious, virtuous “true woman” could use her feminine influence to foster the piety of her spouse. The close relationships among Julia, the Willsons, and the priest continued. In 1847, Julia passed another message to Anna: “Our good Father Kroes

162 Compton to Young, July 5, 1840. 163 Compton to Willson, August 3, 1845. Mr. King was a missionary priest who frequently visited the Eastern Shore; he “made at least 22 visits to Trumpington [Dr. Willson’s estate] and likely more to the neighborhood” (Dolde, “Society and Religion in Town and Country,” ch. 6 in Legacy of Land. 164 Compton to Willson, June 23, 1843.

76 apologizes for not writing before he has compensated for his seeming forgetfulness by celebrating more than one Mass for good Mr. & Mrs. Willson, not forgetting me, and was going again to perform the same good office for us — so dont [sic] despair dear

Nannie of becoming meek at last.”165 This last phrase indicated that Julia believed that having a mass said could create real changes in the person’s life and character.

While she venerated the sacramental role of the priest, Julia commented very openly on how priests could do very well at some of their duties but not others; for example, one was “a most estimable confessor, but heaven help his preaching.” Another priest

“gives long penances and is not too pleasant in conversation.”166 She even discussed priestly peccadillos with Anna, urging discretion in the case of a priest who may have diverted some communion wine to his personal use; on “inquiries concerning the

‘cask’” Julia wrote “it best to remain ignorant; ” such an offense was not “unpardonable.” She explained that “he is French and does not drink tea or coffee...The poor Catholic clergy are expected to drink water, eat water, and cover themselves with the atmosphere.” While excusing priestly tippling, Julia could poke gentle fun at the appearance of some priests: “some of them look like watermelons it is true.”167 Despite the sacramental role of priests as mediators between the laity and

God, Julia regarded them as very human, and fallible.

165 Compton to Willson, March 25, 1843; Compton to Willson, January 1, 1847. 166 Compton to Young, March 22, 1840; Compton to Willson, December 30, 1857. 167 Compton to Willson, October 14, 1844.

“Always Wear Your Medals”:168 Meanings of Julia’s Private Piety

Julia represented her piety as constant, reading and studying the Bible, praying, and paying close attention to sermons. She used her knowledge and understanding of

“the word” to elucidate a wide range of life situations, and expected Anna to recognize the references.169 While she knew and referred to Old Testament stories and passages,170 most of her references were to New Testament verses, especially the gospels. One of Julia’s favorite Biblical images was of faith as a mustard seed, referring several times to Anna’s faith as “your mustard plant” when she wanted to encourage Anna in her devotions. When “Mr. McElroy preached last Sunday about the grain of Mustard”, Julia told Anna “I remember your plant,”171 a reference to the parable of the mustard seed.172

168 Compton to Willson, October 14, 1844.

169 While writing of how her “cousin Matthew ‘troubleth himself about many things’ and the one thing needful he neglects,” Julia was quoting the gospel story of Martha and Mary, Jesus’s words “one thing is needful, and Mary has chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:38-42, KJV). Compton to Willson, August 8, 1843. 170 For example, Julia wrote that “the wounds of grief will soon be healed in the younger members of the family” after the death of a young child, but “the father will mourn like Jacob.” The reference is to the story in Genesis 37 of how Joseph, favorite child of Jacob, was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, who then told their father that Joseph was dead. Jacob was inconsolable. Compton to Willson, December 5, 1841. 171 Compton to Young, December 5, 1841; Compton to Willson, November 15, 1845. 172 The reference is to Jesus’s saying that the “kingdom of God...is like a grain of mustard seed,” which is tiny but “when it is sown...shooteth out great branches” (Mark 4:30-32, KJV).

Although Julia’s Biblical knowledge may have been greater than that of many

Catholics, her interest in the New Testament was probably representative of pious

Catholic laywomen. She presumed that Anna would recognize the references, and apply them to her own life situations as well. For example, before Anna married, Julia gently scolded her for “laughing at “ a young man who was “charitably reading...a moral lesson with ‘from dust or dirt you come and unto dust or death you must return,’” a clear reference to Ecclesiastes 3:20, a verse recited on Ash Wednesday. 173

More importantly, Catholics purchased Bibles as well as religious objects and devotional manuals. Catholic publications frequently advertised several editions of the

Bible, which varied greatly by cost, with deluxe bindings for the affluent and simple ones designed for those of limited means. Catholic publishers such as Sadlier and

Benziger produced several different Bibles for different economic groups, indicating that there was a demand for Bibles, as well as devotional works, among Catholics, including those of limited means.

Julia’s letters revealed a creative engagement with the dominant culture. Her use of the Bible and attention to sermons resembled that of antebellum Protestant women, but her devotional life was distinctively Catholic in using holy objects, praying to the Virgin Mary and saints, and for the dead, and making novenas. By the middle of the nineteenth century parish-based devotional organizations were

173 Compton to Young, September 20, 1840. Julia told Anna that she “ought to be penanced” for this transgression.

79 increasingly popular. Julia joined three, one a benevolent society based at Trinity

Church for helping young men become priests, and two devotional confraternities. The

“new religious society” which Julia joined in 1840 (and expected Anna also to join) had the purpose of fostering individual piety, and made minimal demands: “no more is really required than to recite three pater nosters and three Ave Marias daily and to conform as nearly as you can to the life a good Christian ought to live.”174

Her second devotional society, added in 1843, was a confraternity that had a different purpose, requiring “members to pray for those who solicit them [and] their prayer is made to the Almighty through the ‘compassionate heart of Mary’ and their prayer seldom fails. Instead of encouraging individuals to meet a basic standard of piety, members of the second group were required to pray for others. Because Julia’s friend Sister Stanny also joined, Julia told Anna that the nun would “pray for you and all the family.” Julia regretted that she “had no time to make extracts” of a “French work” on the confraternity for Anna.175 The practice of copying portions of devotional literature (as well as the existence of parish libraries) indicated that knowledge and practice of such devotions was widespread. Moreover, Julia felt it necessary to reassure Anna that she was “not becoming a fanatic” and was “as clear minded as

174 Compton to Willson, March 1, 1840. Taves, Household of Faith, discusses the growth of parish-based organizations. Of a total of 1328 founded between 1800 and 1900, 60% were devotional, 26% mutual aid, 6% charitable (Table 4, p. 17). For Catholic and Protestant views of Mary, see Amy G. Remensynder, “Meeting the Challenge of Mary,” Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 1 (Spring 2013), 119-132. 175 Compton to Willson, March 7, 1843.

80 ever,” in case Anna should regard her devotional practices as excessive. At any rate, this organization became a key to Julia’s sense of her Catholic identity; a few months later, she told Anna “I pray for you now not as myself but as a member of the

Archconfraternity into which society I was admitted in July.”176 Members of this group believed the power of prayer could be concentrated; that the power of a group praying together exceeded that of a solitary individual.

Julia mentioned devotions to certain saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus. During the revival at Trinity Church in 1840, “the six Sunday’s devotion to St. Aloysius has been recommended and insisted upon.” She noted some saints days in connection with the Catholic liturgical calendar, which assigned certain days to particular saints: “you know today we honor St. Ignatius.” Aloysius and Ignatius were both Jesuits; Ignatius noted especially for his Counter-Reformation efforts to re-evangelize Protestant areas for Catholicsm, and Aloysius as a patron of youth would appeal to Julia, with her interest in piety and education of children. 177 In addition to following the saints’ days

176 Compton to Willson, June 23, 1843. Confraternities were Catholic voluntary associations founded in the Middle Ages, usually members joined according to location or occupation. After the sixteenth century, bishops increasingly regulated confraternities. The most popular types were confraternities of the rosary and of penitents. Independent confraternities dwindled by the eighteenth century, but by the mid-nineteenth century parish-based confraternities were revived in Europe and America. Taves, Household of Faith, 96-98.

177 Compton to Young, May 30, 1840; Compton to Willson, July 3, 1846. The devotion to St. Aloysius Gonzaga “was indulgenced in the eighteenth century” and became increasingly popular in prayer books published after 1840; he was a Jesuit noted for early piety and became “the official patron of youth.” Taves, Household of Faith, 39-40. Ignatius of Loyola was founder of the Jesuit order in the sixteenth

81 or prayers prescribed at church, Julia chose devotions based on particular situations.

Having favorite saints was a frequent devotional practice, and Julia’s choices reveal facets of her personality. Referring to Anna’s son Tom’s “indications of piety,” Julia wrote “[i]t was last May I think that you placed him under the protection of the

B[lessed] Virgin.” After the death of Anna’s second son and the birth of her third son,

Julia wrote that she would pray “to the Infant Jesus for the little boys.”178 Antebellum devotions to the infant Jesus published in prayer books “were intended to focus attention on the mysteries of his incarnation and birth” and were associated with the

Christmas season; other devotions focused on the crucifixion.179 Julia’s praying to the

“infant Jesus” for the health of children may have been a modification of these practices; perhaps her study of the Bible inspired her to pray to Jesus rather than Mary or one of the saints. Other than Mary, she did not seem to have a favorite female saint.

While accepting priestly authority, Julia also demonstrated the agency of laywomen in her devotional practices. Here too, she was not unusual. In an 1858 book on sacramentals, Rev. Willam J. Barry cautioned the faithful not to add “their own devotion, the name of their patron saint, or any other petition” to a litany of the saints.180 Laypeople must have been modifying ecclesiastically sanctioned devotions,

century and author of the Spiritual Exercises. 178 Compton to Willson, May 14, 1845; September 17, 1847. 179 Taves, Household of Faith, 32-36; quote p. 32. The passion-related devotions were associated with Lent. 180 He defines a sacrament as the conferring of inward grace, by an outward sign, in

82 otherwise there would have been no need for such an instruction. Even in a hierarchical faith such as Catholicism, lay agency could conflict with church authority, although for Julia it did not. Throughout the letters, she mentioned praying the rosary and making novenas, prayers to a saint for a specific number of days in hope of receiving divine favor.181 Julia instructed Anna to “recite the rosary” and reminded her of when a novena was beginning. When Anna was engaged, Julia was concerned about Richard Bennett’s lack of piety, and regretted not asking Fr. Kroes to make a novena for him and urge him to carry a religious medal.182

Julia did not always state to which saint they were making novenas, but St.

Francis de Sales and St. Francis Xavier were a particular favorites. Julia referred to

“St. Francis, whose help you have invoked” when encouraging Anna’s devotions by noting that Father Kroes would “approve your pious practice of praying for your little

‘Tomtet.’” Two years later, when Anna’s second son was ill, Julia hoped that “little

Willie” was now better, and regretted that she did not remember him in her prayers on

St. John’s day but reassured Anna that “a novena was addressed to St. Francis de Sales

virtue of divine institution” while a sacramental is also an outward sign but “of ecclesiastical origin.” Rev. William J. Barry, The Sacramentals of the Holy Catholic Church, or Flowers from the Garden of the Liturgy (Cincinnati: P. Walsh, 1858), 20- 22, 29. 181 Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11141b.htm, accessed July 20, 2005, s.v. “Novena.” Novenas were usually for nine days. Although they were not indulgenced until the nineteenth century, the practice dates to the Middle Ages. Novenas could be made for the recovery of health, in preparation for specific liturgical feasts, or for the dead. 182 Compton to Young, January 11, 1840; March 1, 1840; December 5, 1841.

83 in behalf of you and your family and I believe Father Kroes offered a mass for you.”183

Indeed, Julia may have preferred Francis de Sales even to Mary, telling Anna that

“good pere Kroes...offered a Mass for you and me on the last day of April — the

Novena was made for you to the Blessed Virgin by his direction.” Significantly, Julia noted that they “used to make it to St. Francis de Sales...but he said to the B[lessed]

V[irgin] M[ary] as it was the Month of May... we will make another to St. Francis — suppose we commence on the 3rd of June.”184 Following her priest’s instructions, Julia made the novena to Mary, but still felt it necessary to make an additional novena, and she made ongoing novenas. In 1847, Julia wrote “the Novena I did not commence as usual on the 3rd owing to my indisposition which unfitted me for long prayer but...I will write a few lines to Rev. F[ather] Kroes and he will join me in a novena to St.

Francis and will offer a Mass for you also.”185

Julia wrote that during an illness she “commenced a novena to my saint,

Francis Xavier,” a missionary Jesuit who travelled to India and Japan. Catholics frequently chose a patron saint, and perhaps Xavier’s interest in missions and

183 Compton to Willson, January 4, 1844; June 28, 1846. “St. Francis” could also refer to St. Francis of Assissi or St. Francis Xavier; however, because Julia mentioned St. Francis de Sales specifically, it seems reasonable to assume that “St. Francis” refers to him. 184 Compton to Willson, May 14, 1845. The month of May was traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary. 185 Compton to Willson, May 8, 1847.

84 education, as well as piety, appealed to Julia.186 Along with novenas, and pious meditations, Julia made retreats to withdraw as much as possible from quotidian duties and concentrate on religious devotions:

The Novena of which you spoke, I mean wrote, can be performed at any time...I have just terminated my retreat and purpose you know to be very good in future yet I know my resolutions will frequently fail but I will continue to try, ‘tis all I can do or you either in such a case. I made my retreat at home and as you will necessarily be secluded some time in your own apartment you may make some meditations profitable ones I hope also — though no set form be necessary.187

186 Compton to Young, December 5, 1841. De Sales was a French priest (1506-1552) who was one of the first to follow Ingatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. He was regarded as one of the greatest missionary priests, traveling to several countries including India and Japan. Given Julia’s closeness to the nuns of the Visitation, it is not surprising that Julia mentioned Francis de Sales as another saints to whom she and Anna prayed most often. De Sales (1567-1622) had defied his father’s wishes for him to become a lawyer and marry an heiress. Instead, he dedicated himself to the Virgin Mary, entered the priesthood, preaching to Calvinists, become bishop of Geneva, and with St. Jane Frances de Chantal, co-founded the Institute of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin. De Sales was known for his piety, charity to the poor, and compassion for penitent sinners. He wrote several works, including An Introduction to the Devout Life (1608), in which he set forth a series of meditations designed to lead the reader, addressed as Philothea, to choose to live a devout life, experience devotion to God, and form and carry out resolutions to live the devout life. According to de Sales, who wrote the to encourage lay piety, anyone in any station of life could and should live the devout life. The popularity of the manual is indicated by its translation into several languages and publication in several editions. It was first published in America in 1806, but De Sales may have been more widely known through Garden of the Soul, an English devotional that included a condensed version of De Sales’s meditations. Francis Xavier was Bishop of Geneva and traveled widely. Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06220a.htm, s.v. “St. Francis de Sales”; http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06233b.htm, s.v. “St. Francis Xavier;” Alban Butler, Lives of the Saints, ed. Herbert Thurston, S.J. and Donald Attwater (New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1963), s.v. “St. Francis Xavier;” “St. Francis de Sales”; Taves, Household of Faith, 71-76, 139. 187 Compton to Willson, September 7, 1843.

These practices helped Julia and others structure their devotions and set aside special times for deepening their faith. Laypeople modified the timing of novenas, and the form of devotions, to suit their circumstances. Julia recognized that she did not always fulfill her version of ideal piety, but rather than castigating herself, acknowledged her imperfections and encouraged Anna to keep trying, recognizing that the practice of piety in everyday life would not match the ideal. During Lent, Julia told the young mother that she “cannot do much fasting” and “you will have to confine your penance to prayer.” Earlier, she had wanted Anna’s husband to read her “book of meditation” and had helpfully “marked some passages for Mr. Mate’s benefit which you can erase if you think they will not suit his humor.”188

Novenas were one of the distinguishing features of Catholicism; another, which many Protestants found suspect, was the use of holy objects. Julia repeatedly advocated the use of objects such as holy water, medals, “blessed candles,” and scapulars189 In one letter, Julia used a description of a “Trefoil” to launch a short sermon of her own: “St. Patrick considered the Trefoil an emblem of the Trinity...dive a little deeper in Metaphysics and find that each member of the great family, depends in some measure, on some other, no one, being able to subsist entirely independent of all others.”190 Yet along with a rather sophisticated analysis of the symbolism of the

188 Compton to Willson, January 8, 1845; Compton to Young, March 14, 1841. 189 Compton to Young, July 29, 1839. 190 Compton to Young, April 29, 1837.

Trefoil, Julia used holy objects for more mundane purposes, such as lighting “the blessed candle” during a thunderstorm.191 Years later, when Anna was recovering from a carriage accident, Julia reminded her to “[a]lways wear your medals” as though the objects would protect her from harm.192 Such practices combined religious devotion and superstition, and later Catholic novelists such as Mary Sadlier and Anna Dorsey embraced the agency of objects as if they carried a holy contagion.

Julia especially wanted “Mr. Mate” to wear holy medals and understand their significance.193 In encouraging Anna to give her husband the book on medals, and foster his piety, Julia expressed an ideal of female piety and feminine influence popular among Protestants, but in a uniquely Catholic version. Julia hoped that Anna’s husband “has resumed his Medal,” even if “no better motive should actuate him in taking it with him during his aquatic excursions than that of gratifying the whim of a superstitious priest ridden old spinster.”194 As she did when referring to Catholics as

191 Compton to Young, August 11, 1839. 192 Compton to Willson, October 14, 1844. 193 “I have received a most lucid explanation of Medals but I cannot write it now, it would occupy the whole letter so I will send a book if the postage is not too great although the article is much abridged yet there are many other things which will appear quite new and I hope not unreasonable to Mr. Bennett. The book is intended for him which I hope you will present with my thanks.” Compton to Willson, March 25, 1843. 194 Compton to Willson, March 25, 1843. Whether or not Mr. Mate wore his medal is unknown, but feminine influence apparently had an effect; he went from being a tippler to a pillar of the Catholic community on the Eastern Shore. Dolde, “Society and Religion in Town and Country,” in Legacy of Land.

“papists,” Julia made a joke about the cultural stereotype of the Catholic spinster in this letter. Significantly, to Julia, motive, or rather a motive other than piety, was not a factor in the efficacy of medals: Mr. Mate’s “aquatic excursions,” or excessive indulgence in his “beer barrel” would end if he simply wore the medal. She shared the belief of the novelists Anna Dorsey and Mary Sadlier in the agency and efficacy of holy objects.

Julia fervently hoped that Anna’s sickly second son would be allowed to wear a medal, probably believing that it would effect a cure and stating that “If his Grandpa were acquainted with Father Kroes, he would not object to your boy’s wearing the medal...he would find both good sense and ‘unaffected piety’ in this father which his own discernment would discover.”195 Apparently, the good Dr. Thomas Willson, with whom Anna and her husband were still residing, had veto power over Anna’s religious practices. Julia would go to considerable lengths to obtain medals, and was disappointed when they were not available.196

The letters thus indicate considerable variation among Catholics in the use of, and attitudes towards, holy objects. Dr. Willson was not an indifferent believer, but

195 Compton to Willson, January 4, 1844. 196 Dr. Willson must have relented, for the following year Julia wrote first that “there are no medals yet at Trinity Church and I cannot send one yet to dear little Willie,” and a few months later that “Jenny had brought the Medal, a present for Willie.” Yet this one was not enough for Julia, because she was still trying to obtain a medal but could not because “the priest, who was “supposed to buy some in Baltimore...only brought books for the boys at the benevolent school.” Compton to Willson, January 8, 1845; August 13, 1845; June 28, 1846.

88 rather a devoted Catholic. Indeed, he was instrumental in spreading Catholicism on the

Eastern Shore.197 There were thus at least two competing ideas about the use of holy objects among devoted Catholics. Some, such as Dr. Willson, apparently questioned their use. Perhaps he believed that by reinforcing Protestant stereotypes about Catholic superstition, such practices undermined the respectable image they hoped to convey, or he could have associated such objects with feminine uses, or simply regarded such objects as useless. Other Catholics, such as Julia, Anna, and Catholic women novelists, embraced holy objects as an important aspect of their faith, one that reinforced, rather than undermined, Catholic respectability.

“How Wrong to Defer Our Preparation for Death”

For Julia, the agency of holy medals may have been a way to cope with the constant presence of illness and death.198 She wrote often about illness, death, and

197 In 1838 he “had opened Trumpington to Father George King for baptisms, marriages, and other rituals because Catholics had no regular meeting place” and “the home became his mission station.” Compton to Young, May 21, 1838. 198 An excellent recent study of the devastating impact of illness and death is Gerald Grob, The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). For the experience of death and responses of the living to death and dying in the nineteenth century, see the essays in David Stannard, ed., Death in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975). Studies of specific diseases include Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1839, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (New York: New York University Press, 2000). Some women turned to the alternative medicine rather than religion when allopathic physicians had little or nothing to offer; see for example Susan Cayleff, Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women’s Health (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

89 resignation to God’s will in the face of tragedy. For example, in 1838 Julia described a young girl who, after suffering from scarlet fever, experienced “symptoms of consumption,” and weakness so severe that she could no longer go to school. This letter reveals the uncertainty and dread associated with illness: the girl’s cough was

“troublesome but not painful,” however, “her extreme paleness and a sort of beauty...make me apprehend the approach of that insidious disease for which no remedy can be found.” The girl’s mother “wept and said she wished she had never married.” In such circumstances, Julia could offer only religious consolation, writing that “he [God] tempers the wind to the shorn lamb” and that the unfortunate mother

“will be resigned.”199

News of epidemics and death would spread quickly. Julia reported a yellow fever epidemic that had spread along the Mississipi; a mother whose only son died was “almost bereft of reason.”200 When Anna “mentioned the death of the little girl” in

1847, Julia understood that Anna had “suffered greatly” but offered the same counsel of resignation and acceptance of God’s will: “dear Nannie have you yet to learn that

Almighty wisdom directs all events and that the death of that child was decreed to take place just at the time and in the manner it did..”201 For Julia, the ultimate purpose of life on earth was the afterlife in heaven, and when informing Anna of the death of

199 Compton to Young, May 21, 1838. 200 Compton to Young, November 17, 1839. 201 Compton to Willson, November 21, 1847.

90 mutual acquaintances, she emphasized the need to prepare for the inevitable, implying that all things have a purpose and/or a preordained fate. Julia criticized those who did not prepare for death; for example, the health of Mrs. Notley Young “is so bad that she requires constant attendance…from the nature of the disease she may expect death at any moment. Yet she does not apprehend any such event and talks about what is to be done the year after next.”202 Writing of “[p]oor Mrs. Hill, who “left an infant of three weeks” when she died, Julia noted “how little satisfaction she had in her grandeur.”203

Death could strike at any time, and mothers were responsible for preparing their children for a possible untimely demise. When a “[p]oor Mrs. Harding has lost her son

William who went to the West, was shot and died,” the woman who gave Julia the news “mentioned that a priest was with him from the time he was till he expired” and

“wrote a consoling letter to his mother,” apparently one which praised her “early instruction” of her son.204 This letter also reminded Anna to do the same for her children.

When Julia consoled Anna upon the deaths of Anna’s uncle in 1846, her younger son in 1847, and her father in 1851, Julia always assured Anna that her family members died in the good graces of “the Almighty.” Certain “consolations” could help ease the inevitable pain of death. Apparently, Uncle Notley’s last days were not happy

202 Compton to Willson, August 3, 1845. 203 Compton to Willson, November 21, 1847. 204 Compton to Willson, June 7, 1843.

91 ones: “his last marriage was productive of positive misery and you have heard to what he had recourse.” (This is not specified, but was probably alcohol or perhaps opium).

Julia expressed sympathy, but also used the sad occasion as a cautionary tale: “he died

I suppose with strangers around him,” with no family members present, certainly the antithesis of the “good death” of pious individuals surrounded by a loving family, and ideally, with a priest present. Yet Julia did not pass judgment on Notley, hoping that

“his was not an unexpected death” and that he had time to prepare himself for the fate that awaits all. Indeed, Julia told Anna that she lived in “a continual dread and fear that I shall not be faithful to the end.”205 The next year, Julia wrote again of Notley’s death, always deriving a lesson: “I feel so sad your uncle had not been to confession for about two months previous to his death and was deprived of his senses during his illness” could only encourage Anna to partake of this sacrament. Reflecting on “poor

Uncle Notley how truly distressed I am at the end he made — continually am I thinking of him and see the vanity of worldly possessions,” Julia wrote “I do not regret being a ‘daughter of poverty’ when I reflect on the little happiness enjoyed by many who had abundant wealth.”206

In the same letter in which Julia first wrote of Notley’s death, Julia informed

Anna about another death: “O Anna how wrong to defer our preparation for death — the miserable death of poor Jack Hill has almost stupefied me.” The young man “died

205 Compton to Willson, July 20, 1846. 206 Compton to Willson, July 31, 1846; January 1, 1847.

92 suddenly...after a week’s dissipations — what must be the suffering of his poor mother.” Julia used the tragedy to teach Anna several lessons. One was how her

Catholic work ethic defined respectability by behavior, not social and economic status:

“Dear Nannie never regret the want of wealth for your boys — had Jack Hill been obliged to labor for a livelihood he might have been a happy man.” Another was that

Anna must inculcate early piety and teach her boys “from the first that which will make them happy when earthly comfort fail.” A third was resignation and acceptance of God’s will: “if Almighty God should in his wisdom take one [of Anna’s children] to himself,” she should “compare your grief with that of Mrs. Hill and you will be resigned to a Father’s will.”207 Clearly, Julia considered resignation a virtue.

Upon the death of Anna’s son before his second birthday, Julia again urged resignation, advising her to “make ‘submission to the will of God’ your subject of meditation...there is nothing so consoling in our every day trials as feeling they are as good as they are powerful.”208 Julia urged resignation, and consoled Anna with the thought that her son would be free from suffering in the afterlife: “ O Nannie do you wish to deprive dear Willie of the happiness of being with his God… in every instance the Almighty imparts strength to his people when in distress they call upon him…”209

In the tragedy of a child’s death, Julia’s consolations recommended resigning to the

207 Compton to Willson, July 31, 1846. 208 Compton to Willson, August 3, 1845. 209 Compton to Willson, October 20, 1846.

93 will of God and trusting that a loving deity could cause a mother to suffer in the interests of bringing the child to heaven.210

The question of salvation was of primary concern when Anna’s father, who had always been a shadowy figure in her life, passed away. This was a very delicate situation, for her father, possibly an alcoholic, may have committed suicide. Anna learned of the death from her brother Alonzo, who informed her that their “poor unfortunate father” had “left his boarding house...in one of his unhappy frolicks,” and was discovered drowned. Fortunately for the family, “[t]he funeral ceremonies were performed on the spot by the Rev. Mr. Flattery, and his body decently interred in St.

Patrick’s Burying Ground.”211

Although Julia could not have known the precise content of that letter, she was well aware that receiving such a communication would be very traumatic. To comfort

Anna, Julia wrote to her husband, asking him to inform Anna that her father “had been about the time to confession and holy communion, had purchased a ‘pious guide,’ and had abstained from some time from his usual habits.” Thus, she tried to assure Anna that her father was “in a state of grace and our Good God took him before he had again lost favor.” Given her strong and steady adherence to Catholic doctrine and

210 When Anna was pregnant again, Julia wrote “I think Tom’s idea of his brother coming back was beautiful children always look on the bright side if they be not much spoiled” and when the baby was born, Julia again promised to pray “to the Infant Jesus for the little boys.” Compton to Willson, November 3, 1847; May 5, 1848. 211 Alonzo Manning to Anna Martha Willson, March 30, 1851. Antebellum Catholics regarded suicide as a sin resulting in eternal damnation.

94 practices, Julia emphasized the special consolation she thought only available to

“Catholic Christians” when bereaved; unlike Protestants they could continue to pray and “feel that we can still assist those whom we love and we may in a few years be again with them;” the doctrine of purgatory could be comforting.212

Julia also counseled resignation for those who had to live with severe pain, illness, or disability. When Anna’s cousin Ben lost his sight, Julia wrote “I am sincerely sorry for the poor boy and hope the Almighty will restore his sight or impart that submission to his will which deprives misery of its pain.” Neither, however, was to be the case. Two years later, “Blind Ben” was “gradually declining without any prospect of recovering his faculties and so very deaf it was impossible to make him hear at all,” and completely dependent upon the care of his grandmother. According to

Julia, “poor afflicted Ben” was “deprived of every earthly comfort yet unwilling to go hence.”213 In such a condition, Julia implied, death would be preferable to earthly life.

Apparently in a reflective mood, Julia wrote to Anna, “How many have gone before us to spend their Christmas in heaven. The thought does not grieve me for at this season there should be no room for grief.”214 In 1847, during her later years, when she was “too weak to go to church” and preparing for her own death, she explained her philosophy to Anna.

212 Julia Compton to Richard Bennett Willson, April 1, 1851. 213 Compton to Willson, August 8, 1845; August 23, 1847; May 8, 1847. 214 Compton to Willson, December 28, 1857.

To me it seems that persons without families should never regret the approach of death... Those who have children require strong faith in and a tender reliance on Divine Providence to tender resignation perfect — but these will be bestowed on those who ‘Ask and you shall receive’ [and] he who has said this never deceives.”215

In her views on death and resignation to God’s will, as with so much else, Julia drew on the Bible; the letter directly referenced two Biblical passages.216

While Julia may have had no relatives after her mother died, with Anna, Jenny, and friendships with the sisters of the Visitation, Julia Compton enjoyed a rich family life in the Catholic “household of faith.” Readers of Protestant consolation literature also believed that heaven “offered homes restored, families regathered, and friends reunited,”217 but only Catholics could pray for the dead, and have the dead pray for them. On one occasion, Julia reported a rumor from Rome about “a ghost seen at the

Jesuits college — requesting prayers.”218 Several years later, Julia mused on the

215 Compton to Willson, May 8, 1847. 216 “But he that shall endure [persevere] to the end, the same shall be saved” (Matt. 24:13, KJV), and the Sermon on the Mount: “Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.” (Matt. 7:7-8, KJV). 217 Ann Douglas, “Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in the Northern United States, 1830-1880,” American Quarterly 26 (1974): 496-515; quote p. 512. 218 Compton to Young, September 7, 1840. In the mid-nineteenth century, individuals from all religious persuasions believed they were communicating with the departed. For spiritualism, see for example Ahlstrom, Religious History, 488-90; R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).

96 afterlife: “I wonder if we will recognize each other in that unknown world,” and, recalling a saintly figure from her childhood, “Beggar Charles was a hermit with his rosary and a book of devotions, a long flowing beard tattered garments and kindly look. I was a pet and would run to meet him with great glee,” reassured herself with the thought that “Now I know he prayed for me when living and I doubt not that he does the same in heaven for there he has certainly gone.”219 Julia believed she would meet him, and all of her family of faith after death, and that devotions could help the dead.

Julia’s letters provide a window into the piety of Catholic laywomen and help to elucidate larger questions of the complex interrelationships among religion, gender, domesticity, family, respectability, and society. Her understanding of the gender system included her roles as daughter, surrogate mother, friend, and teacher in an expanded domestic sphere. Anticipating later Catholic women writers of obituaries and novels, Julia advised, and even preached through her letters. Although the major purpose of the letters was to communicate with Anna, since they were often shared with others, they functioned as prescriptive literature; news about friends and acquaintances could also serve as cautionary tales. Needless to say, Julia never presented her ideas in a systematic manner, and because she was in the process of working out her thoughts in the letters, she could contradict herself at times. (For example, Julia neither acknowledged nor resolved the tension between her belief in the

219 Compton to Willson, January 4, 1844.

97 efficacy of prayer and holy objects and exhortation to accept the will of God in times of illness). It is clear, too, that she had other correspondents, to whom she must have offered similar ideas.

Her letters, along with obituaries, suggest that at least some Catholic laywomen were familiar with Protestant prescriptive literature, and adapted it to create and practice a uniquely Catholic ideology of domesticity, respectability, and gender.

Creating this ideology involved complex interrelationships among priests, nuns, and laypeople such as writers of obituaries and advice literature. The process was not a simple matter of putting a Catholic veneer on an essentially Protestant ideal of domesticity; it entailed creative engagement with aspects of mainstream culture that had many Protestant elements. As an ardent believer in her faith, like Catholic writers of obituaries, novels, and prescriptive literature, Julia attempted to reposition

Catholicism from the margins to the mainstream of American culture. Catholicism

“functioned as an alternately vilified and sanctioned ‘other’” for a wide range of

Protestant writers.220 The “word” in the form of Bible and sermon was as important to

Julia as to a devout Protestant, yet she also addressed stereotypes of Catholics as ignorant and superstitious, and embraced the use of holy objects, which perhaps was the religious practice that Protestants most marginalized. Julia’s letters indicate that she regarded respectability in terms of belief and behavior, rather economic status or type of work. By presenting a Catholic work ethic and presenting respectability as

220 Franchot, Roads to Rome, 199.

98 possible for all, in her letters, Julia assimilated the Catholic working class to the respectable American middle class. Thus religion, like the diffusion of refined material culture, contributed to the ongoing “confusion about class” in American society.221 By providing a window into the lived experience of Catholic laywomen, Julia’s letters indicate the diversity of Catholic religious practices and suggest how Catholic laywomen saw themselves. Although the letters are representations of Julia’s life and views, and do not reflect her unmediated experiences, Julia’s letters demonstrate how her religion informed her identity. Even adherents of such a hierarchical, liturgically defined faith constructed their religious identity not only by following a religious dogma, but also through social practices, and Catholic women were active agents in creating a uniquely Catholic gender system. Moreover, they presented their faith as an integral aspect of their respectable identity.

221 Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1993), quote p. 447. According to Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1768-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), the key division between working and middle class was manual and nonmanual labor.

Chapter 2

PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC DEATHS: OBITUARIES OF WOMEN AS REPRESENTATIONS OF MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY CATHOLIC IDENTITY

On September 22, 1855, the Catholic Mirror, the official newspaper of the

Archdiocese of Baltimore, the central see in the American church, published the obituary of Mrs. Mary Wheeler, “a faithful wife, a tender and exemplary mother, a sincere and abiding friend,” who was, above all, “devoted to her religious duties.”222

Typical obituaries such as this one, were brief and formulaic. Yet others were brief biographies that revealed, as did Julia Compton in her letters, how the Catholic gender system shaped women’s identities and showed how Catholics creatively engaged with the dominant Protestant culture. In the antebellum era the class and ethnic composition of the American church changed as the number of adherents expanded dramatically, largely due to Irish immigration. Because their religion was regarded with traditional

Protestant suspicion, Catholics frequently encountered nativism and hostility.

Although by the mid-nineteenth century Roman Catholicism was the single largest

Christian denomination, Protestantism was still normative in American society, as

222 The [Baltimore] Catholic Mirror, September 22, 1855. The newspaper had a national circulation.

100 were Protestant ideas about gender.223 Yet over the course of the century, Catholic women increasingly engaged in public activity.224 The Catholic press played a significant role in constructing an American Catholic identity that could transcend differences of class and ethnicity. As book publishing expanded in the antebellum era,

Baltimore was the leading city in the production of Catholic literature, with thriving local publishers and booksellers who regularly advertised Catholic novels, saints’ lives, schoolbooks, and devotional literature in the Catholic Mirror.225

Evangelical Protestants produced a diverse “textual community,” a print culture of sermons, theological tracts, histories, devotional guides, prescriptive literature, memoirs, and biographies, creating a “informal, open-ended ‘canon’ of texts” which provided “core narrative structures to contend for the faith.”. Readers

“contending for the faith” could structure their lives according to the religious metanarratives presented in print.226 Catholics developed their own print culture, which

223 Among the extensive literature, see Misner, Highly Respectable and Accomplished Ladies; Mannard, “Maternity...of the Spirit;” McCauley, Who Shall Take Care of Our Sick; Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion; Diane Batts Morrow, Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1828-1860; Suellen Hoy, Good Hearts.

224 See for example Taves, Household of Faith; McDannell, Christian Home. 225 For reading in America see for example Zboray, A Fictive People; Cathy N. Davidson, ed. Reading in America: Literature and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989); Machor, ed., Readers in History; for nineteenth-century women’s novel reading see Kelley, Private Women, Public Stage; Baym, Women’s Fiction; Tompkins, Sensational Designs; Douglas, Feminization of American Culture. For the social meanings of biographies, see are Casper, Constructing American Lives and for obituaries Hume, “Private Lives, Public Values.” 226 Brown, The Word in the World, quotes p. 7, 2.

101 served similar functions. Through reading diverse genres, including novels, devotional literature, and saints’ lives, Catholics could derive a sense of identity and strengthen their faith.

Obituaries incorporated elements of devotional, biographical, and prescriptive literature, while expounding a multifaceted Catholic identity through secular hagiographies of exemplary women. From earliest Christianity, the biographies of exemplary Catholics were used to exhort the faithful to remain steadfast in their faith

(a practice also evident among the Puritans). In addition to hagiographies, which were advertised in every issue of the Catholic Mirror and widely read, the newspaper utilized the lives of ordinary Catholics to encourage others to practice their religion diligently and to resist the temptation to convert to Protestantism. The Catholic Mirror disseminated many such inspiring stories in the form of obituaries, which unlike brief funeral notices, provided significant information about the life of the recently deceased. The number and length of obituaries varied, but almost every issue included some. By providing examples for individuals to emulate, these representations of ideal

Catholicism served a didactic function much like that of saints’ lives. Yet a key difference was that obituaries, by using the lives of contemporary women from diverse backgrounds, provided more attainable role models for readers.227 As representations

227 Obituaries served a function similar to that of evangelical memoirs. According to Brown, Word in the World, “[u]nlike Catholic hagiographies of canonized saints, evangelical memoirs took as their models ordinary ‘saints’ whose closeness to everyday experiences qualified them to influence other Christian pilgrims” (88).

102 of the lives of individuals, these obituaries reveal much about the social and religious values of the elite Baltimore Catholics who sought to shape American Catholic opinion.

The content of the obituaries was often formulaic. Often, the writer of the obituary acknowledged the grief of the bereaved family, praised the character and virtues of the deceased, and offered the consolation that now the soul had departed for heaven, a better place. Prominent among the virtues listed were charity, fulfillment of responsibilities (particularly as wife and mother), intelligence (cited only in the obituaries of converts), gentleness, and piety. A frequent theme was the redemptive nature of suffering, as many obituaries described long, painful illnesses, which the deceased bore with resignation, even cheerfulness, never complaining or questioning what the writer represented as the will of God. Such deaths were sometimes compared to the deaths of saints and martyrs. Another recurring theme was the good death, of women surrounded by loving families, receiving the final sacrament of extreme unction (last rites) before passing peacefully. In accordance with the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, some obituaries requested prayers for the soul of the deceased, while others assured the bereaved family and assured readers that piety of the deceased rendered such prayers unnecessary.

Even in the brief obituaries, the authors often insisted that, in this case the virtues were genuine, and that therefore the obituary was not merely following a prescribed formula, but rather was an accurate portrayal of the life of the deceased.

Many obituaries incorporated a mini-sermon, providing edification for the living along

103 with praise of the dead, and reminding readers of the transience of life and inevitability of death. Occasionally, the author incorporated commentary on contemporary social, as well as religious, matters.

Such are the general themes found in the obituaries. Yet few of the obituaries included all of these elements. Moreover, because obituaries incorporated biographical material, by necessity there was considerable variation, depending on the life of the deceased. Obituaries for such diverse individuals as child, a young wife and mother, a benevolent lady, and an elderly woman included different biographical information, but always praised their piety. The mini-biographies of converts were the most detailed, perhaps because writers of obituaries, concerned about the dangers of apostasy from their faith (also a theme in novels by Catholic women writers), wished to emphasize the exemplary lives, sincere religious devotion, and intelligence of women who chose to convert to Catholicism, while contradicting stereotypes of

Catholics as “priest ridden” and superstitious.228 In a few cases of prominent women, the biographical and even religious function of the obituary was secondary to its representation of her respectable genealogy, which positioned Catholics in the center, rather than the periphery, of American society and culture. Refinement and bourgeois respectability, rather than religious ideals, thus were most prominent in some obituaries. However, the Catholic Mirror also published several obituaries of women

228 Billington, Protestant Crusade; Knobel, Paddy and the Republic. Many antebellum nativists believed that Catholics, who ostensibly owed their primary allegiance to a foreign power, the pope, could not be good American citizens.

104 from humbler stations in life (including one African-American). Befitting a denominational newspaper, despite the differences in the women’s mini-biographies in their obituaries, devotion to the faith dominates is central.

The Catholic Mirror published many detailed obituaries of Catholic women between 1850 and 1870. (After the Civil War, obituaries appear less frequently, and appear perhaps to have been paid for by the bereaved families). Although the names of authors of obituaries were not given, some had lay authors; some were obviously written by friends of the deceased, who mention the relationship. Most obituaries emphasized one or more key aspects of ideal Catholic womanhood. Women who were the subjects of obituaries as mini-biographies, rather than simple death notices, many of which gave simply the name, age, and a relative of the deceased, were hardly representative of the majority of Baltimore Catholics. Yet these obituaries elucidate the representations of diverse experiences of Catholic women who were held as models for others to follow. (Obituaries for Catholic men served a similar function, but more were of prominent men). More significantly, they demonstrate how women’s lives were written to portray ideal Catholic femininity and how the church and

Catholic individuals employed rhetorical strategies to convey normative social and religious values (such as Catholicism, charity, and piety). The variety in the lives of women portrayed, and emphasis on different aspects of piety, both shaped and reflected diverse lay interpretations of the Catholic ideal and suggests that there was some latitude in the expression of the ideal.

105

There were relatively few obituaries of nuns, perhaps because the ideal of the nun was so well known, and more importantly, because the writers of obituaries wished to portray ideal Catholic laywomen, teaching by example that ideal Catholic womanhood was accessible to all. Here, obituaries served a similar didactic purpose to advice literature, saints’ lives, and novels (which also function as prescriptive literature). That laywomen wrote many of these obituaries, and of such diverse women, revealed the agency of women in creating a variety of ideal domesticities.

Although obituaries may not describe the actual realities of the memorialized women, as representations they provided many indications about ideals and models of ideal

Catholic womanhood. Significantly, many were written by friends and relatives of the deceased. Through their obituaries in the Catholic Mirror, the private lives of otherwise unknown laywomen became public. Obituaries established some ideals of

Catholic practice and taught by example, much as did both popular lives of the saints and Protestant conversion narratives, compilations of the lives of eminent women, biographies, and memoirs.229

229 For example, T. Sharp and John Sanford, The Heavenly Sisters, or Biographical Studies of the Lives of Thirty Eminently Pious Females, Partly Extracted from the Works of Gibbons, Germant, and Others, and Partly Original: Designed for the use of Females in General and Particularly Recommended for the use of Ladies’ Schools. To which is Added, A Memoir of Mrs. Abigail, Wife of the Late Pres. Adams, and a Sketch of the Active Life of Mrs. Sarah Hoffman (New York: H. Durrell and Co., 1822). Writers of biographies and editors of memoirs “intervened to reshape women’s experiences, choosing what to retain and omit as well as reconfiguring texts through organizational strategies, texts, and footnotes.” Brown, Word in the World, 94.

106

Early Piety, Early Death

The ideal of ardent dedication to religious devotion was of central importance to mid-nineteenth century Catholics (as it was to Protestants). Death notices and obituaries for children and young adults appeared in the Catholic Mirror with distressing regularity, reminding the readers of the fragility and transience of life, and what was, in the nineteenth century, the not uncommon tragedy of parents outliving their children. For example in 1853, Mary Ann O’Neal, 19 years old and her parents’ only child, died of consumption. After completing her education the previous year at an elite female academy, St. Joseph’s in Emmitsburg, she had “returned to her home in fine health and spirits, with the brightest prospects for a long and happy life.” The writer of the obituary lamented the loss of “long cherished hopes of her bereaved parents and friends.”230 Unlike other obituaries, it offers little consolation to the parents, perhaps because there is none for the devastating loss of a beloved only child.

Early piety and the loss of a uniquely gifted individual are recurring themes in the obituaries of those who died at an early age. Marie Costigan, who died at the age of 23 in 1856, “early distinguished by the practice of entirely amiable virtue,” was noted for her beautiful singing voice as she led her church choir, and for her dedication in “conducting schools” in her native Ohio and in Washington City. Her obituary revealed that at least some Catholic lay teachers were respected and admired; like their Protestant counterparts, they too became schoolteachers in the antebellum

230 CM, September 10, 1853, p. 6.

107 period. Her death was unexpected: although one day “in her usual health,” the next morning she was “found dead in her bed.” The writer of Costigan’s obituary suggested that, because of her virtuous life, her death was “neither untimely nor unprovided,” but noted that, because none are perfect, prayers for her soul were in order. The specter of unexpected, unexplained death reminded readers of the uncertainty of life and of the perceived need to prepare for death. In these and other obituaries of young people, there was a constant theme of the fragility and uncertainty of life, and consequently, the need to rely on God. (Much Protestant writing also emphasized the uncertainty of life and the need to be prepared for the inevitability of death).

While early death was tragic, it could be represented as beautiful. Mary Ann

Aimee Saxton, who died at 16 from consumption, was portrayed as too good for this world, “one of those fair souls who, living for a brief time in the world, yet not of it,” and praised for her “saintly meekness and purity...fortitude amidst suffering,” which

“will live on in our hearts.”231 Her resemblance to fictional heroines who died of consumption is striking. Protestant authors also portrayed ethereal beauty and transcendent virtue of young consumptive women; but by calling the young woman

“saintly, the writer linked obituaries of ordinary women to saints’ lives. There was nothing uniquely “Catholic” about this portrayal of an idealized, even beautiful, death

231 CM, October 10, 1856, p. 6.

108 from consumption; Protestant deathbed narratives also described “sentimental scenes of sanctified suffering” and the happy deaths of pious children.232

Similarly, the death of Grace Mathias at the age of nine led the author of her obituary to write that “[h]er sweet angelic character was too good for this world...God in his goodness transplanted this tender blossom to his own celestial garden.”233 Little

Mary Helene McSherry, who died at the age of four, the only daughter of parents of five sons, had “moved in the family circle like an angel of purity and innocence.” To console the bereaved parents and friends of the family, her obituary included a poem to a lost child, in which each verse repeated the line “Beyond the grave I’ll meet with thee.”234 Such portrayals of innocent children reflected both ideas about the necessity of early piety and a new concept of childhood, in which children were seen as innocent rather than as tainted by original sin.235 However, the Catholic concept of childhood may have been more on the spectrum towards innocence because of the

232 Brown, Word in the World, 91-92. The classic analysis of “the age of the beautiful death” in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remains Phillipe Aries, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Knopf, 1981), 409-474; also see Douglas, “Heaven Our Home” in Stannard, ed., Death in America; Kent Lancaster, “On the Drama of Dying in Early Nineteenth Century Baltimore, Maryland Historical Magazine 81 (1986), 103-16; Stephen J. Vicchio, “Baltimore’s Burial Practices, Mortuary Art, and Notions of Grief and Bereavement, Maryland Historical Magazine 81 (1986), 134-48. 233 CM, August 20, 1864. 234 CM, January 31, 1863. 235 Calvert, Children in the House; Ross Beales, “In Search of the Historical Child,” in Hawes and N. Ray Hiner, eds., American Childhood; Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

109 practice of infant baptism, which was said to obviate original sin. Age was also significant: children dying at ages four and nine were compared to angels, while young women dying in their teens and early twenties were praised for their ideal lives.

The promise of family reunions in heaven, from which bereaved parents must have derived comfort, was an aspect of the Catholic “household of faith,” which linked Catholics, living and dead, into one vast family of faith. Key elements were specifically Catholic devotions and beliefs in purgatory and in prayers for the dead.236

These obituaries taught parents several lessons: parents were responsible for inculcating faith in their children; the innocence and purity of young children were to be cherished; and family relationships would continue after death. There is, perhaps a darker side to this happy promise: a subtle reminder that individuals can never escape family, and that one will have to encounter, and be accountable to, family members after death. In addition, such obituaries could also be used to teach other children that death could strike at any time, and therefore that even the young must be prepared through religious dedication. The obituaries reminded both parents and children old enough to have encountered the ideal of early piety (and perhaps, have the obituaries read to them) that their actions (and inactions, which Catholics refer to, respectively, as sins of commission and omission) here and now would have long-term consequences. Reading such obituaries was not simply a matter of absorbing

236 The phrase is Ann Taves’s.

110 information or remembering the deceased; the reader could interpret them as cautionary tales. or as tales of death in childhood.

The Domestic Ideal

Married Catholic women, like their Protestant counterparts, were expected to center their lives on their homes and families. Jane Malone, who died at the age of 74 of a long illness, led a life that was an example of “piety and virtue, shedding its influence upon her children, for whom she seemed to live, and who shared in all her religious offerings.”237 Although Jane’s death from lung disease, probably consumption, was “not unexpected,” the author of her obituary stated that her absence

“left a void in her family which time cannot fill,” providing an image of the pious, domestic mother as emotional and spiritual center of the home.

Although the writer portrayed Jane Malone as the ideal mother, her obituary did not mention her husband or whether or not she was a widow. Yet hers was an image of a woman surrounded by her adult children, who, still devoted to their mother, continued to accept her guidance in spiritual matters. Jane Malone turned from this world towards the next before her impending death: “the world had long been neglected by her, her heavenly Father and His mansions were her study.” (One may wonder if, as she neglected the world, the world in turn neglected her, as it did for so many women who faced poverty upon the deaths of their husbands). The obituary

237 CM, May 8, 1852, p. 6.

111 evoked an image similar to that of the virgin Mary, a woman with no husband present, surrounded by her children, who were sons and daughters of her faith as well as of her flesh. For readers of her obituary, the implicit promise was that they too should become resigned “to the will of the Divine Master, and someday enjoy the rewards of a life spent faithfully in His service.”

Brief obituaries of wives and mothers were among the most formulaic. In many cases, widows were noted as such, while the name of the husband, if he was still living, was usually given. In others, he was conspicuous by his absence, drawing attention to the woman herself, and the intrinsic merits of her pious life, rather than what many antebellum writers considered her primary role as the good wife and mother (a role defined by its relations to others, rather than by the woman’s life as an individual). The obituary of Mrs. Mary Ann Smith, who died of a “lingering illness” at the age of 38, mentioned the children and not the husband, but in both cases the domestic ideal was one of mother rather than wife. Mary Ann was also representative of an ideal Catholic mother: “it was her sincere piety and untiring devotion in the services of God, that chiefly sustained her four children.” According to her obituary, her piety was lifelong, which gave the writer of her obituary an opportunity to pen a mini-sermon on those who live their lives without thinking of the inevitable end.

Praising Mary Ann’s piety, the writer criticized the “worldlings” who pursued “the fleeting pleasures of a giddy and wicked world, and offer to God only the evening of

112 life, or the dregs of their existence, when they can enjoy the world no longer.”238 (In both Catholic and Protestant writing, “worldlings” was a not uncommon term for individuals who, in the view of the authors, focused too much on this world and not enough on the next). Both Catholic and Protestant obituaries frequently contain such warnings.

The obituaries portrayed the death of young wives and mothers as especially tragic. The author of Ellen Cahill’s obituary wrote of the consolation when “young and innocent” children die, that was the act of a “merciful Creator” who releases them from this vale of tears, and “the happy death of one full of years” was not unexpected.

The death of “the young mother, the happy and smiling guardian of a loving family” was a greater loss, but “she still watches over them...she waits to conduct them, when they shall have left this vale of tears to the heaven of a merciful God.”239 Motherhood, in other words, was an eternal condition, one that survives death and, for good mothers, promised heaven. Such mothers were implicitly like the Virgin Mary, also a mother forever, and one who, in Catholic Mariology can and does watch over her family from the grave. In this sense, there were some affinities between the Catholic and spiritualist perspectives on encounters between the living and the dead; spiritualists also believed that communication “from the other side” was a possible and desirable. However, Catholics had to accept on faith that their loved ones were

238 CM, February 17, 1855, p. 6. 239 CM, September 16, 1856.

113 watching over them from beyond the grave, while spiritualists believed that two-way communication was a reality.240 While the promise of family reunification after death and heaven as the true home is evident among Catholics, mainstream Protestants, and spiritualists, only Catholics emphasized the Virgin Mary and compared dead mothers to a heavenly mother.

Similarly, Mary Jane Magill’s “confessor and kind friend” eulogized her at a funeral mass for her efforts to imitate the life of the Virgin Mary, for “constantly attending to the duties of religion and never neglecting her family,” and for “perfect resignation” in bearing her last painful illness. Before her death at the age of 34,

Mary’s was an exemplary domestic life, “always cheerful and trying to make those around her happy.”241

The deaths of young wives in full bloom of their youth served as a reminder to readers of the Mirror of the fragile and transitory nature of life. The sudden death of

Mary Mullen, apparently during pregnancy, led the writer of her obituary to reflect upon “the uncertainties of life, the illusions which dazzle it, and the purpose for which it was given by the Creator.”242 The wife of Francis Mullen, Esq. (presumably a lawyer), Mary was talented, “filled with rare musical powers,” and “accomplished in

240 Ann Douglas, “Heaven as Home;” for spiritualist views on the afterlife see Braude, Radical Spirits; David Charles Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 241 CM, December 19, 1857. 242 CM, May 12, 1866, p. 3.

114 social life,” and although she had only been married for a year, was able to “adapt her character” to her new domestic duties, and was in “joyous anticipations of maternity...when the Destroyer came.” This obituary provided instruction and, perhaps, a cautionary tale. Her obituary, like many others, emphasized the uncertainty of life and presented the familiar story of how, just when life seems at its most promising, death lurked in wait. In addition, by noting that Mullen had to “adapt her character” to marriage, the obituary writer implied that perhaps there is something about women’s domestic role that required conscious, deliberate effort: had domesticity been “natural” for Mary, there would have been no need for her to “adapt her character” to her new status as wife. Unlike most obituaries, this one did not mention piety, leaving the reader to reflect the possibility that, at the time of her death,

Mary lacked some quality essential in a Catholic wife.

By contrast, the obituary of another young wife, Ellen Broderick, portrayed her life as “a preparation for that event [death].”243 According to her obituary, she was

“faithful wife, sincere friend,” but most important, was faithful in the “punctual practice of her religious duties.” (This obituary, also neglected to explain what these duties were, besides attending mass regularly). Dying in August 1866, after less than a year of marriage, she provided a poignant image: “But yesterday a bride, and today beneath the sod,” reminding the readers of the fate of all flesh and the perceived need to prepare one’s soul for the inevitable.

243 CM, August 18, 1866, p. 3.

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One unusual obituary which portrayed a unique expression of the domestic ideal was for a priest, the Rev. George King. It prominently featured Susan, “his truly excellent wife and a convert to his faith,” was prominently featured. (This obituary, reprinted from the Catholic Herald, “slightly re-modelled in parts as to facts and dates,” may have been widely circulated).244 As a young man, King entered his father’s

“extensive mercantile business” (a phrase which suggests wealth) in Georgetown, and married Susan, who “reared under the pious example of her parents,” brought “female piety” to his household. Together, they created the ideal of family worship: “morning orisons” and “evening rosary” every day, “in front of the little oratory which was their family altar” were part of daily life, and as young parents they made every effort to

“impart to the infant minds of their children...the beauty of virtue and religion.” They had six children, three of whom survived; the eldest became “a pious and devoted priest” (the obituary did not specify whether father or son entered the priesthood first) and the other sons entered the professions of law and medicine. This portrait of three generations of respectable, middle-class Catholic piety was an ideal for readers to admire and emulate.

The obituary was different from most that mention converts because, unlike the obituaries of other women who converted to Catholicism, Susan’s conversion appeared only in passing. Since this obituary was of her husband, it considered Susan in the context of her relationships with the family, not as an individual. Yet, like

244 CM, August 2, 1856, p. 2.

116 obituaries of other female converts, it implied that ideal Protestant piety led to conversion to Catholicism. This obituary also differed from others by specifically explaining that often-used phrase, “duties of religion,” instructing Catholic wives and mothers to pray every morning and say the rosary every the evening in front of “their family altar.” Implicitly, the author of the obituary instructed them to create such an altar. Such devotional practices were increasingly popular in the 1840s.245 While the obituary did not specifically mention holy objects (other than the rosary), the Catholic

Mirror advertised them in every issue. Catholic novelists portrayed crucifixes and paintings as having an agency of their own, writers of prescriptive literature encouraged their use, and letter writers urged their correspondents to use them.

Therefore, readers probably assumed the “family altar” would have, at the very least, an object such as a crucifix, duly blessed by a priest. As the mother went about her day instructing children on “the beauty and virtue of religion,” the family altar would serve as physical, moral, and spiritual center of the Catholic household. The phrase

“religious duties” may have referred to practices so well-known, and (in the ideal, if not reality) so widely practiced that it generally required little explanation.

Although Susan died in 1829, and George in 1856, the obituary devoted so much attention to her that it could be considered a double obituary. She had “assisted his footsteps along the path of piety” and was a benevolent “benefactress” to the poor.

Indeed, the obituary gave Susan much credit for George’s ultimate pursuit of the

245 Taves, Household of Faith.

117 priestly vocation. Before her death, Susan “had entered into an engagement with her husband that, in case of the death of either, the survivor would retire from the world and enter on duties exclusively religious.” (Also, with this agreement, Susan would not have imagined him with another woman in a second marriage). Apparently, they preferred to remain celibate rather than for the longer-lived spouse to marry again.

Susan became, then, the ideal of feminine influence and piety, a devoted wife and mother who, even in death, encouraged her husband to enter the priesthood. If the vocation of priest suited George much more than that of merchant, one may wonder why he did not become a priest in the first place; the obituary credits Susan’s pious influence in helping him find his ultimate vocation.

Disconsolate and heartbroken after Susan’s death, George entered Georgetown

College (presumably after their children were grown) “seeking...that healing balm which Heaven offers to the sorrows of earth,” and was ordained in 1835. For the next twenty years he was a missionary priest, traveling 40,000 miles in the pursuit of his duties in areas “without the conveniences of railroads,” and living “in the simplicity of a hermit” while frequently suffering from poor health. Before his death from typhoid fever, George received the last sacraments, an exemplary life ending with a good death, in accordance with the Catholic metanarrative of piety.

The dual obituaries of Rev. George and Susan King showed the domestic ideal carried to what could be considered its ultimate conclusion. Reared by parents who inculcated the virtue of piety, Susan and George were represented as ideal Catholics who, in turn, passed their faith on to their children. One measure of their success in so

118 doing was the fact that their eldest son, like his father, became a priest. It is revealing that the obituary mentioned the piety of Susan’s (Protestant) parents, but not George’s: perhaps Susan’s piety was most influential in their practice of family worship and her

Protestant piety would led to conversion to Catholicism. In turn, Susan’s influence was instrumental in leading George to pursue his true vocation. From family worship and the piety of an individual household, after Susan’s death and his subsequent ordination, George’s religious role expanded to lead the worship of congregations of

Catholics. In the end, then, his marriage to Susan was not a detour on the way to becoming a priest, but rather a predestined stage in his life. This obituary demonstrated that Catholic men and women could imagine being both married and ordained or in a religious order: they could be laypeople, marry and raise a family, and when one spouse died, the survivor (if male) could enter the priesthood or (if female) become a nun. The ideal marriage might as end with the death of one and the entry into a religious vocation of the other. The couple’s three sons represent three important vocations in life and the continuation of faith through the generations: one priest, a savior of souls, one physician, a savior of bodies, and one lawyer, a promoter of Catholic piety in the secular world.

Benevolent Women

Most, but not all, women who were singled out for their benevolent activities were respectable matrons. The obituary of Annie P. O’ Hara, “directress of St.

Vincent’s Female Sunday school,” who died at the age of 20, praised her for the

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“unremitting devotedness” with which she carried out her duties, combining the themes of early piety and premature death with praise for the benevolent activities of the deceased. Thus, she provided an example of piety and benevolence at an early age, and demonstrated that Catholic laywomen, like their Protestant counterparts, were dedicated to inculcating their faith in the next generation. Single at her death, Annie was already doing one of the most significant duties of a mother. Her funeral, attended by over 500 children, was “one of the most beautiful and solemn processions,” which

“presented an impressive contrast to the excitement and bustle attendant upon the preparations for the great parade of Firemen.” In addition to commemorating the life of the deceased, this occasion presented an opportunity for the writer of the obituary to contrast the normative, respectable conduct of the mourners with the raucous behavior of the parade-goers, providing the readers an implicit education in public manners and the need to behave in a way that exemplified Catholic respectability. 246

The brief obituary of Mrs. Thomas Walsh provided a model of a different kind of benevolent activity. The “estimable lady fell a victim to ship fever, contracted while bestowing her benevolent services to sick emigrants, who had recently arrived in our city.”247 Perhaps this was an epidemic of yellow fever, a disease that disproportionately affected impoverished immigrants living in overcrowded conditions. Mrs. Walsh

246 CM, January 22, 1851. Boylan, Sunday School; C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: a History of Manners in America, 1620-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 247 CM, May 1, 1852, p. 6.

120 conformed to the antebellum ideal of self-sacrifice among women, but Protestant women formed and joined numerous benevolent societies in the antebellum era, the charitable activities of Catholic women remained mostly individual and private or parish-based.248 (Still, it is significant that they did engage in such activities). Only in death did Mrs. Walsh’s private benevolence become public, her final, fatal self- sacrificing act something for other Catholic women to emulate, hopefully with less dire consequences. However, such a death probably led to the publication of Mrs.

Walsh’s obituary, for her selfless act of caring for sick immigrants is reminiscent of the actions of some Catholic saints. Her obituary both indicates that, much like

Protestant women, Catholic laywomen engaged in benevolent activities, and exhorts other Catholic laywomen to emulate her.

More frequently, benevolent women were praised for a lifetime of charity, rather than for a single, dramatic deed. (Perhaps this is a gendered distinction, as men were often noted for a significant accomplishment rather than a lifetime of piety).

According to the obituary of Mrs. Jeanette Hunter, a widow and daughter of a colonel,

“her life was a continued act of charity.” While charitable to the poor “in all sections of the city [of Baltimore],” Hunter “devoted special care to the orphans of St.

248 Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Boylan, Sunday School, Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence; McDannell, Christian Home. Private and parish-based benevolent labor is still noteworthy. In The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York: Norton, 1985), Susan Lebsock discusses a pattern of private, personalized benevolence among southern women which is similar to that of Catholic women. Like Catholic women, southern women did not form benevolent organizations at the national level.

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Vincent’s Asylum — to them she was a mother.” Her obituary demonstrated how laywomen played significant roles in assisting nuns and priests in caring for the poor and orphans. The exact nature of her aid to the orphanage was not specified in the obituary; perhaps she, as other men and women, was involved in fundraising. Clearly, the ideal of spiritual motherhood so evident in the lives of nuns was also present among benevolent laywomen. In providing a representation of an exemplary laywoman, the obituary places on her benevolent activities. It does not mention children. Perhaps Hunter was childless, or if she had children, as they grew into adulthood, she cared for orphans as a way of creating or continuing a maternal role, from which she may have derived her identity, on a larger scale. It is not necessary to have children to fulfill the role of mother. Her obituary also implicitly exhorted other women who are also “blessed with means” to emulate her acts of charity and the faith upon which they were grounded. With her death, “religion has lost a bright ornament” according to the writer of the obituary.249 Charity is represented as the natural result of piety.

Like Jeanette, Mary Fitzpatrick, a widow who died in 1864, was involved in organized benevolence for orphans. For 24 years she “presided over St. Peter’s Relief

Association for the needy.” According to her obituary, she was known for her “most conspicuous charity and sanctity,” and was “knit to the nestlings of her own

249 CM, January 21, 1854, p. 6; Mannard, “Maternity...of the Spirit;” Taves, Household of Faith.

122 orphanage.”250 She engaged in the activities, such as establishing an orphanage, which are more usually associated with charitable Protestant women. Because establishing

“her own orphanage” was doubtlessly a benevolent enterprise, and preventing the orphans from entering Protestant institutions safeguarded their Catholic faith, her actions could be considered a type of social reform, albeit on a private, personal level.

Her obituary quoted her own words: “I know the value of time...I have labored, but oh! How little for eternity.” The “value of time” implied that she adhered to bourgeois values. Mary Fitzpatrick expressed her firm religious faith more through her charitable actions than from devotional practices. There were several different ideals emphasized: some women were eulogized for their piety, others for their benevolence, and still others for their exemplary motherhood. Readers of the obituaries could find representations of more than one path towards ideal Catholic womanhood. The ideal was plural, not unitary.

In the typical manner, Mary Fitzpatrick’s obituary noted how she was “patient and submissive under the afflicting dispensations of providence,” though it did not clarify the nature of her suffering was not clarified, perhaps because the author of the obituary wished to emphasize her lifelong benevolent activities rather than her death.

The obituary presented a mini-sermon about the superiority of consistent virtue and piety to deathbed conversion: “if the repentance of the sinner is the subject of joy in

250 CM, March 12, 1864, p. 3. Unfortunately, orphanage records are difficult to obtain, and I have not been able to find further documentation of this private orphanage.

123 heaven, what jubilation over enduring virtue to the end.” The writer thus both rebuked and encouraged indifferent Catholics to return to the practice of their faith, and to emulate Mary by engaging in similar benevolent activities which would benefit other

Catholics, especially children. Many Catholics, including popular novelist Mary

Sadlier, were concerned that, unless they became more involved in creating and sustaining their own orphanages, Protestants would step in and lead the children into apostasy.251

Because they were involved in organized benevolent work, there were more details in Jeanette Hunter’s and Mary Fitzgerald’s obituaries than in those for other women. For example, according to the obituary of Margaret Creigh, who also died in

1864, “no appeal for charity...was ever made to her in vain.”252 The nature of her charitable activities remains unspecified, yet her life was portrayed as an example of respectable Catholicism. A woman who never declined an appeal for charity represented an ideal. The writer of her obituary averred that “no better argument could be urged in favor of the divine character of Catholicism, than is furnished by her pious example,” thus repositioning Catholicism from the margin to the mainstream of society as well as of theology.

251 Mary Sadlier’s novel Aunt Honor’s Keepsake: A Chapter from Life (New York: D& J Sadlier, 1866) was written for this purpose. Engaging in the same practice as the authors of obituaries, women writers incorporated mini-sermons into their novels. 252 CM, November 5, 1864, p. 3.

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One obituary suggested that, at least in some cases, religion and benevolence could provide a refuge from domestic difficulties. Mrs. Ellen Maher, died “at the family seat,” the home of her brother-in-law, whose name, unlike that of her husband, was given in her obituary. The language of the obituary suggested that the brother-in- law, not the husband, was the more important man in her life, and that although married, her “family seat” remained with her family of origin. 253 Despite being “born in affluence...with every reason to entertain joyful hope of future happiness,” the unfortunate Ellen suffered from “the storm of domestic trials.” Her emotional distress was apparently quite severe: “Her grievances were of no ordinary character, and were calculated to produce serious effects upon a frame naturally sensitive like hers.”

Although the writer of the obituary was discreet, not specifying the cause of nature of

Ellen’s domestic unhappiness, the language of the obituary, and the fact that no reference to her marriage or role as wife is evident, suggests marital turmoil, perhaps marriage to an unfaithful, intemperate, or abusive husband. The obituary thus documented the divergence between the ideal and reality of domesticity, at least for women who were trapped in miserable marriages.

Yet Ellen Maher faced her emotional suffering with resignation, much as did the women who suffered physically: her faith increased as “her discerning mind knew how to appreciate the advantages to be gained in the ordeal of suffering, and taught her to bend in submission to the chastening hand of Providence.” These words implied

253 CM, April 3, 1858.

125 that women in unhappy or even abusive marriages had no recourse; they could only submit. Her obituary praised her “noble deeds of benevolence,” “proverbial hospitality,” “kindness to the poor,” and especially her generosity to the Church. She built and furnished the “little church of St.Rose...almost exclusively from her own purse.” When she did suffer a “long and painful illness” before her death, she bore that too with “heroic patience and resignation to the divine will.” This wealthy Catholic philanthropist probably sought refuge in the church from the difficulties of her private life. Because divorce was difficult to obtain in nineteenth-century America, and to the

Catholic church, marriage was a sacrament, so this was probably the only possibility available to Catholic women trapped in miserable, even abusive, marriages.

Unmarried Women

Obituaries of nuns appeared in the Catholic Mirror, but less frequently than those of laywomen. Frequently, nuns received only a simple death notice, although some exemplary nuns received detailed obituaries. For example, Sister Mary Teresa

Green of the Sisters of Charity died in 1859 at the age of 71 after spending the last 43 years of her life “building and conducting the poor schools of New York City and

Richmond, Virginia...until worn out physically and mentally in the endless labors of her vocation, she is transfigured to another sphere.”254 The nuns who received obituaries were notable for their benevolent activities, and a nun who had converted to

254 CM, April 23, 1859, p. 6.

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Catholicism (as did lay converts) received a very detailed obituary.255 Perhaps the writers of most of the obituaries focused on laywomen to emphasize the idea that they too, could be (or become) ideal Catholics. The authors of obituaries for women probably assumed a female readership, and communicated that a woman did not have to enter a convent, nor become a wife and mother, to be exemplary Catholic woman; several distinctive paths to that ideal were available.

The obituaries of most unmarried women followed the usual formula. For example, Miss Ann Frances Henry died “surrounded by her sorrowing family;” a death which resembled those of wives and mothers who died surrounded by their families. Although she remained unmarried, her virtues were those of the typical benevolent matron: she was, according to her obituary, “foremost in every work of devotion, of charity, and of love.”256 She was thus incorporated into the pious, domestic, benevolent ideal for women. Perhaps one implication is that it is better to be unmarried and true to Catholicism than to be married to a Protestant.257 Other spinsters’ obituaries emphasized their conversion to Catholicism, their respectability, or their “good death.”

255 CM, September 6, 1856, p. 2. 256 CM, September 1, 1855, p. 6. 257 Rose, Beloved Strangers discusses how, although Catholics expressed unfavorable views about Catholics and Protestants intermarrying, in practice many families and priests were much more flexible, provided that the children would be raised Catholic. It was not unusual for priests to perform interfaith marriages.

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Obituaries placed even the lives of independent, successful spinsters within the domestic context. Miss Emma Marilly, whose family had fled the “horrors” of San

Domingo, was 18 when her father died, leaving her and her siblings orphans. The reference to the slave revolt in Haiti suggested that her family had been elite planters of French origin, and possibly very wealthy. According to her obituary, upon his deathbed, her father asked “who will take my place,” and Emma responded “I, father,

I will provide for them.”258 By necessity, she thus extended her domestic role to include the masculine function of provider as well as the feminine role of nurturer.

Although paid employment was essential for survival among working-class women, with the separation from home and work and cult of domesticity in the mid-nineteenth century, working outside the home was not customary among middle-class women, except before marriage or for spinsters.259

To support her siblings, Emma Marilly founded a female academy in

Baltimore, which “enjoyed a high reputation” for 19 years. She then moved to

Natchez, Mississippi, where “her success was complete.” Apparently the Natcheez academy was even more remunerative than the one in Baltimore, because “in a few years her exertions were rewarded with an ample fortune that entitled her to retire from the part of labor.” Either she engaged in other business activities or her schools

258 CM, March 12, 1864, p. 3. 259 Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986); Boydston, Home and Work; Sklar, Catherine Beecher..

128 for girls were unusually successful, for female academies were rarely a way to wealth in the nineteenth century. Marilly moved back to Frederick County, Maryland, and spent her last five years in the “exercise of active piety and benevolence.” As a mini- biography, her obituary provided a representation of the active, public role played by some women. A lifelong spinster who traveled, established schools, and engaged in the masculine activity of taking over her father’s role at the helm of the family finances, was still represented as an ideal Catholic laywoman.

One must wonder whether Emma preferred her active, public life of independent spinster and founder of academies to the prospect of what was, in the mid-nineteenth century, considered proper wifely submission. Still, by situating her life in the context of her assuming the parental role for her siblings, and founding an academy, the author of her obituary placed her in the context of a broader domesticity.

Because running an academy dealt with teaching children and young women, it could be construed as fitting within an expanded women’s sphere.260 Such a rhetorical strategy revealed some of the contradictions within the ideal of domesticity: activities such as benevolence and establishing academies could be considered extensions of women’s domestic role, and yet at the same time, they subverted that ideology by providing women with opportunities for lives that were, in reality, quite public. Emma

Marilly’s life demonstrated that Catholic laywomen, like their Protestant counterparts, simultaneously upheld, extended, and subverted the domestic ideal, and that the

260 Sklar, , Catharine Beecher, 59.

129 division between “public” and “private” was flexible, fluid, and constantly under construction. Her obituary illustrated how Catholic women, as well as their Protestant counterparts, could expand their concepts of domesticity to include virtually any activity other than voting or running for public office.

Genealogies of Respectability

While many obituaries eulogized the lives, benevolence, virtues, and piety of the deceased, exhorted readers to emulate them, and provided consolation for the bereaved, some obituaries highlighted bourgeois respectability. Obituaries for women from elite families often presented Catholicism as the center of American society and culture. For example, the author of Elizabeth Ellen Wildman’s obituary notes that she

“was descended from the families of the Mudds and Mitchells, who came with the

Catholic founders of our state.” This implied that Elizabeth had some connection to the earliest generations of Catholics in Maryland, who were affluent and respectable

English people, quite unlike the Irish immigrants who arrived en masse in the mid- nineteenth century. Although her husband’s name, L.G. Wildman, Esq., was mentioned, her own genealogy was much more prominent in the obituary.

Elizabeth’s bourgeois respectability was based on factors in addition to her family: her role as wife and mother, her defense of her faith, and her death. The author of the obituary, a friend who “attended the sick-bed,” described Elizabeth’s death:

“how edifying to the living — how meritorious to the dead was that struggle with the king of terrors.” Death was both inevitable and common, yet the phrase “king of

130 terrors” indicated how greatly feared it was. One response to the inevitability of death, and the fear of a painful death, was for both Catholic and Protestant believers to become even more religious. The theme of the redemptive qualities of deathbed suffering was frequently found in the obituaries. Although Elizabeth wanted to see her eldest daughter, at St. Joseph’s in Emmitsburg, she “would not consent to have her brought from her mountain retreat to a home of sadness” until death was imminent.

(Perhaps Elizabeth wanted her daughter to stay where she was because of fear of disease, such as a yellow fever or cholera epidemic). Thus Elizabeth was represented as placing what she perceived as her daughter’s best spiritual interests above her own wishes. As her last act before dying, she “called her sorrowing husband to her side...enjoined upon him to bring up her children, eight in number, in the faith in which their ancestors had died.” Here was an image of the devoted mother, dying and surrounded by her grieving family, expressing her concern about the religious upbringing of the children. Perhaps significantly, the writer of the obituary referred to them as “her children,” rather than “their children;” that is, the children were portrayed as more Elizabeth’s than as children of Elizabeth and her husband, reflecting the ideals of the Victorian family with the domestic mother as nurturer and religious teacher of the children. Although the legal reality in antebellum America was that the children were the husband’s, not the wife’s,261 to the author of the obituary, they are “her children” because she will save their souls.

261 Grossberg, Governing the Hearth; Cott, Public Vows..

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Unlike most other obituaries, Elizabeth’s did not overtly emphasize her piety, but such a deathbed scene implies that it was very much part of her life. However, in the defense of her faith, apparently Elizabeth could become quite vehement, and this, along with her genealogy and maternity, was a source of her respectability: “When, as had been of late years fashionable in some circles, the followers of St. Ignatius

[Loyola, founder of the Jesuits] were reviled or spoken harshly of in her presence, how her pure and innocent heart glowed and fired with holy indignation.”262 The social

“circles” were probably those of elite Protestants, which overlapped with those of elite

Catholics (although some Catholics were critical of the Jesuits). Some Catholics converted to Protestantism, and vice versa, for social more than religious reasons, and concern with apostasy was one reason for Catholic revivals in the antebellum era.263 By emphasizing Elizabeth’s eminently respectable Catholic genealogy and defense of her faith, the writer of the obituary reversed the dominant perception of Catholics as marginal and Protestants as mainstream. While Protestant women proselytized, they did not need to defend their beliefs, as did Elizabeth and other Catholic women. This emphasis on defending their faith was an important difference between Catholic and

Protestant ideas.

262 CM, December 16, 1854, p. 12. 263 Cohen makes this argument about Rebecca Reed’s conversion in “Miss Reed and the Superiors;” Dolan, Catholic Revivalism.

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Other obituaries emphasized the patriotism of deceased Catholics, and their connection to key events in American history. The obituary of Margaret Jones, who died “perfectly happy and content” at the age of 86, associated a Catholic woman with

American patriotism through her marriage to Aubrey Jones, who was “a soldier in the

Battle of 1776 and was wounded at the Battle of Brandywine.” (Although Margaret died in St. Louis, Missouri, where she had lived with her grown children, her youngest son was still in Baltimore).264

While Margaret’s connection to American Revolution was through her soldier husband, Miss Sally Taney’s link to American history was through her prominent family of origin. She was the daughter of the late Joseph Brook Taney, who on both his father’s and mother’s side was “first cousin to the venerable Chief Justice of the

United States.”265 That her father was related to the Chief Justice Roger Taney (best known for the Dred Scott decision) suggests that perhaps this notable family engaged in the practice, common among Southern gentry, of first cousins marrying one another. Most significantly, the writer of the obituary wanted to connect Catholicism to one of the most venerable American institutions, the Supreme Court.

Sally Taney’s genealogy was eminently respectable: “Her first progenitor this side of the Atlantic was Michael Taney, the noble-hearted Episcopalian High Sheriff of St. Mary’s County, who was imprisoned and persecuted at the time of the Protestant

264 CM, September 24, 1857. 265 CM, October 3, 1857, p. 5.

133 revolution in Maryland, for refusing to slander and persecute his Catholic fellow- citizens.” Though Michael Taney was uneducated and “spent his life as a plain, honest farmer,” he served in the Maryland state legislature. He was thus portrayed as exemplifying the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent, yeoman farmer as the foundation of a virtuous republic. The American identity of her ancestor was crucial: he was a farmer, a Protestant, a respecter of religious freedom, and a progenitor of

Catholics who, by implication, are equally American, or even more so because he was so deeply enmeshed in United States history.

Sally herself was representative of the ideal of the refined, elite Catholic woman. From both parents, she received “a pious Catholic education,” and inherited from them “those gentle manners and estimable qualities which ever distinguish the worthy descendants of the old Catholic blood of Maryland.” The author of her obituary indirectly contrasted the respectable early Catholics from the time of the

Calverts (who were among the Anglo-American elite) and their descendants with the new Catholic immigrants: Sally was “of that class of Catholics who caused their religion to be respected by their conduct.” Clearly, when Sally died in 1857, there was considerable animosity on the part of “respectable” Catholics towards new immigrant

Catholics, particularly the post-famine Irish.266 There were several lessons here: reminders that Catholics were present in America from the early colonial period and had deep roots in the United States, that during the days of Lord Baltimore and the

266 Ibid.

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Calverts, that Catholicism was the established religion of Maryland colony, that

Catholics were eminently respectable and “American,” and that through their behavior, elite Catholics must provide an example for others.

As an individual, Sally was portrayed as equally respectable, conforming to the domestic ideal insofar as that was possible for a spinster. She was “beloved as a mother by her near relatives.” Moreover, she was, according to her obituary, “almost idolized by her African slaves, whom she has either emancipated or in old age provided for by her last will.” Therefore, she exemplified the ideal of the paternalistic slaveowner and benevolent plantation mistress.267 In the years before the Civil War, in a state on the border between north and south, a slaveowner who emancipated her slaves would be respected by northern antislavery activists, while conforming to the paternalistic, or in Sally’s case maternalistic, ideal. On the other hand, as enthusiasm for antislavery grew in the North, animosity towards it increased in the south. By her actions, she implicitly criticized both the Southern system of slavery and the Northern capitalist system, emancipating some slaves while caring for those to old to fend for themselves in the market economy. Here was an ideal of a maternalistic slaveowner.

267 For paternalism the classic study remains Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll; for southern women see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within he Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: from Pedestal to Politics (New York: Greenwood, rev. ed. 1990); for a local study of including families of planters, poor whites, slaves, and free blacks see Stevenson, Life in Black and White.

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Those from a “Humbler State”

Although most women who were the subjects of obituaries appear to have been from elite families, not all were. The Catholic Mirror published several obituaries of women who were neither wealthy nor socially prominent, including one of an African-

American laywoman. Although few such obituaries appeared relative to the numbers, their presence in obituaries was demonstrated a diversity of ideals for Catholic women, and the accessibility of respectability to all. In brief death notices, the newspaper mentioned the ethnicity of Irish immigrants, along with how many years they had spent in the United States, perhaps as a way of representing them as true

Americans. Likewise, the obituaries represented laywomen lacking in material prosperity as respectable, morally successful Americans.

Mrs. Ann Walsh, who died of consumption at the age of 37, was one such woman “who died in an humbler state, but rich in Christian virtues, which gold cannot purchase.”268 (The superiority of Christian virtues to material success was not noted in the obituaries of wealthy women). In accordance with the domestic ideal, she was “a model of every duty in within the sphere of woman.” The language of the obituary contrasted her genuine goodness with the insincere representations of virtue in the obituaries of more affluent and socially prominent individuals, and suggested an ideal of respectability based on virtuous conduct, rather than wealth.

268 CM, March 22, 1856.

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The writer acknowledged the formulaic nature of most obituaries, with their obligatory praise for the perhaps nonexistent virtues of the deceased. Stating that “one should...endeavor to cast the mantle of charity and oblivion over the faults of the departed,” the writer lamented “how painful [it is] to read the flattering eulogies, which sometimes appear to the memories of those who led even disedifying lives, but who died in the midst of wealth or worldly honors.” Unlike such “worldly minded individuals, who turn to religion only at the end of life,” Ann Walsh “was a sincere and good Christian...during the whole course of her life,” and “died as she had lived...in peace and charity with God and man, and with a well-grounded hope of a happy eternity.” The language was revealing, for it implied that the hope of salvation of “worldly” individuals is not so secure. The Catholic vision of respectability was represented as open to all.

Similar to Ann Walsh, Mrs. Rebecca Koontz, who died at the age of 61, was “a practical Catholic to the day of her death...kind, gentle, and self-denying to the highest degree.”269 These were the usual virtues of benevolent, domestic, pious women portrayed in the obituaries, but unlike most of those women, who were most likely affluent, Rebecca was “poor in the world’s goods, yet her hand was ever open to charity and her heart to compassion.” Her life was represented as exemplary: “There was no act of her existence, as she remarked to her children, that she would not be willing the whole world should know.” Again, the writer of the obituary implicitly

269 CM, April 16, 1861, p. 6.

137 contrasted the formulaic nature of the usual obituaries with her genuine virtues, presenting an idea of respectability based on conduct rather than social class. These two obituaries, like novels by Catholic women writers, suggested that, at least for some Catholics, there was a model of working-class respectability that did not depend on affluence or social prominence.

There was also one representation a respectable African-American in the obituary of Mary Berry, who died in 1863, “a colored woman who, by her prudence and charity, and zeal, garnered the respect of all who knew her, and merited the gratitude, especially of her humble and poor brethren.”270 Because there was less

Catholic than Protestant philanthropy toward African Americans in the 1850s and1860s, it was all the more necessary for black Catholics to assist the neediest in their communities.271 According to the author of her obituary, “more active and disinterested charity was rarely met with,” and Mary Berry was quite active. She engaged in the customary activities of benevolent Catholic women, including “the visiting and care of the sick, the collecting and distributing of help for the poor, the watching by the bedsides of the dying.”

In addition, and most significantly, she “employed a large portion of her time in the management of a school for colored children.” The Oblate Sisters of

270 CM, December 26, 1863, p. 6. 271 Cyprian Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990); Mary J. Oates, The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

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Providence, an order of African-American nuns, was involved in educating black children, and presents one example of the agency of black women despite the constraints they experienced. Black women who were not nuns also formed schools;

Maria Becroft, a free black woman, established a “boarding and day school for colored girls” with the assistance of the Visitation nuns.272 The closing of Becroft’s school in

1831 due to opposition suggests the difficulties that Mary Berry must have faced in establishing and managing her school. No family members were mentioned in her obituary, which did not indicate whether or not she was married. Perhaps she remained a spinster and, like nuns, became a type of spiritual mother.

She was both exemplary Catholic and benevolent woman, demonstrating respectability through her piety and knowledge of her faith, as well as through her charitable actions. According to her obituary, she was “well instructed in the tenets of our holy faith and pious and devout in the practice of religion,” frequently praying before the altar. Her death was represented as ideal, the reward of a life well spent:

“God favored his servant with a short sickness, marked by much suffering, in which she displayed a Christian patience and resignation.” These were the qualities that, so often, are portrayed in obituaries which emphasize the “good death” of the devout.

Mary Berry’s death was “happy and peaceful,” and her funeral service at St. Ignatius

(one of the first African American Catholic parishes) attended by a “large concourse

272 Morrow, Persons of Color and Religious; Misner, Highly Respectable and Accomplished Ladies, 27, 203-04.

139 of her friends.” The sermon eulogized her example as “worthy to be treasured by her friends and imitated by all.”

This suggested that, for readers of the Mirror, an ideal life that transcended racial differences and divisions was being presented for all to strive to emulate. It may be significant that her obituary was published in the end of 1863, the height of the

Civil War and the year of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. By publishing Mary

Berry’s obituary, the editors of the Mirror, which had taken the conservative antislavery position that if the nation were Catholic, slavery would gradually end, had been sympathetic to the Confederacy when war broke out, acknowledged the presence of African American Catholics in the church. Still, this obituary held up a rather meek and selfless ideal for those African Americans.

Obituaries as Conversion Narratives

The detail and length of obituaries of converts indicated the prominent position of converts in antebellum Catholic discourse. In contrast to the stereotype of Catholics as ignorant and superstitious, writers portrayed conversion as the result of a long process of intellectual inquiry. The first to appear in the Catholic Mirror was that of

Sarah Johnson, the unmarried “daughter of an Episcopal clergyman,” who in February

1852 died at the age of 27.273 Less than a month later, she was accorded the most comprehensive obituary of a lay member yet published by the Mirror. The anonymous

273 CM, March 13, 1852.

140 writer of the obituary combined the genres of biography and conversion narrative to present an idealized portrait of a young Protestant convert to Catholicism. In the antebellum era, Catholics adopted the revivalistic strategies of evangelical Protestants, hoping to safeguard Catholics from apostasy and also to encourage conversions to their faith.274 The Catholic press celebrated these conversions; for example, when the

Mirror published information about confirmations, the number of converts was usually included.275 Simply listing converts could not, however, offer readers an inspirational narrative, a representation of the lived experience of an ideal type of convert (although it did remind converts, many of whom must have faced the animosity of their families, that they were not alone). Read as a biography, Sarah

Johnson’s obituary simultaneously dramatized the conversion experience, portrayed a

274 Due to a severe shortage of priests and churches in some areas and the rapid growth of Catholicism in the antebellum era, Catholic revivals provided the only opportunity for those in isolated areas to receive the sacraments. Yet Catholics also believed that the revivals, as well as works of Catholic doctrine, would influence Protestants to convert. Jay Dolan, Catholic Revivalism: The American Experience, 1830-1900 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978). 275 For example, the first such reference is to “nine young candidates” for first communion, “most, if not all of them, children of Protestant parents...profiting by the instruction of their saintly teachers [the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Charity]. On April 28, 1850, confirmation was given at St. Peter’s Church to “some 135 persons, many of whom were converts,” and on June 9, 1850, the same sacrament was given at the German congregation of St. Alphonsus to 307 individuals, including 19 converts. CM, February 16, 1850; May 4, 1850; June 15, 1850. Elite Catholic girls’ academies had some Protestant students, who may have later converted, and contributed to ideas about domesticity. By 1817, Elizabeth Seton noted that her girls’ academy at Emmitsburg would be “forming city girls to faith and piety as wives and mothers.” Annabelle Melville, Elizabeth Bayley Seton, 1774-1821 (New York: Scribner, 1951).

141 model of an ideal Christian death, and presented a uniquely Catholic view of domesticity and femininity.

Beginning by praising Sarah’s character, extolling her “angelic purity, simplicity, charity, and piety,” the author of her obituary presented her as adhering to the conventional Protestant antebellum ideal of the “true woman.” Yet her life revealed inherent contradictions within the ideal of pious domesticity. Conversion to

Catholicism required her to reject the faith of her family of origin, which contradicted the ideal of submissive womanhood. One must wonder what factors might have led the daughter of an Episcopal priest to convert; perhaps, like some other converts from her former faith, she disapproved the growing evangelicalism among Protestants.

Quite a scandal must have ensued at her father’s congregation, as well as among her family, who probably would not have approved of her even investigating the Catholic faith. Indeed, associating with a Catholic priest and eventually converting, Sarah

Johnson must have experienced a type of respectable notoriety, celebrated in her

Catholic circles while denigrated among Protestants (just as some Protestant women faced ostracism from their families when they converted to new sects such as

Methodism).276

276 Heyrman, Southern Cross, 177-89. Through conversion to another religious group, young women could defy their fathers, although they would have to submit to the patriarchal authority of the sect. For Protestant women’s conversions, see Brerenton, From Sin to Salvation. According to Ahlstrom, “among the converts who attained some degree of public notice, the largest number came from the ranks of High Church Anglicans who were dissatisfied by the evangelicalism of the Protestant Episcopal church and who were carried forward by the implications of their own arguments on

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Perhaps family tensions and conflicts contributed to her dramatic conversion; since the obituary is silent on this matter, one can only speculate. What the obituary did emphasize was Sarah’s spiritual search, and how her conversion was an intellectual process. She was hardly intellectually submissive, for she had “received all the advantages of a good education,” which, “acting upon a strong mind and sincere heart,” led her to question the faith of her father and convert to Catholicism. Her intellectual independence led her to convert, as her study of the Bible led her to see the

“incompatibility of the faith in which she had been raised with the words of Holy

Writ.” Her obituary was thus a counter-narrative to Protestant conversion stories, which emphasized prayerful study of the Bible as a corrective to both moral failings and doctrinal errors. Instead, Sarah’s Protestant piety led her to Catholicism (which was also a theme in the Catholic novels ofAnna Dorsey). Sarah’s life thus presented an example of a young woman of high social position who rejected her religious upbringing. This Catholic view of womanhood somewhat challenged the ideal of submission, for she resisted the authority, both spiritual and temporal, of her clergyman father. Sarah’s obituary thus reverses the convention of much anti-Catholic literature, which regarded Catholics as “priest ridden,” superstitious, and unthinking, and emphasized the threat of priests, particularly confessors, to the virtue of women. 277

apostolic succession and ‘valid’ ordination” (Religious History, 548). 277 For discussions of Protestant responses to Catholicism, see Cohen, “Miss Reed and the Superiors;” Franchot, Roads to Rome; Maureen McCarthy, “The Rescue of True Womanhood: Convents and Anti-Catholicism in 1830s America” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers

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Implicitly, the obituary portrayed the Catholic church, with its religious hierarchy of priests, bishops, and pope, as the legitimate source of patriarchal authority, with the household patriarchy of Sarah’s father as a spurious version.

Yet in other ways, Sarah Johnson was a very conventional woman, conforming to the image of the pure, pious, domestic young woman of “angelic character,” whose lingering death serves as an inspiration to others. Prominently mentioned in her obituary was her self-sacrifice, her “untiring devotion to the sick and aged members of her family,” which “injured her constitution” and led to her untimely death. Enduring

“six months of severe suffering” without complaint, her greatest pain was not caused by her physical illness, but by the spiritual anguish of being the only Catholic in her family, ardently wishing that they too would convert. After receiving the sacrament of holy communion, her last request to the priest was for him to pray that her beloved family “may die Catholics.” (Still, her relatives did not reject her). According to her obituary, this young convert worked herself to the point of illness and death for her ungrateful Protestant relatives, all the while hoping that they too would convert.

Indeed, the obituary seemed on the one hand, to blame these relatives for her death, and on the other hand to praise her selfless service to them, portraying the ultimate in self-denial as self-obliteration.

Sarah Johnson’s obituary (and the obituaries of other converts) also offered readers a mini-sermon that reversed some of the conventions of evangelical

University, 1996).

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Protestantism. Her life and death asserted that “although circumstances of education or situation may for a while stifle the truth...there will arise a cry for a spiritual center, unity, and truth, and no generous mind can disregard this cry.” Her obituary thus supported the standard Catholic argument that theirs was the one true Christian church, and that honest intellectual inquiry would lead a sincere individual to that conclusion. Here was a young woman who is intellectually independent, but not excessively or dangerously so, for in rejecting the partriarchal masculine religious authority of her father, she accepted that of her “spiritual director” and true “father,”

Rev. T. O’Neill. That name of her biological father was not given, but her priest was, suggested that for women, some form of submission to masculine authority was necessary.278 While Episcopal clergymen called themselves priests, the obituary referred to her father with the generic term, implying that only Catholics can be real priests, and that Sarah Johnson made the correct choice of religious authority. She symbolically exchanged obedience to her father for submission to a father figure. Still, she demonstrated considerable agency, for the priest did not have direct paternal power over her, and she could choose to submit (or not) to the priest. As a young unmarried woman, most likely living at home with her family, she would have been economically dependent on her father. Moreover, because of large Catholic congregations and a shortage of priests, the authority of Catholic priests was

278 Historians have argued that when a sect becomes a larger, more socially respectable denominatin, male religious leaders increasingly restrict women’s expressions. Heyrman, Southern Cross; Juster, Disorderly Women.

145 somewhat diluted, although they still held authority over laypeople. Rev. O’Neill could only encourage Sarah to convert and support her during the process of learning about, and converting to, Catholicism; the final decision was hers.

Rebecca Williams was another convert who died at an early age. Only 27 at the time of her death, she too was from a prominent family; she died of “the most painful form of consumption” on June 8, “at the residence of Ex-Governor Lowe, in Frederick

City,” which suggests the prominence of her family. She was described in her obituary as “a lady of remarkable personal attractions, amiability of disposition, and accomplished manners; and a most exalted purity of mind and character.”279 This description, unlike that of Sarah, did not emphasize intellectual independence, but rather portrays a more emotional, or even supernatural, process of conversion. Her desire to convert was based on the emotional appeal of Catholicism, perhaps because although essentially a patriarchal denomination, it could foster a uniquely feminine style of devotion.280 According to her obituary, “[f]or several years, as she stated after

279 CM, June 21, 1856. 280 See Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) on medieval and Reformation era Catholicism. Although some historians, including Taves and McDannell, suggest that Catholicism was more rooted in household and ecclesiastical patriarchy, some feminized content, such as veneration of female saints, existed within that framework. The appeal of Catholicism could have been, in some instances, an extension of the “femininization” of religion among Protestants by incorporating female saints and devotions in a generally feminized Christianity. See Douglas, Feminization of American Culture.

146 her conversion, she had experienced ‘an unaccountable yearning for the Catholic faith.”

Even prior to converting to Catholicism, Rebecca “always had a peculiar respect and veneration” for the Virgin Mary. Significantly, “for a long time before her conversion [she] wore a medal given her by a Catholic relative.” The obituary does not suggest that this unnamed relative had any influence on Rebecca’s religious education; however, the religious medal was itself significant. In some Catholic novels (for example, Mary Sadlier’s Aunt Honor’s Keepsake and Anna Dorsey’s The Flemings), sacred objects have a type of agency in fostering conversions, as if the objects themselves carried a kind of holy contagion which would, by physical proximity, help to transmit the faith. The object itself seemed imbued with religious power.281 Perhaps the writer of this obituary was implicitly encouraging Catholic readers to give such medallions to their Protestant relatives and friends, in hopes that they too might convert.

Rebecca’s conversion occurred near the end of her short life. Only seven weeks before her death, she “looked about in vain for the sources of consolation which the world cannot give,” and wanted to enter the Catholic church. After “careful preparation under the spiritual guidance of the Rev. Father Villiger, S.J., Pastor of St.

John’s Church, she had the happiness to receive all the sacraments necessary to her

281 For religious objects, see Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

147 state.” (These are not specified, but would probably be baptism, confession, communion, and confirmation). The language emphasized how conversion was not a precipitous decision, but one that was entered into only after considerable thought. As with Sarah Johnson’s obituary, her father is not named (and her relationship to the former governor is unspecified), but her priest is, suggesting that the spiritual fatherhood of the priest was more important for her in life and death: a somewhat radical statement for a church to make.

Rebecca’s reception of the sacraments near her death was represented as one type of ideal death. According to her obituary, “such peace of mind, such transports of holy joy, which grew more intense as she approached death...such perfect resignation to the will of God, have rarely been witnessed excepting at the death-beds of the most heroic saints of God.” Apparently, hers was a peaceful death, despite her suffering from the pains of consumption. Her death thus combines the motifs of redemptive suffering with that of the joyful death.

Similarly to Sarah Johnson and Rebecca Williams, Mary Griffith at age 28 converted to Catholicism, “in which she found what her soul had long craved, development for its faculties, exercise for its energies, contentment for its desires.”

She lived much longer than the unfortunate Sarah, becoming “the brightest ornament of her truly Catholic family,” now mourned by her “devoted husband and loving children.” Here, Mary’s conversion and the “extraordinary piety” which ensued were interwoven with what is represented as her lifetime of domestic bliss. Consoling the

148 bereaved, the obituary writer promised that the family will be “reunited to the loved one departed in realms above the skies.”282

The obituary of Mary Griffith mentioned conversion only briefly; however, it was portrayed as the foundation of her long and happy life. While the narrative of

Sarah’s conversion suggested upheaval, Mary’s appeared to have been less dramatic, perhaps because she encountered indifference, rather than determined opposition, from her family of origin. Sarah’s father was prominent in the narrative of her conversion, while Mary’s parents were not even mentioned in her obituary. Part of the explanation may be that while Sarah was a young unmarried woman, whose only earthly family was the one into which she was born, Mary was an older wife and mother. However, in some cases, the names of parents of even elderly women were given in obituaries, so the more likely reason is that Sarah and Mary were at different stages in the religious lifecourse: Sarah was a recent convert, while Mary had been practicing her faith for decades. Her obituary presented conversion from Protestantism to

Catholicism as a normal and natural occurrence.

Not all converts were young; elderly converts also appear in obituaries in the

Catholic Mirror. One was Mrs. Mary Lyman, who died in 1865 at the age of 89, converted ten years before her death, and was the mother of the Catholic “pastor of St.

Mary’s church.”283 According to her obituary, she was “[r]eared in the doctrines of

282 CM, January 19, 1853, p. 6. 283 CM, November 18, 1865, p. 3.

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Protestantism, the wife and mother of a Protestant clergyman.” In such an environment, “with all her antecedents and surroundings, and prospects linked, humanly speaking, to the Protestant belief,” conversion to Catholicism would have been difficult, entailing the disapproval of family and friends and, most likely, a loss of social position. It is revealing that the writer of her obituary used the words

“humanly tied,” for this suggests that she placed her religious values, and the fate of her soul, above such transitory matters as social position, a message that would have considerable appeal for Catholic readers, perhaps especially converts.

The obituary emphasized her “courage” in converting, and her intellectual independence in what was apparently a process that, described as “a long and chequered pilgrimage,” must have taken several years. She “deliberated long and sincerely” before converting, and her “mind was incessantly employed...fond of investigation, limited however, to what had a bearing upon religious truth.” Her conversion was the result of her own reasoning processes; before converting she had

“read and studied deeply whole volumes upon the subject.” This was the same theme of intellectual independence and careful study leading to conversion evident in Sarah

Johnson’s obituary. Mary Lyman’s obituary portrayed an active, independent intellect in a woman who, on the other hand, restricted what was perhaps a more generalized natural curiosity to matters of religion: she channeled all her intellectual curiosity into what the writer considered the most important matter, religion. It also contrasted with the stereotyped image of the ignorant, illiterate, “priest-ridden” Irish immigrant, with little understanding of the faith and implicitly criticized Protestant evangelicals’

150 emotionalism by providing a clear contrast to it. Unlike in other obituaries of converts,

Mary Lyman’s contained no mention of the priest who instructed her. Instead, the writer portrayed her as even more intellectually independent than other converts, who received religious instruction directly from priests.

Her obituary reversed the standard process of men influencing the conversions and religious development of the women in their lives, for Lyman’s example influenced her son, who also converted to Catholicism, and became a priest. Although he converted “a year or two before her, still, no doubt, he owed the rectitude of his principles of action, which finally conducted him to the Church, to her teaching and training, and to her influence and example.” Mary Lyman was thus represented as an epitome of maternal influence, of intellectual and spiritual motherhood, since her intellectual example, as well as her virtuous character, influenced her son to convert.

Perhaps, however, the influence was more mutual than the obituary would indicate: it is possible that her son converted long before, and that the author exaggerated to emphasize the point that maternal influence continued even after the children were adults. (Since she converted at 79, if the “year or two” is accurate, her son must have been middle aged when he converted.) In any event, even after her son converted,

Mary proceeded at her own pace; only she chose whether, and when, to formally enter the Catholic church.

Although the obituary emphasized Mary’s intellect and conversion, it did not neglect the virtues which usually appeared in obituaries: her “devout piety,” “humility and submission,” and “continual self-sacrifice.” After converting, according to her

151 obituary she never doubted her new faith, and “her virtues expanded, her soul became stronger, her life more beautiful.” The picture here was of conversion as the natural result of innate virtue and piety combined with sincere intellectual inquiry. The obituary praised Mary Lyman for her quintessentially feminine virtues: “humility and submission” were ideals for antebellum women, along with “piety” and “self- sacrifice.” The intellectual independence necessary for her to leave the religion in which she was raised did not repudiate, but rather fulfilled, feminine virtue. Piety led to Catholicism, “humility and submission” to the doctrines of her new faith. The list of virtues was deployed against the idea that intellectual independence is inherently unfeminine; in its proper context, which was specifically Catholic, it is the result of piety. Significantly, no obituaries praised a woman’s intellect as a virtue in and of itself; it is always portrayed as fostering the Catholic faith. Also, to converts hoping that their relatives would also convert, the encouraging message of this obituary was that it would never be too late; conversions occurred at any age.

A few obituaries of women combined the themes of respectable genealogies and social prominence with religious conversion, representing respectability and conversion as mutually reinforcing. One notable example was Mrs. Harriet D. P.

Baker, “relict of the late John Martin Baker, formerly Consul of the U.S. in Europe and South America, and daughter of the late Col. Frederick H. Baron de Wissenfuls, of the Revolutionary Army,” who died in 1856.284 Her family connections placed her

284 CM, February 2, 1856.

152 among the elite of antebellum society. While in Europe, she developed a friendship with the then-exiled Duchess of New Orleans. When the Duchess was “restored to her rank and title,” Harriet was able to assist the bishop of New Orleans by introducing them. The obituary printed an excerpt from a letter he wrote to Harriet in 1816, noting how he was received by the duchess and writing that “it gives me satisfaction to acknowledge my indebtedness for this honor” to Harriet’s “flattering recommendation.” Such a story vicariously connected the readers of the Baltimore paper to the Catholic elite in other regions and internationally. Through this strategy, the writer associated the respectable aristocracy of the American Revolution with elite, noble, titled European Catholicism, which helped to legitimize the strongly internationalist emphasis in Catholicism during a time of nativist suspicion.

Yet although Harriet was “born in high life,” she “was fated to pass through all the phases of fortune,” enduring “ingratitude and neglect.” According to her obituary, those who praised her during “in the days of prosperity” neglected her, or even persecuted her, “in the days of adversity.” The obituary writer provided no details concerning what caused such reversals of fortune (one frequent cause of a woman’s impoverishment was the death of a husband). In addition to protecting Harriet’s friends and relatives from what could possibly be embarrassing details about her life, omitting such biographical information also served to submerge the particulars of her story into a religious metanarrative. Noting that “[n]o misfortune, however great, could crush her Christian spirit,” the author of the obituary implicitly exhorted the readers to emulate Harriet by remaining steadfast in their faith when they too

153 encounter adversity. Perhaps this reflected a concern among Catholics with apostasy; in the wake of nativism, anti-Catholicism, and efforts of Catholic evangelicals, some

Catholics converted to Protestantism. This narrative strategy also connected aristocratic Catholics with those of lesser social status. The obituary writer implied that the only legitimate source of status is to be found in religion.

To combat the threat of apostasy, obituary writers celebrated conversions, especially among prominent Protestants, and Harriet was one such convert to

Catholicism. As with Sarah Johnson (the daughter of the Episcopal priest), Harriet is praised for her intelligence: “her strong and logical mind, aided by the grace of God, soon found the one true way.” Such converts must have exhibited a considerable degree of intellectual independence. Yet unlike Sarah and other converts, whose priests and instructors in the faith are prominently mentioned in obituaries, Harriet either went through the conversion process without such assistance, or the writer of the obituary chose to emphasize her assistance from God rather than from a priestly mediator. A more independent conversion would accord more with the Protestant model for conversion experiences, with their period of “conviction” and often solitary soul searching before conversion.285

A key difference, however, was that while Protestant conversion narratives often portrayed emotional turmoil, the Catholic obituaries emphasize conversion as an

285 For Protestant women’s conversion narratives, see Brerenton, From Sin to Salvation.

154 intellectual process. Significantly, Harriet herself was credited with leading other

Protestants to convert, or encouraging the indifferent to return to their faith (the obituary is not specific): “she enlightened many a soul, which till then had been in darkness...She had won the hearts of strangers, to truth and virtue, before they suspected it.” The obituary thus represented Harriet proselytizing in a manner not dissimilar to that of evangelical Protestants; although she did not preach in the usual sense, her activities had a similar result. Like Catholic women novelists who proselytized and defended their faith in print, Harriet’s role in converting others was neither “public” nor “private”; it was both. Novelist Anna Dorsey, also a convert, wrote stories that in many ways were fictional conversion narratives, and some of her characters had connections to European nobility. Mary Sadlier regarded one of the primary purposes of her novels as religious instruction, and some of her characters struggled to maintain their faith in difficult circumstances. Harriet’s obituary also served a didactic purpose, encouraging readers, especially women, to proselytize, or (a more likely role) urging Catholics to help others maintain their faith.

In contrast to Harriet’s connection with the European Catholic elite, the obituary of Mrs. Catherine Kilty, widow of John Kilty, emphasized her family’s connection with Maryland state politics, the events of the American Revolution, and the early republic. Although the writer of her obituary followed the usual pattern by praising her “kind, courageous, hospitable, and charitable” character, and her “long and useful life” (she died at the age of 86) her respectable family and conversion to

Catholicism were much more prominent. Catherine’s father, Allen Quinn, Esq., was

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“for many years a prominent member of the earliest legislative assemblies of this

State.” Her husband, Captain John Kilty, and his brother had “an active and honorable part in the war of the Revolution.”286

Thus, through her husband, she became acquainted with “a large number of persons distinguished in the early history of the Republic.” A talented raconteur, she

“could make her hearers, as it were, personally acquainted with the worthies of former times.” She was thus represented as a living repository of the memories of the

American Revolution, transmitting them from one generation to the next, and making the past come alive for her listeners. Her association with the foundation of the

American nation provides a contrast to the Irish Catholic immigration and Protestant nativism of the antebellum period, representing Catholicism as the truest form of

Americanism.

Catherine Kilty’s obituary emphasizes her connection to the early American nation more than her conversion to Catholicism, which was remarkable considering that only three years before her death she was received into the Church, and became “a devoted and exemplary member.” One can only imagine what inspired this respectable and elderly widow to convert at the age of 83. Unlike the obituaries of other converts,

Catherine Kilty’s contained no narrative of her conversion; it was a fact stated simply and plainly, without explanation or discussion. Perhaps her husband was Catholic and so this was seen as a logical step, or possibly the writer of her obituary assumed that,

286 CM, September 27, 1856, p. 7.

156 for a Catholic readership, no explanation of Catherine’s conversion was necessary. As with Mary Lyman’s obituary, the message is that it was never too late to convert;

Catholic converts can continue to hope and pray that their relatives will join them in the faith.

Redemptive Suffering and the “Good Death”

Even obituaries in which agonizing death was not the main theme mentioned such a death when it occurred. Mrs. Ann Bevans died at the age of 65 in 1852 after “a long and painful affliction,” which she endured with “the fortitude and resignation of a true Christian.” Yet her obituary emphasized her intelligence, piety, benevolence, and charity. She had “more vigor of intellect and energy of purpose than is common to those of her sex,” which “enabled her to prosper in the world” but also led her to “life eternal.”287 Here intelligence, a quality usually gendered masculine in the nineteenth century, was acknowledged yet placed in a secondary position to piety, which was considered a more feminine quality.

Not all “good deaths” were painful. Although portrayals of enormous suffering were frequent, some obituaries represent certain deaths as almost preternaturally peaceful. For example, Mary Ann Logsden “died amongst those in whose society she found most pleasure,” the nuns of St. Joseph’s, where she had gone on a “short and private retreat” to prepare for Christmas, which apparently had great meaning for her.

287 CM, January 31, 1852.

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In declining health for “several years,” she died there, surrounded by religious women.288 No information about her family was given in the obituary, implying that the nuns were more of a family to her than her biological family.

The long obituary for Betty Jenkins, who died at the age of 23, incorporated a mini-sermon. Apparently, she was the daughter of a prominent lawyer, which was no doubt a factor in the length of her obituary, which begins with the usual praise of the character of the deceased: “In all the relations of daughter, sister, pupil, and companion, she was distinguished for her correct deportment and the faithful discharge of her obligations.” Yet even more than her behavior, which conformed to the ideal of submissive, virtuous femininity, her piety and devotion to the Virgin Mary were praised: “she threw herself with childlike simplicity into the arms of her tender mother; nor was she disappointed.” At the time of her death, “her mind was serenely calm, and her heart was full of consolation.”289

The obituary portrayed Betty’s calm, peaceful death as the result of her steadfast piety. Describing her “good,” albeit premature death, the author of her obituary both consoles the bereaved family and friends and uses her death as a means to present a “lesson of momentous import” to all who may read about her: “There is something eminently beautiful, and even poetical, in a youthful life closing under such auspices...It is the beauty of divine truth...the victory of grace.” Thus, the early death

288 CM, March 13, 1853. 289 Ibid.

158 of a pious, pure, virtuous young woman became a triumph rather than a tragedy.

Although her parents may “be permitted to drop a tear at the rupture of endearing bonds,” they were consoled with the thought that they had experienced “the full dignity of the parental office” by raising their daughter in the faith and seeing her go to the reward of the pious; such a death “inspires a joy.” No mention was made of prayers for her soul; the clear implication was that for someone so devout and pure, such prayers would be unnecessary because she (unlike most mortals) would spend little, if any, time in purgatory being punished for, and purified of, the sins they committed in life. Even in life, apparently Betty had turned from her earthly parents to the Virgin Mary for comfort. Thus, devotion to the heavenly family was represented as being more significant than family connections.

Betty’s pious life and what was represented as an ideal death “reprove the folly of misguided youth, who rush with so much avidity after the poisonous foundations of worldly pleasure and dissipaton.” The author also used Betty’s obituary to write a mini-sermon rebuking those of mature years as well as the young, castigating “the sinful apathy of those who allow a long existence to roll away, without serious thought of eternity.” Instead of the “transient and deceptive enjoyments” of ordinary earthly life, readers were exhorted to turn their eyes heavenward and consider the fate of their souls.290 Here was an instance of a pious life and “good death” serving as both example

290 CM, September 22, 1854.

159 and warning for other Catholics. The didactic purpose of this (and other) obituaries was clearly evident.

During and after the Civil War, the theme of an agonizing death cheerfully endured after long and painful illness became more prominent in the obituaries of women. Such women, much like their fictional counterparts, were portrayed as saintly.

Eliza Lee Thomas was “perfectly unselfish, unworldly, and Christlike.”291 According to her obituary, “for 13 years she was like a martyr;” apparently her physician father was unable to alleviate her suffering (perhaps from tuberculosis). Her age at death was not given, but the obituary eulogized her as the ideal daughter who could tell her mother that she had “never willfully disobeyed.” Her life provided the lesson to

Catholic readers that “the hidden life with God is true comfort and final safety.”

Again, the obituaries preached that the purpose of life is the afterlife.

One such victim of prolonged suffering and an excruciating death was actually called a saint by the author of her obituary (who was probably an acquaintance or family member). Mary Coghlan, who died in 1870 at the age of 32, had suffered from

“a complication of diseases” for 17 years, yet “never was she heard to utter the least word of complaint.”292 Always ready with a “cheerful word,” despite her suffering she

291 CM, December 15, 1866, p. 6. Possibly the agony of death was represented more because of the tremendous number of Civil War deaths, and the mourning for the dead. For mourning after the Civil War see Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War New York: Knopf, 2008), esp. 137-70. 292 CM, February 26, 1870, p. 5; March 12, p. 5.

160 would “consecrate herself to the wounds of Our Savior.” The obituary concluded that

“surely she lived the life and died the death of a saint,” testifying to the redemptive power of silent suffering with patience and forbearance. Yet the next month a poem” in memoriam” was published, and a request made for readers to pray for her soul.

Such requests were not infrequent, but usually were made in the obituary itself, rather than after it was published. Obituary writers frequently admired silent suffering; although this is not a uniquely Catholic attitude, the association between suffering and sainthood was more explicitly stated in Catholic writings.

As mini-biographies, obituaries provided representations of the lives of private individuals who, by having their obituaries published, could enter the public memory of their fellow Baltimore Catholics. They also articulated ideals of Catholic womanhood, suggested similarities and differences between Protestant and Catholic domesticity, and despite the formulaic nature of obituaries as a genre, demonstrated that considerable diversity existed in the lives of Catholic laywomen. Obituaries reflected varying positions within the lifecourse; the obituaries for children, young wives and mothers, and elderly matriarchs were different from each other.

Some obituaries emphasized certain themes, such as conversion to

Catholicism. Converts were given the longest, most comprehensive of the obituaries, and it is the converts, such as Sarah Johnson and Mary Lyman, who become most vividly individuals to the reader. Conversion narratives in the obituaries portrayed religious journeys towards what Catholics believed was the “one true faith,” and the only way to salvation was of submission to the faith. However, the obituaries also

161 portrayed intellectually independent women making their own choices in matters of religion, exercising what agency they could in matters of faith. The tension between the surface and submerged narrative was unresolved.293 Readers would probably reach the conclusion that the role of intellect was to serve faith: while the obituaries praised women who challenged Protestant religious doctrines, to question any tenets of

Catholic faith was unthinkable. Intellectual independence was, in effect, a brief detour on the way towards submission to Catholic orthodoxy.

Other obituaries, such as those of young people, benevolent women, and pious

Catholic mothers, are more stereotyped than the obituaries of converts. The obituaries presented activities charitable work are portrayed as an outgrowth of religious faith, rather than as free choices by individuals. However, the obituaries portrayed some women who were raised in the faith, such as, for example, Mary Berry, the benevolent

African American, and Emma Marilly, the active spinster, as dramatically as the converts to Catholicism. The obituaries represented Catholic women as both domestic and involved in public benevolence, and implied that the line between public and private was flexible and permeable. Such obituaries also presented Catholic counternarratives to stories of benevolent Protestant women.

Not surprisingly, the theme of the “good death” was quite prominent in these obituaries. Long, lingering illnesses are mentioned in many obituaries, even when the

293 In From Sin to Salvation Virginia Brerenton applies the analysis of surface and submerged plots that literary critics have used in discussing novels to Protestant women’s conversion narratives.

162 primary focus was on other aspects of the lives of the deceased. During the course of the Civil War, there was a subtle shift in emphasis, with more space and attention in the obituaries being devoted to martyr-like suffering and the redemptive nature of such suffering, when endured with forbearance and without complaint, than to domestic virtues and benevolence. Moreover, the emphasis shifted from one type of good death which involved an elderly individual passing peacefully, or a younger person suffering little, as the reward for a life well lived, to another concept, that of the good death as one which entails martyr-like suffering. However, because both types of “good death” were found in obituaries through the mid-nineteenth century, there was considerable continuity as well, and the shift is one of emphasis rather than content. Still, perhaps this transition reflected the tremendous suffering that occurred among men as a result of the Civil War and the culture of mourning.294

The Obituaries of Women

The obituaries of women performed several social functions. Although many middle-class women were reading advice manuals and periodicals such as Godey’s

Lady’s Book in the mid-nineteenth century, Catholic writers presented their version of domesticity primarily in genres such as novels and obituaries before specifically prescriptive literature appeared. While Protestant writers also created biographies

294 Faust, Republic of Suffering, 137-70.

163 which also functioned as a form of advice literature, Catholics, lacking overt prescriptive literature, turned to other sources.295

The obituaries combined elements of biography and prescriptive literature, presented ideals of Catholic womanhood, and demonstrated that there was considerable variation within the ideal. By portraying idealized lives of ordinary women from diverse backgrounds, obituaries provided narratives of lives for readers to emulate. Because the women portrayed in obituaries were closer, in time and in experience, to the lives of their readers than were female saints, the narrative structures of their lives could be more accessible than the lives of saints, and could be read alongside them. As representations of individual lives which exemplified ideal versions of Catholic womanhood, obituaries both shaped and reflected social and religious values, thus helping to construct a unified American Catholic identity, and attempted to reposition Catholicism from the margin to the mainstream of American society and culture.

295 McDannell, Christian Home, 122-25; Brown, Word in the Word, 89. Prolific women writers such as Mary Sadlier and Anna Dorsey regularly sermonized in their novels, which were filled with conversions. The Catholic Mirror regularly published serialized novels. The most famous work of prescriptive literature for women was Rev. Bernard O’Reilly, The Mirror of True Womanhood; a Book of Instruction for Women in the World (New York: Peter F. Collins, 1878).

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Chapter 3

GENDER, ETHNICITY, AND RESPECTABILITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY CATHOLIC NOVELS

Nineteenth century Catholic laywomen such as Julia Compton and the writers of obituaries engaged creatively with the dominant culture as they developed their own understanding of their domesticity. As novel reading expanded dramatically with technological improvements in printing and distribution, the expansion of literacy due to the growth of common schools, Sunday schools, benevolent associations, and the growth of public and private lending libraries, a national reading public developed, and an explicitly Catholic print culture emerged.296 Fiction written by women writers, for women readers, became ever more popular, much to the dismay of some critics.

Historians and literary scholars have studied novels for forty years and used them to explicate and debate ideas of womanhood. Although novels do not necessarily provide a realistic portrayal of nineteenth-century life, literature played an important role in creating and responding to cultural values and in conveying ideologies. Works by women writers became popular because they expressed beliefs shared by many people; scholars have argued that women’s fiction played an important role in defining

296 For a detailed analysis of the expansion of the antebellum reading public, see Zboray, A Fictive People.

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women’s domestic sphere, articulating problems individuals faced and proposing solutions.297

The ideal of the “true woman” was far from monolithic. The ideal as presented in popular magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book; excluded immigrant, working class, and African American, and Native American women, and was explicitly

Protestant. (Despite the tremendous variations among Protestant denominations, evangelical or mainline Protestantism was assumed). Historians have provided more nuanced interpretations emphasizing the complexities of the ideal, its inherent contradictions, and how writers renegotiated and challenged the ideal as they represented an implicitly white, Protestant, middle class gender systems.298 Catholics

297 The literature is vast, but see for example Kelley, Private Women, Public Stage and Learning to Stand and Speak; Baym, Women’s Fiction; Tompkins, Sensational Designs; Douglas, Feminization of American Culture; Carolyn L. Karcher, “Reconceiving Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Challenge of Women Writers,” American Literature 66 (December 1994), 781-93. According to Davidson, Revolution and the Word, the novel was a subversive genre, for as a popular literary form, it challenged the claim of a small elite to be the producers and arbiters of American culture. Novels did not demand a classical education of their readers, and they replaced ministerial and patriarchal authority with the response of the individual reader. 298 The classic formulation of "true womanhood” remains Barbara Welter’s fourfold scheme of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. However, Tracy Fessenden points out that true womanhood was the “site of multiple and conflicting hierarchies” and Nancy Hewitt analyzes the “contradictory impulses – between order and change, progress and stability, materialism and religiosity – that the ideal sought to resolve.” Welter, “Cult of True Womanhood;” Fessenden, “Gendering Religion;” Hewitt, “Taking the True Woman Hostage,” 157.

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both appropriated and subverted Protestant literary tropes such as the dangers of drunkenness, the long-suffering wife, and the pious, dying child.299

The novels of Mary Sadlier and Anna Dorsey reveal a distinctive Catholic gender system in which, even with the strict Catholic religious doctrine and hierarchy, women writers constructed their religious identity by social practices and cultural values, as well as by specific theological and religious practices. The work of women writers highlights some of the implicit values of the novel-reading Catholic public. In

299 McDannell, probably the first scholar to consider Catholic and Protestant domesticity together, described nine key qualities in Catholic domesticity: “order, purity, cheerfulness, work, authority, class stability, religion, refinement, and ethnicity.” Discussing the development of religious fiction, David Reynolds has analyzed how Catholic writers appropriated and inverted Protestant literary tropes, for example, portraying educated Catholic and ignorant Protestant characters. Stephanie Wilkinson discussed how, in the nineteenth century “doctrinal novels,” many written by priests, were produced earliest; later Catholic writers engaged all genres, including domestic fiction, gothic stories, satires, conversion stories, and “cautionary tales” (a genre in which she places Mary Sadlier). Marie O’Brien analyzed the works of three Irish-American women writers, including Mary Sadlier, and how they combined realism and sentimentalism in their work. Considering both fiction and nonfictional works such as sermons, catechisms, tracts, and autobiographies, James Ryan discusses the diversity and complexity of nineteenth-century Catholicism, suggesting that in practice, the faith was far from monolithic. Tracy Fessenden discusses anti- Catholicism within the larger context of multiple secularizations and the complexities of the narrative of secularization as progress. Willard Thorp, Catholic Novelists in Defense of their Faith (Worcester, Mass., American Antiquarian Society, 1968), Ray Messbarger, Fiction with a Parochial Purpose: Social Uses of American Catholic Literature, 1884-1900 (Brookline, Mass.: Boston University Press, 1971); Leslie Woodcock Tentler, “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” American Quarterly 4 (March 1993), 104-27; McDannell, Christian Home, quote p. 58; Reynolds, Faith in Fiction; Marie Regina O’Brien, “Scribbling Brigids;” Wilkinson, “Novel Defense;” Ryan, “Inventing Catholicism;” Nineteenth Century Literary History and the Contest for American Religion;” Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Religion: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 60-136.

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an era when Catholicism was marginalized, they attempted to reposition their faith to the mainstream of American society and the center of American life, where they thought it belonged, placing religion is at the center of their novels; every character and twist of plot illustrates some element of their faith. Despite the tremendous diversity among Protestant denominations, Sadlier and Dorsey usually presented

Protestantism as a monolithic “other” in opposition to Catholicism; Dorsey especially contrasted Catholic “feeling” with dour Puritanism. Sadlier addressed the dilemma faced by Irish Catholic immigrants torn between their ethnic heritage and longing for

“home” and their desire to Americanize and advance in the world. Both writers created a uniquely Catholic representation of respectability based not on economic standing but on adherence to Catholicism. While they accepted some elements of the

Protestant work ethic (such as industry, honesty, thrift, and sobriety) they criticized excessive ambition, which they associated with apostasy. Their domesticity involved benevolent patriarchs, a gentler masculinity, and devout and submissive women, while warning about the danger of Protestant women seducing Catholic men away from their faith. They explicitly embraced what, to many Protestants, was one of the most offensive and superstitious Catholic practices: the use of holy objects. Indeed, they endowed objects with their own agency, a holy contagion that could foster conversions and avert disaster.

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Catholic and Protestant Sentimentalism

In their work, Mary Sadlier and Anna Dorsey, two of the post popular and prolific nineteenth century Catholic novelists, simultaneously resisted and accommodated to the mainstream culture. Their didactic fiction aimed to instruct as well as entertain readers. Both Protestant and Catholic novelists found it necessary to defend the reading and writing of novels, consider questions of gender, domesticity, social class, and religion and stress themes such virtue rewarded, adversity overcome, and a “fall” followed by redemption. Yet their own didactic purposes led them to shape specifically Catholic plots and topics. By producing fiction that attempted to exhort the faithful, convert Protestants and encourage those who had strayed to return to the fold, Sadlier and Dorsey fostered and defended their faith.

As they did, they significantly departed from some of the themes and plots of Protestant novelists. Protestant women writers of sentimental fiction frequently wrote about women’s domestic concerns: family, home, courtship, and marriage. Their female protagonists contrasted with Catholic female characters who were cast in supporting roles as the male protagonists assumed center stage. Protestant novels frequently focused on character development, while in Catholic novels this was secondary to plots driven by religion. Unlike the well-developed female characters in Protestant novels, some female characters in Catholic novels were simply stereotypes with underdeveloped relationships.300 If Protestant domestic fiction stressed the need

300 According to Nina Baym, in Protestant novels “religious values are always subsumed within the domestic ideology,” and women writers “permit each heroine to find her own God, privately, without the intervention of masculine religious

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for women to follow their individual consciences, Catholic novels reversed this pattern, portraying participation in priest-led Catholic rituals as essential. Didacticism was a feature of all domestic fiction, but while Catholic didacticism extended to matters of ethnicity, class, and gender, all of these were subordinated to the central religious concern. The domineering men found in some Protestant fiction were absent in Catholic novels..301 Patriarchs in Catholic novels wee kinder and gentler, representing masculinity reconfigured by Catholicism that would mitigate patriarchal excess.

Especially notable was the absence in Sadlier’s and Dorsey’s novels work of

“women’s sphere.” Indeed, both devoted little attention to the roles of women at home and in society.

Marriage was not as important a theme in Catholic novels. Instead of the theme of the unfortunate female protagonist who is seduced, betrayed, abandoned, and meets a dismal end,302 Catholic novelists reversed the story. Often, in their works it is the

institutions.” Protestant novelists ranged from the relatively secular to those whose works, in the words of Jane Tompkins, “functioned in the same way as...the pamphlets produced by the Tract Society.” Baym, Women’s Fiction, 41; Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 149. 301 For example, in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), Ella must subordinate herself to a tyrannical uncle, although in the end she will be rewarded with marriage, and Queechy (1852) is populated with tyrannical men. Ella “gradually gives up the right to be herself.” See Tompkins, quote p. 181; Sensational Designs, Baym, Women’s Fiction, esp. 151-53 302 See Baym, Women’s Fiction, 86-109 for a discussion of McIntosh. Caroline Lee Hentz, Ernest Vinwood; Mary Virginia Terhune, Eve’s Daughters, Catharine Sedgwick quoted in Kelley, Private Women, p. 227, 233, 240. In Terhune’s Charbydis, the heroine’s brother tells her that she must marry or else face “taking in

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alluring Protestant woman who seduces the male protagonist away from the true

Catholic faith. In this fashion they reconfigured the seduction theme from an exploitative relationship between individuals to a contest between rival religions.

Ethnicity, rather than marriage or domesticity, provided both writers with key plot elements. The conflicts that Irish Catholic immigrants faced between their nostalgia for “the old country” and veneration of their ethnic heritage, and their desire to become more “American” and assimilate frequently drove the two women’s most popular stories.

Rejecting portrayals of Catholics as “priest ridden” and superstitious, the novelists devised religious plot elements that embraced traditional practices such as the use of holy objects. Ethnicity and religion thus became the frameworks for presenting a counter-stereotype of dour “Puritan” Protestants and ignorant pastor, or a critique of the American gospel of success, which could appear, in a novel, as a force undermining both the faith and traditional immigrant culture. To be sure, Dorsey and

Sadlier admired bourgeois respectability and depicted values such as hard work, thrift, and sobriety positively. Nevertheless, characters who emulated what the novelists viewed as excessive, Protestant-style ambition inevitably met with disaster when they abandoned their faith. Here is an implicit critique of the excessive ambition of

sewing for a living, or to see the more degrading position of a salesperson in a store.” After her marriage she becomes “a slave in queenly attire...to whom love meant remorse, and marriage pollution, all the more hopeless and hateful because the law and Gospel pronounced it honorable.” The earliest and most famous novel of seduction and betrayal by a woman writer is Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple (1794).

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“success ethic,” and characters from among the “worthy poor” present a “stern corrective to the dissipated upper classes” as the ideal of success.303 Virtue, not money, was the true measure of respectability in their universe; both working-class and middle-class characters could attain that standard as long as they placed religion at the center of it all.

For both Dorsey and Sadlier, novel-writing had several purposes, aside from being an occupation. It enabled them to work out in print conflicts between a marginal

Catholicism and the Protestant mainstream, and between the inner conflicts many of their readers faced, and then provided readers with fictional resolutions to these tensions. In addition, they sought to help readers better understand fellow Catholics from different social and ethnic backgrounds, even guiding their readers when they faced similar conflicts in their own lives. But novels also gave them a forum in which to preach and teach, and perhaps even prevent apostasy and foster conversions. In that quasi-priestly role, women novelists received considerable support from male leaders in their church. For example, in his Quarterly Review the noted convert Orestes

Brownson regularly urged the production of more Catholic literature, and Catholic newspapers held contests for the best novel, with prizes of $50 and publication as a serial, and the Catholic World ran fiction in almost every issue. Indeed, Mary Sadlier

303 Baym, Women’s Fiction, quote p. 47. For an example of the virtuous seamstress, see Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Seamstress” (1843), for the drunkard, Lydia Sigourney, “The Intemperate” (1834), both reprinted in Barbara H. Solomon, ed., Rediscoveries: American Short Stories by Women, 1832-1916 (New York: Mentor, 1994). Temperance tales were a staple of antebellum literature.

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wrote the first of her Irish-American Catholic novels, Willy Burke, or the Irish Orphan in America (1850) when Patrick Donahoe, editor of the Boston Pilot, ran such a contest at Brownson’s suggestion. The novel was later published in book form by two different publishers and sold 7000 copies its first week in print. The Baltimore

Catholic Mirror held a similar contest, specifying that the “composition must be distinguished by its Catholic tone and practical instruction, which should have a special application to the circumstances of this country.” In 1851, The Mirror serialized Anna Dorsey’s novel The Two Angels. Here, the Catholic novelists, followed the typical pattern of their Protestant and secular counterparts, who also frequently published their work in newspapers and magazines, which published fiction to attract readers.304

By such means, Mary Sadlier and Anna Dorsey became the two most popular

Catholic women novelists of the nineteenth century. Both were extremely prolific;

Sadlier produced about fifty novels and Dorsey about thirty. Many of their novels went through several printings and remained in print for decades; according to one

304 Here, the Catholic novels followed the pattern of their Protestant counterparts, who also frequently published their work in newspapers and magazines. The practice of serialization was widely used – not just by religious publishers. McDannell, Christian Home, 54; Catholic Mirror, January 9, 1850; January 22, 1851. I have been unable to obtain The Two Angels and cannot determine whether this novel was the winner of the contest. In her study of twelve Protestant women novelists, Mary Kelley notes that “[p]ractically all of the literary domestics appeared in a wide variety of periodicals” and that many novels first appeared as serials; Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the best known example. Kelley, Private Women, 19.

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scholar, Sadlier’s were literally “read to pieces.”305 Their publishers kept demand alive by reminding readers of other works, listing them, and presenting them in different editions. A devoted reader of means could eventually purchase Dorsey’s novels with the series title “Mrs. Dorsey’s Works” prominently displayed, in gilt, on the spine of each book. At the same time, cheaper editions reached a wide audience. For example,

Willy Burke, or the Irish Orphan in America, which would appeal to working-class immigrants, cost less than half the price of an upper-class French novel, which would have a much more affluent and elite readership.306

The Lives of Mary Sadlier and Anna Dorsey

In some ways, the lives and works of Sadlier and Dorsey were quite similar.

Both affirmed an ideology of Catholic domesticity and raised large families while writing for the public and even preaching in their novels. Interestingly, both had daughters, Anna Theresa Sadlier and Ella Loraine Dorsey, who also became popular

Catholic writers, and both received the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame University for

305 Sources give different estimates of the total number of books Sadlier and Dorsey produced. Willard Thorp suggests that both produced at least 20 and probably as many as 30 novels; Sadlier’s were evidently “read to pieces.” Other scholars suggest a larger total. Richard J. Purcell estimates sixty novels for Sadlier, Colleen McDannell “almost fifty,” and Sandra Grayson estimates thirty for Dorsey. In addition to novels, both published poetry, and Sadlier also translated a number of French novels and wrote doctrinal works. Willard Thorp, Catholic Novelists in Defense of their Faith (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1968), quote p. 99; Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. “Mary Anne Madden Sadlier;” American National Biography, s.v. “Anna Hanson McKenney Dorsey;” McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America 1840-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 54. 306 McDannell, Christian Home, 54.

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their contributions to Catholic literature and special blessings from Pope Leo XIII.307

Anna Dorsey and especially Mary Sadlier attempted to write realistic, didactic novels reflecting their concern with gender, ethnicity, respectability, Catholic doctrine, and the dangers of apostasy.

Yet differences in their lives influenced their concerns, which in turn helped to shape their fiction and other writings. Mary Sadlier, an Irish immigrant and lifelong

Catholic, wrote primarily about Irish-Catholic immigrants who were in danger of succumbing to the lures of American Protestantism. Anna Dorsey, a convert to

Catholicism, filled her novels, some of which were set in her native Baltimore, with as many conversions as her rather contrived plots could sustain. Both novelists, much like writers of obituaries, presented a Catholic vision of womanhood and domesticity before writers of overtly prescriptive literature developed their perspectives on

Catholic domesticity in systematic form. Yet they emphasized different aspects of their Catholic identity; Sadlier warned her readers of the dangers of apostasy while

Dorsey exhorted her characters (and implicitly her non-Catholic readers) to convert. In choosing these two themes, Dorsey and Sadlier were probably drawing on their own life experiences, much like their Protestant counterparts who portrayed aspects taken

307 Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribners, 1958), s.v. “Mary Anne Madden Sadlier” by Richard J. Purcell; John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), s.v. “Anna Hanson McKenney Dorsey” by Sandra M. Grayson.

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from their own lives in fictional form and even wrote “semi-autobiographical” novels.308

Mary Anne Madden Sadlier was born in 1820, in Cootehill, County Cavan,

Ireland. Her father, Francis Madden, a prosperous merchant, encouraged her early literary pursuits, and when she was eighteen a London magazine, La Belle Assemblee, published some of Mary’s poems. Apparently her father suffered some financial difficulties before his death in 1844 (her mother died during Mary’s childhood), leaving Mary alone and impoverished. As it did for many Irish immigrants in the

1840s, financial need probably motivated her to immigrate, first to Montreal and then to New York City. Still, her comfortable childhood and education placed her firmly in the middle class, and her life may have led her to view respectability as more a matter of ideals and behavior than of economic status.

Quite possibly, writing was a financial necessity. In the preface to her first book, Tales of the Olden Time: A Collection of European Traditions (1845), Sadlier wrote “Had it been my fate to belong to that fortunate class which is happily exempt from the necessity of working, I should, in all probability, never have presented myself before you.” Such statements were commonly used, of course, both to justify assuming the public role of novelist and to defend the writing and reading of novels. 309

308 Kelley, Private Women, quote p. 68. 309 Michele Lacombe, “Frying Pans and Deadlier Weapons: The Immigrant Novels of Mary Anne Sadlier,” Essays on Canadian Writing 29 (1984), 99; Kelley, Private Women, esp. 56-60. According to Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters, Irish immigrant

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While in Montrea in 1846l, she met and married James Sadlier, also an Irish immigrant, who had opened a Canadian branch of the D&J Sadlier publishing company, which he and his brother Denis had established in New York in 1837.

During her marriage, Mary Sadlier had six children, yet became an extremely prolific writer. Much of her work appeared in periodicals such as the American Celt, Boston

Pilot, the New York Freeman’s Journal and New York Tablet (which was published by

D&J Sadlier). She became the mainstay of her husband and brother-in-law’s company, helping to edit the Tablet, translating French novels and prescriptive literature, and writing her novels.310

As a writer, Sadlier’s most productive period was during her marriage to

James. After his death in 1869, she turned from writing novels to producing didactic works complied from other sources, such as The Young Lady’s Reader Composed and

Arranged for Advanced Classes (1875) and Purgatory: Doctrinal, Historical, and

Poetical (1886), which was dedicated to her son, Francis Xavier, a Jesuit priest who died in Rome in 1885 and whom she praised for his “devotion to poor souls in

women frequently worked as domestic servants, but many of their daughters became teachers. 310 Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. “Mary Anne Madden Sadlier;” Edward T. James et al, eds., Notable American Women 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), s.v. “Mary Anne Madden Sadlier by Thomas N. Brown;” Szabo, “Sadlier’s Biography;” Lacombe, “Frying Pans;” McDannell, Christian Home, 54.

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purgatory.”311 She also engaged in benevolent activities in the 1870s, including the

Home for Friendless Girls, the Foundling Asylum, and the Home for the Aged in New

York City. Towards the end of her life, she moved back to Montreal to be near her adult children. Although many of her novels were reprinted in the 1880s, probably in response to a renewed demand for Irish Catholic fiction with increased immigration, she suffered financial difficulties after losing control of D&J Sadlier, and died in relative obscurity in 1903.312

Anna Hanson McKenney Dorsey’s life as an American-born Protestant who converted to Catholicism differed in important ways from Sadlier’s. Her father,

William McKenney, was from a family of prominent Maryland Quakers, though he was a Methodist chaplain in the navy. Born in Georgetown in 1815, Anna Dorsey, like

Mary Sadlier, was educated at home and at an early age wrote poetry that was published in magazines. In 1837, Anna married Lorenzo Dorsey of Baltimore.

Influenced by the Oxford movement (a liturgical and theological movement that spread from the Anglican church in England to Episcopalians in America) which

“resurrected ritually oriented Protestantism but also led the way to increased conversion to Catholicism,” the couple converted to Catholicism in 1840. Orestes

311 Sadlier, Young Lady’s Reader (New York: D&J Sadlier, 1875); Purgatory (1886). 312 Lacombe, “Frying Pans;” Notable American Women, s.v. “Mary Anne Madden Sadlier” by Thomas N. Brown.

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Brownson and Isaac Hecker also converted to Catholicism through their involvement in the Oxford Movement.313

Unlike Sadlier, Dorsey did not claim to experience economic difficulties. Her husband worked in the United States government post office in Washington, D.C. until his death in 1861 and she continued to write novels and some poetry (including an ode to the U.S. Sanitary Commission) after his death. The couple had five children; one son died fighting for the Union Army during the Civil War. Although she published a pro-Union work, They’re Coming, Granddad (1865) about the Union cause in

Tennessee, Dorsey did not, at least publicly, address the slavery question. Indeed, as will become evident, her portrayal of African-Americans is disparaging and paternalistic. In works such as The Student of Blenheim Forest (1867), a story of conversion, and Zoe’s Daughter (1888), a historical novel about Maryland

Catholicism in the days of the Calverts, Dorsey appeared rather nostalgic about the

Old South. She stayed in Washington, D.C., surrounded by her children and grandchildren, and continued writing until a few years before her death in 1896. Her novels remained in print and popular, and her obituary in the Ave Maria reported that many “had learned to love her through her books”; at least one individual regarded her

313 The Oxford Movement was a devotional movement that began in the Anglican Church in the 1830s; several prominent followers converted to Catholicism. American National Biography, s.v. “Anna Dorsey,” by Sandra Grayson, 763; Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. “Anna Dorsey,” by John D. Walsh, 384; quote from McDannell, 15; Ahlstrom, Religious History, 548-49, 621-22.

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as a “guiding light.”314 Although Dorsey has attracted less scholarly attention than

Sadlier, she too made significant contributions to American Catholic fiction.

Mary Sadlier’s Respectable Irish-Catholic Immigrants

Sadlier’s novels addressed specific social problems facing post-famine Irish

Catholic immigrants to America. She wrote her first novel, Willy Burke, or the Irish

Orphan in America (1850), to dramatize the plight of young Irish orphan boys in large

American cities. Similarly, Bessy Conway, or the Irish Girl in America (1862) dealt with the problems facing young Irish immigrant servant girls. In her preface to the latter, Sadlier wrote that [p]erhaps in the vast extent of the civilized world, there is no class more exposed to evil influences that the Irish Catholic girls who earn a precarious living at service in America.” Apparently, Sadlier’s motive was threefold: to express her concern for the treatment of the young girls, to encourage them to “do honor to their country and their faith,” and less directly, to improve society as a whole through the salutary influence of what she regarded as proper feminine conduct and belief. Noting that “the unprincipled will find husbands as well as the good and the virtuous,” Sadlier added the cautionary note that “[t]he sphere of influence thus extended, who can calculate the results, whether good or ill?” 315 Thus, her idea about the significance of women’s domestic sphere, and the family as the basis for society, was similar to that of mainstream Protestants. Yet in the Catholic “household of faith,”

314 Ibid., Ave Maria quoted American National Biography. 315 Sadlier, Willy Burke; Bessy Conway.

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which encompassed both the living and dead, that sphere would be, if anything, further extended.316

Prominent Catholic converts suggested the idea for both of these novels:

Orestes Brownson suggested a novel for boys, and Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulist order, suggested Bessy Conway.317 The novels emphasized the dangers of apostasy, as did The Blakes and the Flanagans: A Tale Illustrative of Irish Life in the United States

(1855), which contrasted two families: one remained true to the faith while in the other the characters fall into apostasy largely as a result of exposure to public schools. The novel was translated into German and published twice under the title “Old Ireland and

America,” suggesting that these two immigrant Catholic populations faced similar concerns about assimilating in the United States without succumbing to the lure of

Protestantism or abandoning the culture and customs of the old country. In the didactic preface to this novel, Sadlier explained that the purpose of all her writings was “the illustration of our holy faith, by means of tales and stories” and asserted that “I do not profess to write novels.”318 While this was an adaptation of the obligatory disclaimer found in many Protestant novels, Sadlier’s claim is much more overt.

316 The phrase is from Taves, Household of Faith. 317 Notable American Women, s.v. “Mary Sadlier.” 318 The Blakes and the Flanagans: A Tale Illustrative of Irish Life in America (New York: D&J Sadlier, 1855). In “Scribbling Brigids,” Marie O’Brien discusses Sadlier’s praise for domesticity while following a very different life course and Sadlier’s “authorial anxiety” about the contradiction. .

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The Perils of Ambition and the Lure of Apostasy

By using the first-person voice, Sadlier represented some of her novels as fictionalized, but essentially realistic, autobiographies. Confessions of an Apostate, or

Leaves from a Troubled Life (1864) opens with the appearance of a lonely, dejected old man in a deserted cottage in Ireland. Sadlier inserted social commentary on problems in Ireland by having the cottage deserted because, unable to pay the rent to her absentee landlord, a widow had been evicted. The old man walks through the countryside, visits the graveyard and the parish priest, and cries; the novel is the story of his dubious progress from Irish Catholic child to immigrant in America, to his return to his native Ireland in his old age.319

As a child, narrator Simon Kerrigan displays early piety, and in his dotage waxes nostalgic about his “innocent and happy” life as the son of a small farmer.

Upon his father’s death, the family scattered. Restless and bored with ceaseless toil on his mother’s small farm, and inspired by stories of “venturesome poor boys,” he was so eager to seek his fortune that he ignores the warnings of ghostly priests and monks

“sent to warn the unhappy reprobate...of the tremendous value of the Holy Sacrifice.”

Here Sadlier defends what, to middle-class Americans (especially Protestants), would probably be regarded as a superstition of the unintelligent and ignorant: “Let no one scoff at this simple legend, for in it lies a profound meaning, and it is such traditions

319 Sadlier, Confessions of an Apostate (New York: D&J Sadlier, 1864), 8-10.

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that help to keep the faith alive.”320 The anecdote displays the importance of maintaining old customs.

Torn between ambition and “filial and fraternal affections,” Simon succumbs to the specious promise of upward mobility, and booked passage to America. The death of his friend Pat Byrne’s young son is “ominous of evil,” but Simon ignores the portent, and secures a position through the ship’s captain. Upon arrival in America,

Simon discovers that the land of individualism and ambition is hardly the promised land, for necessity forces him to stay briefly in a boardinghouse “much beloved by bugs.” Still worse, Simon encounters religious and ethnic prejudice: “to be a Catholic was bad enough, but to be an Irishman and a Catholic rendered a man to the very lowest grade.” In an era when the Irish were marginalized, Sadlier’s portrayal of such prejudice was realistic (for some prominent Protestants, including Samuel Morse and

Lyman Beecher, nativism and anti-Catholicism were interwoven).321

Although Sadlier’s description of Protestant beliefs is fairly undeveloped, her portrayal of individual Protestants is more nuanced; such characters range from

320 Ibid., 28-29. 321 Ibid., 40, 43. The classic study of nativism remains Billington, Protestant Crusade; see also Ahlstrom, Religious History; Hueston, Catholic Press; Knobel, Paddy and the Republic; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860- 1925 (1955; repr. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996); William R. Hutchinson, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). For “whiteness studies,” see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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predatory and depraved to decent and tolerant, albeit misguided. John Parkinson, a

Protestant friend of Simon’s, gives him some friendly advice: “If you keep your

Popish notions to yourself, and don’t let anyone know what persuasion you belong to, you’ll go ahead fast.” Thus, Sadlier implicitly states that it was very difficult, though not impossible, for Irish Catholic immigrants to assimilate the American middle-class ideology, with its emphasis on industry, honesty, thrift, sobriety, and ambition as the way to success, without abandoning their faith. This creeping secularism is as threatening as is Protestant proselytization. Overweening ambition and pride lead

Simon to first conceal and then repudiate his faith. Not surprisingly, ambition and loneliness gradually seduce Simon away from the fold. With language such as “get ahead fast,” perhaps Sadlier implies that it is excessive ambition, the desire to get ahead at any cost, rather than ambition itself, that is the real danger. Along with excessive ambition is an excessive individualism which destroys membership in a

Catholic community, and produces the isolation that contributed to apostasy.

Through describing the difficulties of Simon’s friend Pat Byrne and his family,

Sadlier critiques the idea that anyone can improve his condition through hard work. A hardworking immigrant, Pat dreams of “a nice little house,” only gradually realizing that “twelve dollars a week in a large city did not go far beyond the support of a large family.”322 Pat wanders away from his faith, until a broken leg and the death of his son leave them poorer than when they arrived from Ireland. Forced to rely on the charity

322 Sadlier, Confessions of an Apostate., 51.

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of the bishop, Pat resolves to return to his religion. Here Sadlier portrays the insufficiency of the Protestant work ethic. To any readers who might be tempted to stray from the faith to “get ahead,” Sadlier replies that such a strategy would not work and could result in disaster, both financial and spiritual. Sadlier was simply being realistic: it was quite possible for an Irish immigrant to work extremely hard, yet remain trapped in a vicious cycle of relentless toil, barely able to feed the family and

“end up” one illness or accident away from utter destitution.

Feeling “bewildered” and “alone amongst Protestants,” Simon encounters a pious old Irish Catholic tutor, and studies under him for a time, but eventually rejects him and all he stood for. As Simon secures more remunerative employment, he became increasingly sensitive to ridicule for the Catholic practice of eating fish on

Fridays and Saturdays. In the kindly Protestant landlady who defends him and says that the bishop is respected “even by the Protestant community,” Sadlier admitted that some Protestants were sympathetic towards Catholic immigrants. Still, Simon experiences a “callous state of indifference” to religion, going to confession only at

Christmas and Easter, ignoring the pious injunctions of his mother, whom he considers a “foolish old woman” (though he continues to send her money). This was a very ironic description: to Sadlier, the “foolish” mother was wise in adhering to her faith, and the ambitious young son was the truly foolish one. His goal was to “be a Catholic heart and soul, but a Catholic such as becomes this free and enlightened country,” a

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Catholic “without superstition,” and never again to form a close connection with other

Catholics.323

This turning point in the novel illustrates several of Sadlier’s themes. Not all

Protestants are villains; Simon’s Protestant landlady practices religious toleration, defending Catholic practices and admiring the bishop. Complementing the exemplary

Protestant was the ideal Catholic, the bishop who is respected by all. Here too Sadlier portrayed a conundrum facing Catholics in a Protestant country. Many Catholic practices, such as praying to Mary and the saints, confessing one’s sins to a priest, venerating and using holy objects (such as religious medals, statues, scapulars, and holy water), and relying on a celibate priesthood, constituted “superstition” to the

Protestant majority. Could one abandon such marginal practices, and thereby become more socially acceptable, and remain Catholic?

Sadlier’s answer was a resounding “no”: this strategy, followed by many ambitious Irish immigrants, could be effective for upward mobility, but at the cost of the soul. Simon is offered a lucrative position with a Deacon Samuels, an “upright and honest...rather kind-hearted” New Haven merchant, with little animosity towards

Catholics. However, Miss Olive, his maiden sister “wielded the domestic sceptre.”324

Sadlier thus portrays disorderly gender relationships in the household of an erstwhile

Protestant deacon; instead of household patriarchy, a woman rules the roost.

323 Ibid., 97-101. 324 Ibid., 107, 114.

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Moreover, Deacon Samuels’s daughter, the aptly named Eve, was “proud and obdurate.” Because Simon is smitten with the captivating Eve, though she was a

“tormenting little minx,” and has a “perfect horror of Papists,” he avoids going to mass altogether. Eve threatens to have Simon removed if he remains Catholic, while tempting him with the promise that “if you were a Protestant, you might have Deacon

Samuels’ daughter as well as a share of his business.”325 Yet the cost would be Simon’s faith. Sadlier implied that Catholics could be upwardly mobile; had Simon simply done his job and left Eve alone, perhaps he would have been fine.

Predictably though, Simon marries Eve, who at first becomes “the brightest, dearest, liveliest little helpmate.” Scenes of their life together provide a caricature of

Protestant perceptions about Catholics. Simon’s conversion to Protestantism is “one of her [Eve’s] favorite subjects of ridicule.” According to Deacon Samuels, Catholics only pretend to worship the same God as Protestants; Catholics “give far more honor to the Virgin Mary and their trumpery old saints than they do to their Maker...they have as many gods and goddesses as they do saints and saintesses.” He regardes popery as a “monstrous thing, an unnatural thing existing in this advanced age of the world.” Sadlier also ridicules what she consideres ignorant Protestant preachers in the character of Mr. Elliott, an untutored shoemaker who claims “gifts in the way of

325 Ibid., 134, 168.

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prayer and expounding.” Elliott has designs on Miss Olive, and eventually marries her, only because “[t]o preach well, a man needs to eat well...a man wants a good cook.”326

Both of these marriages criticize Protestant domesticity. Unlike a proper, submissive, pious wife who defers to the spiritual and temporal authority of her husband, Eve dominates and ridicules him. The true “unnatural thing” was not the pope, but such Protestant marriages. Protestants and Catholics shared the ideal of domesticity, but here Sadlier portrayed a spineless man and shrewish wife. Similarly,

Olive, who dominates her brother’s household, could not choose a suitable patriarch and receives the just punishment of a marriage in which she is relegated to the status of domestic servant. In the character of Elliott, Sadlier satirizes the Protestant minister and implicitly contrasts him with her ideal priest, the bishop (and Simon’s old

Catholic tutor). A priest received education at a Catholic seminary before receiving the sacrament of holy orders from the bishop and being ordained to the priesthood; an orderly process was required. The ideal priest was also a benevolent patriarch, caring for the souls of his flock and dispensing charity when needed, and other novels presented a kinder, gentler Catholic patriarchy. Sadlier portrayed Catholics as belonging to an orderly family, both in the sense of the private, domestic family and the church as a whole. In contrast, Protestants’ method of choosing pastors was as distorted as were Protestant gender relations. Elliott had no education, no higher authority to sanction his preaching, only his private claim to a calling: the serious

326 Ibid., 180, 174-76, 208.

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public matter of selecting ministers was removed from the sphere of church authority and relegated to the whim of a rather ridiculous individual.

Distorted Protestant gender relations worsen over time. Simon and Eve have four children together, who unfortunately become infected with Miss Olive’s fanatical hatred of Catholicism and Catholics and her “sour, arid spirit of puritanical

Protestanism.” Eve too is affected, losing her gaiety as she assumed “the office of inquisitor” when Miss Olive exhorts her to make sure that the children would not be tainted with Catholicism. Here, Sadlier portrays different varieties of Protestantism:

Simon’s tolerant landlady, who admires the bishop and even defends Catholic practices, is very different, and Eve changes over time from the “dearest, liveliest little helpmate” to “inquisitor” under Olive’s baleful influence. Succumbing to the lure of ambition and displaying weakened masculinity, Simon acquiesces, for Protestantism brought “wealth and consideration amongst men” even though his “heart and soul were most deeply stamped with the burning brand of Catholicity.”327 During this time,

Simon grows ever more distant from his mother, who, before she died, returns the money her apostate son sent her, after which Simon blames himself for killing her by breaking her heart. Subsequently, all of his children die, except Joel, the eldest, who

“grew up cold and heartless,” seduces a servant girl, and ignores the resulting

“bastard.” Heartbroken, Eve experiences failed health. Wracked by guilt, Simon sees a

327 Ibid., 212.

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vision of a fiery cross and his mother’s “disembodied spirit,” who warns him to “[d]o penance or perish miserably.”328

Here again, Sadlier gave credence to beliefs such as ghostly visions from the dead that many Protestants considered superstitious. However, some Protestants were becoming interested in spiritualism: Joseph Smith experienced visions which led him to establish a new church, and evangelicals experienced spiritual phenomena such as uncontrollable shaking, trances, visions, and speaking in tongues. Also, many

Protestants, especially women, paid close attention to their dreams.329 Still, even if such practices were accepted among some Protestants, this passage defended a uniquely Catholic version of “superstition” in the form of visions. In addition, by having all but one of Simon’s children die, Sadlier also implied that Protestant

328 Ibid., 226. 329 Such beliefs and practices, although marginal to many mainstream Protestants, were very significant. According to John Brooke, Joseph Smith’s visions and beliefs that the Mormon faithful progress to godhood were influenced by the magical practices of Renaissance hermeticism and alchemy. Braude suggests that trance mediumship helped to empower women, noting that it facilitated women speaking in public and that spiritualists supported social reforms, including women’s rights. Taves suggests connections and continuities from eighteenth-century Methodist revivalism to twentieth century “new age” spiritualism and theosophy. Mechal Sobel and Ann Kirschner analyze the central importance of dreams to some Protestants. John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Braude, Radical Spirits; Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton University Press, 1999); Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in Revolutionary America (Princeton University Press, 2000): Ann Kirschner, “‘God Visited my Slumber’: The Intersection of Dreams, Religion, and Society in America, 1770-1830” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 2004).

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children, in a dour family with disordered gender relations, were not as healthy as

Catholic children. Although the death of a child was frequent at the time (rather than the virtually unspeakable tragedy it is today), even by nineteenth century standards this was a very high mortality rate.

Simon is tormented by this vision, which he could not forget, but still refusees to repent. When Joel accuses his father of being alien, papist, “an apostate and a hypocrite,” Simon strikes his son, and believing that he had murdered his sole surviving child, locks himself in his room in despair. At this point, Eve begs for forgiveness, saying “you’ve done wrong, Simon! — to sell your god for a wife — I did wrong to ask you...” and dies.330 Then Simon finally returns to the Catholic fold during a mission, after losing all but his wealth, mourning Eve and “the probable loss of her soul,” which he considers his fault. By mentioning a Catholic mission, Sadlier praised “Catholic revivalism” and indirectly encouraged priests to conduct such missions.331 For the next twenty years, Simon lives “an obscure and peaceful life” in

Boston and contributes to building a Catholic church in New Haven. He loses touch with Joel, who is outraged by Simon’s reconversion to Catholicism, until by chance

Simon saw his son leading a nativist mob in Philadelphia. Now, Simon’s only

330 Ibid., 241. 331 As Dolan points out, evangelical revivals were prominent among Catholics as well as Protestants. Much like their Protestant counterparts, Catholic revivals, usually called missions, emphasized emotional preaching and individual salvation. Especially in areas with a shortage of priests and churches, the revivals were a practical necessity. Dolan, Catholic Revivalism..\

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surviving child repudiates both key aspects of the unfortunate immigrant’s identity:

Irish ethnicity and Catholic religion. With nothing to keep him in America, Simon returns heartbroken to Ireland, his childhood home, lamenting “I have wealth still...but what of that? I am old, friendless, childless, and alone, burdened with harrowing recollections and ready to sink into the grave unhonored and unknown.”332

In this story, Sadlier violated the conventions of most sentimental fiction by leaving her male protagonist alone and dejected in the end; in Protestant novels many female, but not male, characters shared this sad fate. In this cautionary tale, while warning her readers of the perils of secularism, apostasy, and marriage between

Catholics and Protestants, Sadlier critiqued the American middle-class ideology of success through material achievement. It is a novel not only of nostalgia for the ancestral Irish home, but also a critique of the “promises” of America for Irish immigrants. Some, despite all their hard work, through no fault of their own simply cannot prosper. Sadlier did not reject upward social mobility and material advancement, but rather the excessive ambition that led to apostasy. In other novels, she had characters avoid Simon’s disastrous fate by returning to the Catholic fold before it is too late, though they also shared her religious revision of the Protestant social class system.

332 Ibid., 248, 252.

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Working-Class Catholic Respectability in a Catholic Captivity Narrative

Sadier began Aunt Honor’s Keepsake: A Chapter from Life (1866) by explaining how novels strengthened the faith of their readers. As she lamented how young Catholics “will not read them [devotional works] at all, or at best under compulsion,” Sadlier stated her intention “to fight the spirit of the age with his own weapons,” arguing that “I can in no way advance the cause of religion and virtue more than by providing thus for the joint entertainment and instruction of Catholic youth, through whom the Church is to be perpetuated on earth.”333 Here, Sadlier responded to both general critiques of novels as worthless and corrupting, and to uniquely Catholic concerns.

The novel is a fictional autobiography of a young Irish Catholic orphan,

Charles O’Grady, who with his “poor, pale” Aunt Honor, escapes dire poverty in

Ireland for better prospects in the tenements of New York City. The name of the protagonist’s aunt describes her character (much as Eve’s describes hers). Sadlier’s realistic rendition of the poverty, hunger, and overcrowded tenements awaiting Irish immigrants, and how these problems were not acknowledged, differed from the idealized narratives of other sentimental novels. For example, after contrasting the large, beautiful houses he first saw with the fourth floor walkup where they will live with ten other people, Charlie asks “Honor, is this America?” She replies “Husht...to

333 Sadlier, Aunt Honor’s Keepsake: A Chapter from Life (New York: D&J Sadlier, 1866), vii-viii.

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be sure, it’s all America, but don’t be askin’ questions that way.”334 Immigrants who expected a land of plenty encountered poverty.

Although Sadlier depicts drinking, fighting, and filth in the tenements, she also portrays a type of working-class respectability in the midst of bitter poverty. Aunt

Honor was pious, hardworking, and responsible; other women accuse her of “puttin’ on airs” when she refuses to join them in drinking to excess. The respectable working class shares the values, such as piety, sobriety, and industry, of the middle class; although they could not aspire to their bourgeois prosperity and status, spiritually and morally they were equal. They had more in common ideologically with the middle class than with their economic equals who drank to excess and criticized those who abstained. Here, Sadlier presented an ideal of working class respectability, while critiquing the gospel of success, and conveying the idea that success must be reformulated to place primacy on adhering to the faith. Sadlier’s description of the diversity among the poor was similar to that of Protestant novelists, who distinguished among characters ranging from the destitute seamstress, widow of a formerly prosperous merchant, struggling to support two children, to the callous drunkard who drove his family to poverty and despair.335

334 Ibid., 18-19. 335 For example, the seamstress appears in Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Seamstress” (1843) and the drunkard in Lydia Sigourney, “The Intemperate”, both reprinted in Barbara H. Solomon, ed., Rediscoveries: American Short Stories by Women, 1832- 1916 (New York: Mentor, 1994).

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In the midst of such chaos, disorder, and poverty appears “the astounding apparition of a well-dressed lady,” who, giving them a Protestant tract, offers to care for Charlie and take him to “live in her fine house.” A neighbor warns Honor that

Protestant missionaries “lay their traps for children.”336 It was poor Charlie’s fate to wind up in the clutches of those very missionaries, for on a cold and hungry Christmas

Eve, he and another boy succumb to temptation by stealing a loaf of bread. Along with other “vagrant boys” arrested for such heinous crimes as stealing kindling wood, they are “taken up” to the House of Refuge, a staunchly Protestant institution belonging to the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents (an institution and organization that actually existed in New York City). Here, under the tutelage of the appropriately named Mr. Watchem and his assistant Mr. Slocum, who, comparing

Catholics to the Jewish idolators in the Old Testament, regards Catholic prayers as blasphemous and the cross as an idol, Charlie gradually drifts away from his childhood faith.

Sadlier portrays the guardians of the House of Refuge, and the ministers from every denomination who evangelize the children, as having a disordered masculinity.

Instead of nurturing children and fostering their religious faith and family ties,

Watchem and Slocum destroy both. Since they regard the cause of converting Irish

Catholic adults as hopeless, Watchem and Slocum focus their efforts on coercing children to abandon their faith. Whenever Charlie’s Aunt Honor, or any other Catholic

336 Ibid., 31, 37.

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relative, visit, the rigid Watchem and Slocum become almost hysterical and force them to leave, lest exposure to Catholicism lead a child to drift back into “Romanism.”

Violating the Biblical commandment to honor father and mother, the guardians of the

House of Refuge refuse to allow their charges to receive letters from Catholic relatives, unless they “let alone about religion.” There were a number of cautions here as Sadlier criticized Protestants who she believed were more interested in converting orphans to Protestantism than in caring for them, presenting a devastating critique of reformers motivated not by benevolence, but by self-interest and fear of a faith they did not understand. In so doing, she challenged and reversed Protestant portrayals of

Catholics who adhered to their faith only because of ignorance.

Sadlier also adapted and modified a character frequently found in Protestant sentimental fiction: the pious heroine whose lingering death, usually of consumption, was an inspiration to others. (Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s

Cabin is the most famous. Aunt Honor, whose name suggests her character and who dies of an unspecified illness and overwork, could be placed in this category.

However, a more dramatic and well-developed character of this type in Aunt Honor’s

Keepsake was not an angelic girl or young woman, but rather an orphan boy, Kevin

O’Reilly, a “thin, delicate child, with a look of precocious gravity,” who was taken to the House of Refuge for vagrancy. His usual docility “did not extend to matters of religion,” for he insisted on remaining steadfast in the faith taught him by his Irish

Catholic mother, saying his Catholic prayers and refusing to have anything to do with

Protestantism. His knowledge of, and “fidelity of a martyr” to Catholicism fluster the

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chaplain and guardians of the House of Refuge. When Kevin bests those worthies in a theological debate, Charlie “looked up to him with unbounded respect, intuitively feeling his superiority to myself and the other boys.”337 The Protestant governors of the orphanage, however, do not share Charlie’s opinion, and subject Kevin to ever harsher punishments while encouraging the other boys to ostracize him.

In sentimental fiction, such angelic characters almost inevitably die because they were “too good for this world,” and Kevin is no exception. Although the superintendent would not allow him to have a priest hear his last confession, Kevin prays to the Virgin Mary with his last breath, which Sadlier described as “a sermon for us.”338 In this and other Catholic novels, so many of these angelic, dying characters were male rather than female, possibly because of femininized elements in Catholic devotions. Although gender roles are constantly negotiated and contested, and the context for the practice of Catholicism had changed considerably, there were feminine elements in the nineteenth century. Female converts to Catholicism outnumbered their male counterparts, and during the mid-nineteenth century Catholic devotional manuals became more popular. The Catholic “household of faith” was much larger than the

Protestant nuclear family, encompassing the living and the dead, indeed all the

337 Ibid., 117-18, 139. 338 Ibid., 158. While some Protestant writers, such as Lydia Sigourney, depict angelic dying boys, these characters are usually rather peripheral to both plot and theme of the novel. In “The Intemperate,” the emphasis was on how the drunkard father killed his son through cruelty and neglect, while in Aunt Honor’s Keepsake the boy’s ideal faith is central.

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adherents of the Catholic faith.339 But Catholicism, with its belief in the “communion of saints” and practice of prayers for the dead, expanded the concept of family to include all adherents of the faith, required a saintly dying character with a sphere of influence larger than that of home and family. Because gender conventions denoted masculinity as public, in many Catholic novels this character is male rather than female. Thus Kevin’s type of masculinity is represented as a new Catholic role model, described as stronger than the rigid, intolerant masculinity of the Protestants in the novel. In a religion to which women disproportionately converted, idealizing such a feminized masculinity, even androgyny, might be appealing to women readers of novels.

However, one could also consider these representations of gender revision as a counterbalance to a faith which was patriarchal in practice, with women expected to submit to priests, husbands, and fathers. Children can be portrayed in more androgynous ways than adults, and in the nineteenth century sentimentalized portrayals of masculinity in a variety of genres (including temperance tales, begging letters, and portraits) were quite popular.340 Yet as celibate adults, priests were also, to some extent, desexualized and demasculinized, and unlike Protestant pastors who

339 Several scholars have suggested that medieval Catholicism fostered a uniquely feminine style of devotion; see Bynum, Jesus as Mother; Roper, Holy Household; Fessenden, “Women’s Sphere;” Taves, Household of Faith. 340 See the essays in Mary Chapman and Mark Carnes, eds. Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

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submit only to God (or in the case of denominations such as Episcopalians, a bishop),

Catholic priests were also expected to submit to the pope and venerate the Virgin

Mary and female saints; they are at the lowest level of the Catholic clerical hierarchy.

The complexities of Catholic worship and organization could create more fluid, flexible representations of gender, especially in “ideal” characters such as priests and saintly individuals.

Sadlier complemented her revision of Catholic masculinity with a very unflattering portrait of the Protestant masculinity of the governors of the orphanage, who stopped at nothing to maintain the boys’ conversions, obstructing the efforts of

Charlie’s aunt and uncle to free him from the House of Refuge by sending him and many other children to Illinois, where they were indentured to ministers and other worthy Protestants. Even their names, formerly symbolic of their Irish Catholic identity, are changed; in the act of transforming Charlie from an O’Grady into a

Graham, his Irishness along with his former Catholicism is erased. Interweaving fact with fiction, and with an obvious reference to the just-completed Civil War and

Thirteenth Amendment, in a footnote Sadlier observed that boys and girls “were sold, as it were, at auction” when they were sent west. (She set the novel at a time when

Protestant “orphan trains” were an established institution but before Catholics began

“placing out” children with midwestern farm families).341 Naturally, along the way, she

341 For Protestant reformer Charles Loring Brace, who began “placing out” orphan and abandoned children with midwestern farm families in 1851, see Marilyn Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press,

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criticized Protestant ministers. Charlie is indentured to Elijah Brown, a pastor without a church, a kind man but woefully ignorant, who displays a dislike of the new breed of educated and well-dressed ministers second only to his hatred of “Romanists,” whom he regards as “followers of the antichrist.” By now, after years in the House of Refuge,

Charlie develops a similar feeling toward the faith of his childhood and was very ashamed that he was once a “Papist.” When a Jesuit mission appears on the scene,

Charlie is determined to avoid it, although many Protestants, including the girl with whom he has fallen in love (Rebecca, the daughter of his master) are drawn to

Catholicism.

At this point, the novel takes a strangely gothic turn. Because of their different religious views, Rebecca refuses to accept Charlie’s proposal, encouraging him to instead court her adopted cousin, Rachel, whose antipathy to Catholicism is as vehement as his own. However, as the day of the marriage approaches, Charlie feels an “increasing repugnance” which he cannot fully understand. Fortunately, Rachel’s brother visits before they marry, bringing an old Catholic prayer book, which Charlie recognizes as once belonging to his Aunt Honor. As a result, the three realize that they are in fact siblings, for Rachel was also sent west with a new name. The miraculous appearance of “Aunt Honor’s keepsake” prevents Charlie from marrying his own

1992). Linda Gordon presents a fascinating exploration of the meanings of religion, class, and ethnicity though a study of white Catholic orphans placed in middle-class Mexican Catholic homes, and the white Protestants who interfered in The Great Orphan Abduction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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sister. Sadlier’s narrative device provided a scathing criticism of the Protestant practice of changing the names of Catholic orphans and sending them west, which according to Sadlier, could lead to the most unnatural perversions. Here Sadlier blended the genres of captivity narrative and sensational gothic novel to provoke outrage at a Protestant practice, and to respond to Protestant allegations, such as those of Maria Monk and Rebecca Reed, of nefarious practices in convents.342

The captivity narrative, beginning with the account by famous colonial Puritan,

Mary Rowlandson of her capture by Native Americans, became an institution in

American letters, and virtually all literate Catholics would have been familiar with

Maria Monk’s The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (1836). Here was a counter-captivity narrative: instead of a virtuous Puritan taken captive by “savages,” or in the specious narrative of Maria Monk’s imprisonment in a convent and subjection to horrific activities there, Sadlier had Charlie taken captive first by tyrannical overseers in the House of Refuge and then by ignorant Protestants in the

West. Instead of captive women rescued by men, a young man was rescued by a prayer book. Moreover, Sadlier expanded the conventions of the gothic horror novel with the threat of incest, one of society’s greatest taboos.

Like most sentimental novelists (and in contrast to the unfortunate Simon in

Confessions of an Apostate) Sadlier provided a happy ending for her long-suffering

342 According to Franchot, Monk and Reed blended these two genres. Franchot, Roads to Rome, 135-61; for analysis of Rebecca Reed, the 1834 burning of the Charleston convent and Mari Monk, see McCarthy, “The Rescue of True Womanhood.”

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characters. Charlie returns to the faith, the entire Brown clan (except for Rebecca’s father) convert, and Charlie and Rebecca marry, symbolically combining Rebecca’s

Puritanism with Charlie’s Irish Catholic ancestry to create a new American ideal with a distinctly Catholic identity. However, they could not marry before her father who, refusing to sanction the union and representing Protestant intolerance, died. Almost immediately after converting back to Catholicism, Charlie return to New York and the

House of Refuge to relate the story of his narrow escape from an incestuous marriage and to let his former keepers know that their mission on his behalf failed, for he is once again a Catholic. He also tells them exactly what he now thinks of them, calling

Slocum a “coward! knave! hypocrite!”343 (Watchem had gone on to his dubious reward.) Clearly, Sadlier was expressing her opinion of the character of all too many

Protestant missionaries, as well as giving her readers a vicarious thrill. Even the names of these characters serve as narrative devices, as for all his watching the children,

Watchem neither knew nor understood what was going on with them. The rather stereotypical character of Aunt Honor was emblematic of both the faithful Catholic and of a working-class respectability which was grounded in religion and morality rather than status, and was more honorable than the specious respectability of socioeconomic status to which the apostate Simon aspired.

Sadlier wrote Aunt Honor’s Keepsake primarily to call attention to what she considered abuses in institutions run by Protestants and to encourage Catholics to

343 Sadlier, Aunt Honor’s Keepsake, 294.

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found and support their own orphanages. Yet the larger context was the problem of maintaining the Catholic faith in the face of constant, unremitting Protestant hostility and power to control public institutions such as orphanages, and also whether to retain or discard Irish customs. In an era when Irishness and Catholicism were denigrated

(and frequently conflated), Sadlier celebrated both. Above all, she was concerned with the danger of apostasy, especially for young men who, in the wake of the Civil War, experienced more freedom of movement and a greater chance of being converted to

Protestantism than ever.

Anna Dorsey, German Ethnicity, and Elite Catholic Respectability

While Sadlier emphasized the dangers of apostasy, Dorsey portrayed the difficulties of converting to Catholicism. However, she wrote some novels that emphasized ethnicity, such as The House at Glenaran (1887), a historical novel about

Irish Christianity. (Sadlier also wrote historical novels, such as Daughter of Tyrconnell

(1863), about the struggle of a young countess to remain Catholic in James I’s

England; the novel was notable for its extremely unflattering portrait of the monarch).

Dorsey wrote one novel, The Oriental Pearl, or the Catholic Emigrants (1857) about difficulties faced by German immigrants in America her purpose being “to eulogize and assist in sustaining the great Catholic truth, that confidence in the mercy and wisdom of God is the best preservative from temptation and despair.” The novel was

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dedicated to the Society of the Archconfraternity of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, suggesting that Dorsey was active in this devotional organization.344

Although Dorsey was generally more sentimental and less realistic than

Sadlier, there were elements of realism in the novel, and like Sadlier, Dorsey addressed the problems of assimilating to American society and culture while maintaining the faith and customs of the old country. She openes the novel with a description of a group of newly arrived German immigrants, only a few of whom speak English. The little group, Conradt the father, his daughter Marie, and their young friend Heinrich, are taken in by Caspar, an elderly widower, who promptly takes them to a German mass. Although they miss the “Faderland” [sic], while touring

Washington, D.C., and seeing the monument of the same name, they are pleased that in their new home there is no “overgrown aristocracy” but rather “one species of nobility...open to all” with “industry and integrity.”345 Here, Dorsey portrays ethnic solidarity existing simultaneously with the American middle-class ideology of success and the supremacy of American democracy over European aristocracy. The family faces trials of poverty, fears that Conradt, who moved west to buy land, had died in a shipping accident, but he returns, Marie and Heinrich marry and Dorsey provides her readers with a conventional happy ending.

344 Dorsey, The Oriental Pearl, or the Catholic Emigrants (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1857). 345 Ibid., 78.

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More typical of Dorsey’s works are her novels of conversion. Like Sadlier, she provided a didactic preface to The Student of Blenheim Forest (1867). Noting that

“several of the doctrines and practices of the Church are explained in a manner quite simple enough to be understood by all,” Dorsey stated that her “object was to illustrate some of the difficulties which those who become converts to the True Faith are frequently destined to encounter.”346 The primary narrative is of Louis Clavering, son of an aristocratic Virginia planter, the process of his conversion to Catholicism, and his death from consumption. Yet the novel also includes the cautionary tale of his mother, who had spent “the most tranquil and happy moments” at a convent school in

France, but after marrying the Anglican Colonel Clavering, is unable to practice her faith. Still, she builds and shows her son “an oratory most exquisitely filled up” with an altar with candles, a crucifix, statue of Mary and the baby Jesus, a Madonna, and also with books including saints’ lives, devotionals, and polemical works. Here

Dorsey, like Sadlier, places great emphasis on the importance, and even the agency, of holy objects. Clavering’s mother informs her son that, when he was sick as an infant, she baptized him, and he then recovered.347 Through presenting long excerpts from

Louis’s diary, describing theological works and his responses, Dorsey, in effect,

346 Dorsey, The Student of Blenheim Forest (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1867). 347 Ibid., 37-38, 47, 53.

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practices theology, an occupation formally closed to women in the nineteenth century.348

She describes the elaborate festivities on a wealthy southern plantation while ridiculing Protestant ignorance, reversing the tropes of ignorant, priest-ridden

Catholics and educated Protestants (a device also favored by Sadlier). One young lady expresses her horror, reporting that she sees in a Catholic church “priest and people adoring the bread and wine in the sacrament — yes, worshipping it!” Meanwhile,

Ambrose Beverly, a non-Catholic advocate of religious toleration, defends Catholics from the charge of idolatry, quoting two Anglican bishops, while Colonel Clavering prepares to arrange the marriage of Louis to Isadora, a distant relative.349 Aware that

Louis is in imminent danger of converting to the despised faith, the colonel offeres him “$100,000, one of my richest plantations, and several valuable slaves” if he would only spend the year with an Anglican bishop and reconsider. Louis expresses affection and filial obedience, but refuses. Despite Mrs. Clavering’s entreaties, the colonel sends his son away.

Louis travels to Baltimore, where he stays with Mrs. Botelar, an “old and responsible” Catholic lady friend of his mother’s, who treats him as a son and

348 For how women in another patriarchal religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, practiced theology through their novels see Susanna Morrill, “Women’s Popular Literature as Theological Discourse: A Mormon Case Study, 1880-1920,” in Brekus, ed., Religious History of American Women, 184-205. 349 Ibid., 79-82.

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introduces him to Father Francis, who is an ideal priest: devout, kind, knowledgeable, and attentive. Dorsey describes “evening devotions” in a room “beautifully filled up with altar lights and holy pictures,” and “holy objects” in Louis’s room, with their

“sweet influences on the unconscious senses.”350 One can imagine how such lavish descriptions, combined with allusions to the objects having their own intrinsic agency, could foster sales of such devotional objects. In describing how Mrs. Botelar survives the death of her son in a shipwreck, Dorsey describes an attractive aspect of

Catholicism: the doctrine of “communion of saints” and purgatory. She refers to the

“cold and unloving creed of Protestants, who believe that death separates all the ties and affinities, all the communion” between the living and the dead.351 Belief in prayers for the dead would be appealing, perhaps especially to mothers, during a time when the death of a child was all too frequent. The imagery contrastes a Catholicism of warmth, light, and eternal connection to family members with a Protestantism of coldness and separation from departed loved ones.

While in Baltimore, Louis gradually succumbs to consumption. While

Sadlier’s saintly dying male in Aunt Honor’s Keepsake was a child, Dorsey presents a young adult male in the traditionally feminine role of resigned suffering through illness, death, and dying, and presents the scene in the flowery language favored by many sentimental women novelists: Louis “sank back into the arms of Father Francis,

350 Ibid., 139-41. 351 Ibid., 150.

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pale and fainting.” Throughout his long, lingering illness, Louis is attended by Mrs.

Botalar, Father Francis, and especially his devoted friend and companion, Ambrose

Beverly. Indeed, their friendship assumes an intense, quasi-romantic and even homoerotic dimension. Beverly confided to Father Francis that, although it may seem

“unnatural, perhaps unmanly,” Louis’s “pale, trusting, enduring, and brave heart has made me feel that there is at least one on earth with whom my very being could become incorporated.”352 Such sentiments were evident in women’s letters to their friends, in fictional representations of friendships between women, in letters between men, and in literary representations of “sentimental men,”353 yet Dorsey reconfigures such bonds in distinctively Catholic setting. She presents the process of converting to

Catholicism as the most genuine version of both masculine strength and sentiment by having Beverly say that “it certainly requires a greater amount of moral courage to make a man a Christian than a warrior; it would be easier to “become a desperate soldier” than to “kneel in a Catholic church and make the sign of the cross.”354

In the end, Colonel Clavering relents, and travels with his wife to see their dying son, whose “appearance was a perfect incarnation of the poetry of consumption...a rare and indescribable shade of spiritual beauty.” This description of

352 Ibid., 234, 269. 353 Chapman and Hendler, eds., Sentimental Men; Smith-Rosenberg, “Female World”; Shirley Samuels, Romancing the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 354 Ibid., 234.

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the death of a pale, weak, dying consumptive was similar to those of young women in

Protestant novels; the convention about consumption was the same, but the gender reversal, reconfigured the representation of masculinity. After long deathbed vigils,

Louis dies. Three years later when Colonel and Mrs. Clavering and Isadora travel through Italy and seek refuge from a storm in a monastery, they discover that Beverly is among the monks. Dorsey provides a conventional happy ending for other characters: Mrs. Botelar’s young daughter marries well, and Father Francis becomes a bishop. Thus, Dorsey presents a relatively conventional conversion story, but with a reconfigured, sentimental masculinity.355

In marked contrast to the poignant death of Louis, Dorsey portrayed the demise of Mr. Talmadge, Presbyterin deacon and ardent nativist, as comical. Upon reading the

Orthodox Organ (a paper that warns of the imminent threat of the pope ruling the

United States), Talmadge runs to “give the alarm” about the dangers of immigrants, and trips over the family dog, injuring his head. As blood flows, elders of the church surround him, reading the “awful disclosures of Maria Monk and Miss Reed.” Not surprisingly, the ministrations of the elders are ineffective, and Mr. Talmadge dies.

Later, although Mrs. Talmadge had been afraid even to enter a cathedral, she follows

355 In Romances of the Republic, Shirley Samuels analyzes representations of sentimental masculinity in the novels of well-known Protestant authors, arguing that they became less patriarchal and analyzing how sentimental novels incorporated elements of Gothic horror. In Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) she analyzes anxieties about death and male vulnerability in the wake of the massive deaths in the Civil War. These themes are also evident in the novels of Sadlier and Dorsey.

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in her son’s footsteps by converting to Catholicism.356 Along with comic relief, here was heavy handed satire of Protestant nativists and their ignorant, hysterical fears that a papal takeover was imminent. The name of the paper was ironic; for Catholics only their faith could be orthodox. Dorsey let her readers know what she thought of

Protestant doctrines by having them not read the “awful disclosures,” not the Bible, to the dying man (unlike proper Catholics who would call a priest to minister the sacrament of “extreme unction,” or last rites). The unfortunate deacon, ridiculous in life, meets an ignominious death, a farce not a tragedy.

Dorsey also provided representations of Catholic benevolence in this novel. In the character of Mrs. Talmadge, a wealthy widow, Dorsey portrays a charitable

Catholic lady who is constantly visiting and aiding the poor, dispensing food and religious medals, and “consult[ing] with the lady managers” of an asylum about helping impoverished orphans. Here Dorsey critiques Protestant benevolent societies by having Mrs. Talmadge tell Louis about a lady who solicits contributions for “the indigent Greeks” while ignoring her half-starved slaves. The novel was published two years after the end of the Civil War, and many of the elite Baltimore Catholics that

Dorsey would number among her readers must have previously owned slaves. Mrs.

Talmadge exemplified the ideal of the paternalistic slaveowner, genuinely concerned for the welfare, both spiritual and material, of the slaves. However, the major lessons here were that “charity begins at home,” the Protestant lady who neglected her slaves

356 Ibid., 214-220.

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was a hypocrite, and Catholic ladies were more effective charity workers than

Protestants. Significantly, to Dorsey giving “religious medals” was as important as dispensing food to the starving.

While Sadlier never mentioned African-Americans, they were present throughout Dorsey’s novel, usually as slaves and always in stereotyped ways. Near the beginning of the novel, when Louis journeyed by candlelight to his mother’s secret oratory, Albert, his faithful but “obtuse” slave, “began to think of Obi and all his frightful train of spectres.” Seeing a glimmering light from the oratory, Albert runs in panic to the colonel’s room, having mistaken Louis for the dreaded Obi. Such stereotypical portraits of superstitious, ignorant, childlike slaves were characteristic of paternalistic proslavery defenses.357 Dorsey depicted Louis’s slaves as having a strong affection for their kind master. When they hear rumors that Louis would be leaving, and why, many “had assembled and thronged the shore to receive a last kind word and look from one, who through holding the position of a master...had been their untiring friend in sickness and health.” Upon his departure, they “filled the air with their cries and prayers that he would soon return” and when he returned in a casket, “more than a hundred negroes sat or stood in groups...many a bronzed cheek might be seen wet with tears,” and all “uttered lamentations.”358 This was a representation of the feminized

357 Ibid., 101; The classic study of paternalism remains Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll. 358 Dorsey, Blenheim Forest, 118-20, 333-34.

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singing and emotional displays of grief found in some Protestant novels (most notably in the scene of the kind master’s death in Uncle Tom’s Cabin).

In a later novel, Ada’s Trust (1887), Dorsey depicted free African-Americans in a similar manner, this time using stereotypical dialect as well. When the protagonist and her aunt travel to Virginia, they are met by a female slave who greeted them with

“a smile and a grotesque dip of a curtsy.” Discovering that this slave and her twin sister are named “Venus” and “Nervy,” Ada could scarcely contain her laughter at the disparity between them and “the marble venuses she had seen abroad.” When Ada’s aunt asked Venus if she and her husband were free, Venus responded with the words of a stereotypically happy slave: “Lor’ no, Missis, not as you understan’s it; but we’s as free as ever we wants to be...It’s a mighty good ‘rangement...’cos if we gets sick, or has trouble, we goes back to Mars’r to be tooken keer on.”359 This was a representation of post-emancipation slaves who, in the imagination of their former masters and mistresses, did not really want to be free, but instead preferred to remain on the plantation, in a state of childlike dependence close to slavery, and the refined aunt agreed that this arrangement was “advantageous.” Ada calls Venus “aunty” and appreciates the slave’s “thoughtful kindness” in supplying them with a basket with snacks. Venus’s husband, who is “of higher intelligence than his wife” arranges a carriage for them. After giving the ladies the basket, Venus “dropped a curtsy, and ran into the house for fear the young “Missy” would not accept the nice things packed in

359 Dorsey, Ada’s Trust (Baltimore: John Murphy and Company, 1887), 101-105.

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it, or offer to pay for them.” Dorsey inserted an autobiographical footnote: “Venus was the name of my mother’s old cook, and her twin-sister’s name was Minerva, and I doubt if two more ill-favored darkeys were ever born, or two more unapproachably skillful cooks...[slaves] dearly loved all high-sounding cognomens.”360 Thus, Dorsey represented slaves, and since the novel was published in 1887, African-Americans, as inherently childlike, generous, kindhearted, affectionate, and inferior to whites, a theme found in many white-authored post-emancipation novels and in postbellum nostalgia for the Old South.

Paternalism was equally evident in portrayals of the slaveholders. It is unclear whether Mrs. Botelar’s “servants” are immigrant domestic servants, free African-

Americans, or slaves. At any rate, she is the ibdeal mistress, tending to the care of their souls by having them attend her evening devotions, and giving them Sundays and holy days as “literally days of rest,” not requiring ceaseless toil, and allowing them to

“go out and visit a friend” when the day’s work was done. Although “inferiors in position and education,” Mrs. Botaler explains to Louis that her servants are “always treated as rational and sensitive beings...[with] all the attributes of humanity in common with ourselves.”361 This is a rather different version from that of Venus. Still, with characters such as kind mistresses and charitable ladies, Dorsey provides a model of Catholic benevolence for her readers to emulate.

360 Ibid., 104, 106-07. 361 Dorsey, Blenheim Forest, 153-55.

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In this novel, Dorsey appeared relatively unsympathetic to the plight of the poor, portraying their misfortunes as being largely their own fault (a striking contrast to Sadlier’s Irish novels). In one scene, Father Francis assists a man whose wife and child were literally dying of starvation. On the way to the man’s “ruinous looking hut,” he hears “sounds of drunken revelry...shrill curses...shameless tongues of women

[who] now joined in the chorus of blasphemous sounds.” Francis arrives at the miserable hovel and saw a dead little girl, whose beauty Dorsey positively rhapsodized: “emaciated to the last degree by hunger and cold...how solemn and eternal seemed the peace which rested on her still white lips!” Once again, here was an angelic child. Dorsey portrayed the cause of the father’s difficulty not as unemployment, but being a “bad manager” and above all, regarding religion as “a pretty humbug.” Repenting and learning from experience, he and his wife could live respectably in “plain though comfortable circumstances.”362 Unlike Sadlier, who considered larger, structural causes of poverty such as the low wages paid to Irish immigrants, Dorsey represented the primary cause of poverty as individual moral failure, irresponsibility, and impiety. In their divergent attitudes towards poverty,

Dorsey and Sadlier resembled their counterparts, with some of the poor more

“deserving” and sympathetic than others.

362 Ibid., 314-23.

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The Trials of Converts, Holy Contagion, and the Agency of Objects

In The Flemings, or Truth Triumphant (1869), Dorsey portrayed the first encounter of a Protestant family with Catholicism. The novel opens with a “wild and bitter night” in rural New England, where the Flemings, a respectable Protestant family who can claim an ancestor aboard the Mayflower, gather around the hearth.

Wolfred Fleming, known as “the Elder” for his position in their Congregational church, is reading John’s gospel as he leads the family in worship. At their door appears a stranger, lost in the snowstorm. When the stranger clutches a medallion and says “blessed mother,” Wolfred’s wife Martha assumes that he was referring to his actual mother, not to the Virgin Mary.

Dorsey thus used humor, unlike Sadlier’s more bitter sarcasm, to display

Protestant ignorance of Catholic beliefs and practices, and appropriated the eighteenth- century ideal of the Protestant, especially Puritan, father leading the family in household religion.363 Remaining faithful to the older, patriarchal model of Christianity with the father maintaining his proper place as the spiritual and temporal head of his household, would lead to conversion. In this novel genuine Protestant masculinity, in its ideal, patriarchal but kindly manifestation, developed into a Catholic masculinity that effects the conversion of the entire family. This was a representation of an ideal

363 Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper and Row, rev. ed. 1966); Demos, Little Commonwealth; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Boylan, Sunday School; Ann Douglass, Feminization of American Culture; McDannell, Christian Home.

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Protestantism, quite different from the farcial Mr. Talmadge or the tyrannical

Watchem and Slocum of Sadlier’s fictional House of Refuge. Moreover, Dorsey was being (probably deliberately) ahistorical: there were no Puritans in the second half of the nineteenth century, but perhaps at a time when Protestantism was very diverse

(from Episcopalianism to evangelicalism to Mormonism), she seemed to regard colonial Puritans as a prototype of cold, unfeeling Protestantism.

The Flemings discover that the stranger at their doorstep is Patrick McCue, an

Irish Catholic peddler from Boston. Wolfred and Martha argue about whether or not they should even let such an individual stay with them. Both abhor and are terrified of

“papism,” but Wolfred regards Patrick’s arrival as providential, an opportunity to practice the Christian duty of charity.364 McCue is steadfast in his faith. When asked to refrain from ritual observances, such as making the sign of the cross at dinner, he says that he would rather go back in the snow. At dinner, he entertains the family with ballads and tales of his adventures in Europe. Before leaving, he gives the Elder a copy of a treatise on Catholic doctrine (Milner’s End of Religious Controversy, which was quoted extensively in some Catholic novels and portrayed as instrumental in conversions), and gives the Fleming daughters a statue of Mary and a picture of the crucifixion. The picture “thrilled” them, by making the crucifixion seem more

“real.”365 Ebmotion is the key here: the statue itself stimulates a powerful emotional

364 Dorsey, The Flemings, or Truth Triumphant, 23-27. 365 Ibid., 66-67. Bishop Milner died in 1826.

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response, and the fictional Fleming women follow a very different route to

Catholicism than the converts memorialized in obituaries, who were portrayed as intelligent, reasoning women who converted only after a long process of investigation and study. Here, a religious object awakens an emotional devotion ,which in turn leads to a series of conversions.

The neighbors gossip, criticizing the Flemings for even hosting a “papist.”

Here Dorsey inserted a mini-sermon on religious intolerance, which she ascribed to

Protestants: “They thought they were serving God, and vigilant in his service, when they sat in judgment on their brother’s shortcomings and transgressions.” She also argued that Protestants, with their multiplicity of beliefs, were united only by their shared enmity of “popery”; only in Catholicism was “the integrity of the

Scriptures...preserved intact.”366 (Ubiquitous in Catholic novels was the idea that by denying proper ecclesiastical authority, Protestantism inevitably led to interpretative anarchy). In this “insular” farm neighborhood, the preacher, named Ray, was the stereotypical joyless Puritan divine. Ray’s “spiritual hypochondria” and Calvinist rigidity drive his own grandson, George Merrill, away from the church and into the arms of those egregious heretics who believe in universal salvation. Unable to undergo conversion, many church members “become indifferent.” While Mrs. Fleming was

“one of the stern disciples” of Ray, Wolfred read McCue’s Catholic books in addition to his Protestant treatises, concluded that “none of them agreed” and reluctantly

366 Ibid., 72-88

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accepted that he “could not make them harmonize, either symbolically, practically, or theologically.”367

As his doubts accumulate, Wolfred stops going to church. By having him discover the doctrine of the mass in the Bible, Dorsey portrays conversion to

Catholicism as the fulfillment, rather than the repudiation, of Christianity. He is the first of the Flemings to convert, telling himself “[i]f this is being a roman Catholic, then my god, I am one— heart and soul”; indeed, the only alternative was infidelity.368

Astonishing his family, Wolfred demonstrates his conversion by making the sign of the cross at breakfast, which as the first meal of the day represents a new beginning.

Appalled, his wife responds in stereotypical Protestant manner, fearing “a huge, idolatrous, and devilish system.” Still, exposure to Catholicism strengthens her own religion, as during communion she experiences “a thrill, an awe, such as she had never felt before.”369 Now his wife, like his daughters, experiences rapturous religious feeling and sentiment. The eldest son, however, is devastated by this turn of events, for his father’s conversion means the loss of his marriage prospects to the deacon’s daughter, and “the wrecking of a career just begun.” Dorsey here asserts that conversion to

Catholicism entails “sacrifice... humiliation... contempt... false accusations.”370

367 Ibid., 104.

368 Ibid., 168. 369 Ibid., 170-72, 191-92. 370 Ibid., 217.

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The Fleming daughters, however, are drawn to the statue and painting. Indeed,

Dorsey portrayed these religious objects as having almost an agency of their own in fostering conversions; as though Catholic devotional objects carried a kind of holy contagion. With the transmission of faith through physical objects, as well as ideology and devotional practices, Catholicism might be understood in almost biological terms.

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, disease, especially epidemics of cholera, were believed to be caused by an atmospheric miasma associated with intemperance and poverty, qualities linked especially to immigrants.371 For Dorsey, however, an Irish

Catholic immigrant brings objects with a benign rather than baleful influence. The religious objects inevitably stimulate an intense emotional experience, so they also serve the rhetorical strategy of elevating Catholic “feeling” over austere, unemotional, cold Protestantism. Moreover, in contrast to the plain crosses that Protestants usually used, the Catholic crucifix, with its vivid image of the suffering Christ, might present a powerful image that would elicit an emotional response.

When Wolfred’s anti-Catholic business partner threatens to withdraw, the

Flemings faced financial ruin. Even the impoverished neighbors whom the new

Catholics had assisted had, at the insistence of the minister, nothing to do with the

Flemmings. Isolated and in the throes of such troubles caused by anti-Catholic prejudice, Wolfred writes to Patrick McCue in Boston, who shows the “miraculous” letter to the bishop and sends the Flemmings more books to encourage them to

371 Rosenberg, Cholera Years.

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preserve in their new faith. (The books may function as holy objects as well as texts).

The bishop, who is kindness and charity to the poor personified, is a very different religious leader than his dour Puritan counterpart. His “plain old two story brick house” contrasts with the image of Catholic ostentation and worldly, wealthy bishops involved in political intrigue. Instead, this bishop is a beloved patriarch of his parish

“family.”

Following the conventions of domestic fiction, Dorsey provided a relatively happy ending. One of the Fleming daughters, clutching the statue of the Virgin Mary, miraculously survives the collapse of a ceiling; here Dorsey represents a holy object as saving the girl’s life, as well as awakening the devotional sentiment that will save her soul. After a nearly fatal illness, Mrs. Fleming, the last Protestant holdout, converts to

Catholicism, as did the fiances of the eldest son and one of the daughters, which make two happy marriages possible. The family journeys to Boston, where they see McCue, meet the bishop, and received the sacraments. The younger son, whose dreamy and impractical nature was a constant source of chagrin to his parents, was found to be a talented sculptor and sent to Rome to study, symbolically linking the isolated Fleming family with the center of Catholicism. Fortuitously discovering valuable mineral deposits on their property, the Flemings are saved from financial ruin.

Such prosperity through divine intervention, rather than hard work, contrasted in some ways with Protestant success narratives such as those found in the novels of

Horatio Alger. In Ragged Dick (1868) the title character prospered through “pluck and luck”: he was industrious, honest, and deserving, but also needed the help of others

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(which always came at just the right time).372 Along the way his benefactors introduced him to church and Sunday School, but he was well on the way to success before becoming Christianized. For the Flemings, assistance came from piety and divine intervention alone. Yet all was not bliss, for “the Flemings live among themselves, still avoided, and their prosperity envied by their Puritan neighbors.”373

Thus Dorsey, like Sadlier, introduced some social realism into her didactic sentimental fiction by incorporating anti-Catholicism into her plot structure.

Anna Dorsey’s novels reversed the Protestant convention of a virtuous effecting the conversion of her whole family, or saving an intemperate husband from ruin. Instead, Dorsey portrayed the father as the leader in what she portrayed as a journey to the one true faith. As Wolfred first led his family in Protestant worship, he encouraged them in the study that led them to convert. Laymen, as well as priests, could be religious leaders in Dorsey’s world. In contrast to the male Protestant characters in the novel, who were either indifferent to religion or stereotypicallt joyless, rigid Puritans (though much more ignorant than their colonial counterparts), the male Catholics, McCue, the bishop, and Wolfred, were kind and generous. Both

Sadlier and Dorsey tended to present their male characters more vividly than their female characters, perhaps because of their concern about the danger of apostasy,

372 Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick, Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks (1968), intro. Michael Mayer (New York: Signet Classics, 2005). 373 Dorsey, 443.

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which would be greater for men because of their greater freedom of movement, especially after the Civil War. Another reason was that, because religion was at the center of their narratives, they focused less on women’s domestic lives.

Representing Catholic Respectability

While both Dorsey and Sadlier were concerned with representing Catholics as respectable Americans, they took different approaches. There may have been at least two intended audiences. Sadlier’s novels seemed directed towards the entire Catholic laity: not only the middle-class women who were often avid novel readers, but especially Irish immigrants who faced the challenge of maintaining both their faith and their customs. She probably hoped both to encourage Irish immigrants and to help her middle-class, native born readers better to understand, and be more willing to help,

Catholics from a very different background. Dorsey’s readership was most likely middle-class Catholic women. Her dramatic conversions would appeal to Catholics who, especially after being subjected to Protestant proselytizing, would like to see the roles reversed. She probably wanted to encourage the converts among her readership not to convert back to Protestantism, those who were raised Catholic to stay away from Protestantism and, by portraying Catholicism as superior, indulge her readers’ fantasies.

Sadlier celebrated Irishness, presenting impoverished immigrants in the characters of poor, virtuous Aunt Honor and other Irish Catholic immigrants as eminently respectable. Dorsey portrayed converts to Catholicism as the epitome of

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bourgeois respectability. The Irishness of McCue, the peddler whose influence leads to so many conversions, could be seen as incidental or as central. Dorsey simultaneously appropriated and subverted the strategy of anti-Catholic polemicists who conflated

Catholicism with Irishness.374 She also minimized German ethnicity. Perhaps responding to divisive ethnic conflicts among nineteenth-century Catholics, Dorsey asserted religious unity over ethnic fragmentation. Yet the position of African-

Americans, who were portrayed in very stereotypical ways, is difficult to ascertain.

Although Dorsey asserted that “servants” (who may be Irish immigrants, or even impoverished native-born white girls) were human, and represented them as included in evening devotions, slaves were excluded from Dorsey’s image of religious unity.

Although Sadlier probably encountered free African-Americans, they were invisible in her novels, and largely in Dorsey’s as well.

The divergent approaches of Sadlier and Dorsey suggest that Catholic novelists subsumed ethnic conflict to doctrinal unity.375 Although they were writers, not

374 Ahlstrom. Religious History, 555-68; Hueston, Catholic Press; Knobel, Paddy and the Republic. See also the cartoons of Thomas Nast, some of which portray Catholics of unspecified ethnicity with the apelike physiognomy of “Paddy.” 375 Dolan emphasizes ethnic division, while McDannell focuses on ideological unity. Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 294-320; McDannell, Christian Home and Material Christianity,, 132-62. For Irish ethnicity see Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (New York: Routledge, 2000); Tyler Anbinder, Five Points The 19th Century New York Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001); Diner, Erin’s Daughters. For an overview of the extensive recent literature, Dierdre Moloney, “Who’s Irish?: Ethnic Identity and Recent Trends in Irish-American History.” Journal of American Ethnic History 28 (4): 100-109.

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established religious authorities, the women wrote novels that served a didactic purpose, so they, along with the authors of devotional and prescriptive literature, were engaged in educating the Catholic reading public. Using very different approaches to race and ethnicity, both writers constructed a representation of Catholicism that incorporated ancestral Puritanism, creating a metanarrative in which Catholicism, not

Protestantism, was the more genuinely American religion.

Despite their different approaches to ethnicity, both Sadlier and Dorsey attributed a form of agency to material objects. Sadlier never described the content of

Aunt Honor’s prayer book; rather, the object itself was instrumental in averting a disastrous marriage between brother and sister. Dorsey portrayed a statue of the Virgin

Mary as miraculously saving the life, as well as the soul, of a young woman who surely would have died when the ceiling collapsed. In the novels, such Catholic devotional objects not only inspired religious devotion and fostered conversions, but also intervened dramatically in the physical lives of the characters. By portraying such spiritual objects as carrying a kind of holy contagion, Sadlier and Dorsey implicitly reversed the paradigm of associating disease with impoverished Catholic immigrants.

They appeared to be deliberately flouting the conventions of mainstream Protestants, who frequently criticized Catholics for their orientation towards ritual objects, a devotion which, like prayers to the saints and Virgin Mary, bordered on idolatry.

Perhaps their aim was to reassure practicing Catholics about their use of devotional objects, while enticing potential Protestant converts with representations of ardent religious feeling. Since Protestants would continue to criticize Catholics for their

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“superstition” and use of holy objects, the novelists had the choice of minimizing these practices, thereby portraying a Catholic practice that would be more socially acceptable, or of embracing them. They chose to emphasize the use of holy objects in a way that would encourage their readers to do the same. Protestant novelists did not need to describe religious practices and beliefs because they knew that mainstream

Protestantism was central in American society and culture. Catholic novelists knew that their faith was marginal, so they wrote to illustrate their religious truths.

Unlike Protestant novelists, who often portrayed women’s associations with one another and emphasized marriage, domesticity, and the contested negotiations between public and private, Dorsey and Sadlier usually relegated their female characters to secondary roles. Similarly, both Dorsey and Sadlier representated

Protestant and Catholic masculinities to construct their visions of Catholic respectability. Their male characters were much more compelling than the female characters, most of whom were undeveloped or presented as stereotypes. Perhaps they thought that portraying Catholic masculinity as more normative than Protestant masculinity would be an effective strategy for constructing Catholic respectability.

Whether substituting dying, saintly male characters for female characters, representing a man as assuming what they regard as his rightful place as the family’s religious leader, or providing unflattering portrayals of Protestant masculinity, Catholic women writers assimilated and adapted conventional tropes in a way that destablized the dominant Protestant metanarrative.

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Historians of evangelical Protestant denominations that moved from the margin to the mainstream of American life have argued that a shift from femininity to masculinity was a constitutive element of this process. Baptist and Methodist women were marginalized, losing their formerly prominent role, as their churches gained respectability.376 Perhaps Catholic women writers utilized a similar strategy of representing masculinity (in an ideal, somewhat desexualized, kindly, albeit patriarchal form) as central in constructing Catholic respectability. Priests are (at least in theory) celibate, always submissive to God, the saints, and the bishop, and in this sense, gendered feminine, although in their priestly duties towards laypeople they are gendered masculine. The gendering of priests suggests some of the complex ways that gender is contested and negotiated.

In effect, these novelists presented a double gendering of their faith. On the one hand, they portray a feminized masculinity and feminine style of religious devotion, yet on the other hand, the reality of Catholic theology diverged from such representations: the faith was based on a patriarchal ideology which required submission to Christ, the pope as “vicar of Christ,” the parish priest, and for women, their husband or father. Thus, a feminine devotional style with ritual objects and prayers to the Virgin Mary and female saints was subsumed within the practice of a patriarchal religion.

376 Juster, Disorderly Women.

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Both Sadlier and Dorsey portrayed respectability as grounded in religious faith and morality, rather than in socioeconomic status. It seems possible that such representations contributed to the denial of social class in nineteenth-century America, much as Richard Bushman demonstrated the diffusion of refinement geographically from cities to towns to rural areas, and vertically through the social class structure, contributed to the illusion that most Americans are middle class.377

Through these strategies, by challenging Protestant constructions of Catholics as Other, Sadlier and Dorsey implicitly reversed the dominant perception of

Catholicism as marginal and Protestantism as normative. Thus, women writers played a critical role in the project of those nineteenth-century Catholics who redefined themselves as occupying a social, spiritual, and cultural center, while relegating the dominant Protestant culture to the periphery. By means of rhetorical and narrative strategy, Sadlier and Dorsey minimized the vast denominational, class, ethnic, and regional differences among Protestants, positing a unitary Protestantism in opposition to Catholicism. They adopted and reversed the Protestant strategy: these Catholics portrayed Protestants as Other.

There were several ways of reversing the perception of Catholicism as peripheral and Protestantism as central. Defenders of Catholic theology presented

Protestantism as a spurious religion which, produced by rebelling against proper

377 Bushman, Refinement of America. Perhaps Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, overestimates the significance of manual versus nonmanual labor in social class definition and underestimates the importance of ideology.

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religious authority, lead to chaos. Portraying themselves as practicing religious toleration, Catholic polemicists regarded themselves, rather than Protestants, as the true heirs of the American political tradition. Writers of obituaries created geneologies of respectability, linking Catholic women to American history, especially the

Revolution. Likewise, Catholics repositioned their faith from to periphery to center by creating religious buildings and institutions such as cathedrals, convents, monasteries, and parochial schools. Necessitated by the expanding Catholic population, such establishments provided a geography and iconography of the sacred which in turn simultaneously shaped and reflected religious ideologies. Lacking the social, political, and economic power that most white male Protestants enjoyed, some nineteenth- century Catholics, responded by attempting to situate their faith at the center of

American society and culture. Yet this was something they could never accomplish, except within the Catholic mental world. Catholic women novelists like Mary Sadlier and Anna Dorsey presented their readers with such an imagined world, where

Catholicism always triumphed in the end.

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Chapter 4

TRUE MEN, TRUE WOMEN, TRUE RELIGION? GENDER, RESPECTABILITY, AND NINETEENTH CENTURY CATHOLIC PRESCRIPTIVE LITERATURE

In 1868, an anonymous “Lady” published an article “On the Rights of Catholic

Women” in The Catholic Mirror. Readers expecting or hoping for a discussion of the vexing issues of whether or not women should have the right to vote, or for married women to own property, or to have equal access to education and careers, would have been disappointed. Ignoring such directly political questions, she turned instead to women’s roles and duties in the church, urging women “who may be awakened to a desire of claiming their women’s rights” to emulate their Parisian counterparts by

“making and embroidering vestments” instead. Given the problem of too few (and very overworked) priests, she maintained that lay involvement in the church was crucial: “in the early ages the laity suffered martyrdom with the clergy…[now] the laity should share the labor of the clergy.” Warning against “neglect of domestic duties,” she urged women, especially the unmarried, to aid the church by sewing, teaching catechism to children and to converts, translating French, German, and Italian

Catholic writings, and of course praying. Laywomen’s activities in the church would thus parallel the duties of nuns in the working, teaching, and contemplative orders of

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nuns. Eliding any distinction between sociopolitical commentary and advice giving, she stated that “[w]e have tried to show Catholic women what are their rights” (which were, of course, actually duties) while instructing women on proper behaviors and attitudes.378

For Catholics in the late nineteenth century, advice literature, social and political commentary, and theology were interwoven, each embedded in the other.

Through prescriptive literature (which encompassed several genres such as sermons, obituaries, saints’ lives, novels, and articles addressing contemporary issues, as well as advice manuals), Catholics expressed their understanding of their world, their identity, and their reactions to modernity in highly gendered terms, with complementary masculine and feminine versions of respectable domesticity. Both clerical and lay writers created representations of a respectable identity that obscured differences in

378 “The Rights of Catholic Women, by a Lady,” Catholic World [CW] 7, no. 42 (Sept.. 1868), 844-48. The journal was established in 1865 by noted convert Isaac Hecker, who was ordained a Redemptorist priest and subsequently founded the Paulist order. Although its circulation was much smaller than those of the domestic Sacred Heart Review and devotional Ave Maria, it is worthy of attention for its literary quality and intellectual content. Although Isaac Hecker never supported women’s suffrage, he encouraged education for women, corresponded with at least two Catholic suffragists, and “featured articles from every point of view on the woman question by an exceptionally large number of Catholic women writers, many of whom he discovered and encouraged.” Margaret Mary Reher, Catholic Intellectual Life in America (New York: MacMillan, 1989), 45-49; Karen Kennelly, “Ideals of American Catholic Womanhood,” in Kennelly, ed., American Catholic Women: A Historical Exploration (New York: MacMillan, 1989), 7-10; quote p. 7.

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ethnicity, economic status, and social class, anticipated the social teachings of Pope

Leo XIII, and presented a unitary Catholic social and religious imaginary.379

Prescriptive literature revealed how laypeople practiced theology in a broader, more informal sense of the term through a process of interaction and mutual influence with the clergy, while engaging with the larger society and addressing changing economic, social, and political conditions. The process of developing these complex, sometimes contradictory ideas, demonstrated how laypeople “’unconsciously’ expressed complex religious and theological knowledges in their practices.”380

Theology, as well as devotional practice, was a lived experience for believers; theology and practice were mutually constitutive. Catholics’ charitable practices, fears of the “dangers” in “the world”, and negotiation of women’s “place” all were informed not only by theology in the narrower meaning of specific doctrines put forth by the pope and priests, but also by the broader social and cultural contexts, including the meanings believers ascribed to the social and economic disruptions accompanying

379 Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum defended the rights of workers to a living wage but stood against socialism and communism, is usually considered the beginning of Catholic social justice teachings in America. John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2003), 131; Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 332. 380 Riesbrodt, Promise of Salvation, 87. Riesbrodt was writing of liturgies, but his concept can be extended to other activities, for all take place in a web of interrelated meanings. Riesbrodt’s general theory is oriented towards the meaning of religious practices: “the threefold theme of averting misfortune, overcoming crises, and providing salvation appears in all types of religious practices in the most diverse religions, regardless of time, place, or specific cultural form,” 91.

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a second wave of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, revised gender roles, confrontation with “modern” ideas, Protestantism, and secularization. The practice of their faith was more than adherence to a belief system (and one that, as in the question of women’s “place,” was open to negotiation): it was a lived experience in “a network of relationships between heaven and earth.”381 Rather than becoming more secular, if anything, the public and private, sacred and secular, theology, sociopolitical commentary and advice to individuals, became even more interwoven for Catholics over the course of the nineteenth century.

381 Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 2. Similarly, McCartin describes prayer as a relationship, “an ongoing and fluid engagement between the powers of heaven and the people of earth.” Prayers of the Faithful, quote p. 11. Taves also discusses the lived experience of the “communion of saints,” the prayers to saints, and relationships among the living and the dead in Household of Faith; see also Joseph P. Chinnici, Living Stones. My analysis draws especially upon Riesbrodt and Orsi, and also on Geertz’s analysis of religion and ideology as cultural systems, Catherine Brekus’s discussion of women’s history and religious studies, Otto’s classic study of “the ‘numinous’ state of mind” in religious feeling, and works on the relationships among religion and social class. For discussion of recent work on religion and class see David Hackett, Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, R. Laurence Moore, and Leslie Woodcock Tentler, “Forum: American Religion and Class,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 15, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 1-29. Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System” and “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in Interpretation of Cultures, 87-125, 193-233; Brekus, “Introduction: Searching for Women in Narratives of American Religious History,” in Brekus, ed., Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past, 2-50; Otto, Idea of the Holy, 7. A recent study drawing on the concept of “religious consciousness” is Matthew Pehl, “The Remaking of the Catholic Working Class, 1939-1945,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 19, vo. 1 (Winter 2009): 37-67. For the agency of women in patriarchal religions, see Wiesner- Hanks, “Women, Gender, and Church History,” and M. Christine Anderson, “Negotiating Patriarchy and Power: Women in Christian Churches,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 3 (2004), 197-96.

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Americans had read advice literature from the early colonial period in the form of Puritan sermons, novels, and advice for success in Benjamin Franklin’s Poor

Richard’s Almanac, but the antebellum era was a golden age for domestic advice manuals. Catholics developed specific advice manuals later than did Protestants, but

Catholic women no doubt the read the books of Protestant writers such as Lydia Maria

Child, Catharine Beecher, Sara Josepha Hale and others, who extolled the ideal of a domestic “separate sphere” for women.382 “Prescriptive literature,” however, encompassed more than works telling women how to raise a families and manage households, as some advice manuals were directed to men, and others to children.

Moreover, genres other than advice manuals also functioned as prescriptive literature.

Saints’ lives and obituaries provided models of exemplary Catholic behaviors, attitudes, and ideals to emulate; temperance tales presented cautionary tales of behaviors to avoid, and novels did both. Sermons and letters, such as Julia Compton’s,

382 Poor Richard’s Almanac was first published in 1733. The literature on domesticity is vast; see Welter’s classic “The Cult of True Womanhood”, Smith-Rosenberg, “Female World of Love and Ritual”; Kerber, “Separate Spheres: The Rhetoric of Women’s History”; Cott, Bonds of Womanhood; Fessenden, “Gendering Religion”; Hewitt, “Taking the True Woman Hostage;” Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic. McDannell, considering both Protestant and Catholic domesticity in Christian Home, argues that Catholic domesticity did not appear until after 1865. For the women in groups in public see Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence; Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class and Women in Public between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880; Lawes, Women and Reform; Boylan, Origins of Women’s Activism; Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak analyzes novels and “moral formation” on how women incorporated themselves into civil society through education; antebellum women formed academies and “apprenticed themselves as makers of public opinion,” in literary societies, quote p. 153.

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also functioned as prescriptive literature. Even advice manuals did not simply provide guidance to individuals, for they contained political, social, and cultural commentary: in the context of giving advice to their readers, they provided uniquely Catholic perspectives about the gender system, class, ethnicity, and respectability.

Conversely, some Catholic commentaries on social, political, and economic issues told their readers what they, as individual readers, must do to safeguard society from falling into chaos and anarchy. Prescriptive literature revealed the complex ways that public sphere and private space, the personal and the political have always been interrelated, how the gender system interacted with other cultural systems of class, ethnicity, and religion, and how Catholic laypeople creatively engaged with the dominant culture, as well as with the clergy, to develop new understandings of themselves and their changing society in the late nineteenth century.

Through the course of the nineteenth century, Protestant concerns about gender were as significant for anti-Catholic ideology as were political questions. Some

Protestants maintained that the celibacy of priests and nuns undermined the family and that the practice of confession threatened female purity. Protestant convent narratives such as Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures and Rebecca Reed’s (which led to the burning of a Boston-area convent in 1834) blended the genres of captivity narrative and Gothic horror with their dark tales of innocent victims held captive and subjected to nefarious abuses at the hands of vile priests, fostered suspicion, fear, and distrust of

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Catholics, who created their own literary responses.383 Protestants used highly gendered rhetoric in their polemics on the incompatibility of Catholicism and

American political traditions, fearing that Catholics would owe their primary allegiance to a foreign power, the papacy, rather than to their country. As waves of

Irish immigrants fleeing famine descended upon the American shores in the 1840s and

1850s, nativists frequently conflated Catholicism with Irishness, stereotyping the immigrants as drunken “Paddy” and slovenly “Brigid.” However, the intersection of religion and ethnicity was considerably more complex: there were “lace curtain” Irish,

Protestant Irish, and native-born Catholics of British, French, and German descent in the antebellum era.384

383 For discussions of these developments see Ahlstrom, 527-58; Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 127-57; Cohen, “Miss Reed and the Superiors”; McCarthy, “Rescue of True Womanhood”; O’Brien, “Scribbling Brigids”; Ryan, “Inventing Catholicism”; Wilknison, “A Novel Defense”; Becker, “Rational Amusement and Sound Instruction.” 384 For gendered dimensions of anti-Catholicism, see Cohen, “Miss Reed and the Superiors;” Marie Ann Pagliarini, “The Pure American Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America,” Religion and American Culture 9, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 97-128; Franchot, Roads to Rome. Fessenden discusses how “the discourse of anti-Catholicism… served from the seventeenth century onward to underpin the social, political, cultural, and economic dominance of North Atlantic Protestants in the United States” and how Harriet Beecher Stowe transformed anti-Catholic tropes into anti-slavery rhetoric in Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Culture and Redemption, quote p. 7. For Irish ethnicity see Kenny, American Irish; Anbinder, Five Points; Diner, Erin’s Daughters; for Germans Don Heinrich Tolzmann, The German-American Experience (Amherst, Ny: Prometheus Books,2000), 151-83; for recent historiography Moloney, “Who’s Irish?”

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Catholic prescriptive literature of all genres attempted to reposition the faith from the margin to the mainstream of American society by setting forth a Catholic normative ideal of domesticity that contradicted Protestant representations of the

Catholic gender system as fundamentally flawed and dangerous. Gender figured prominently in Catholic ideology throughout the nineteenth century, and centered as much on masculinity as on femininity. At the same time both men and women shared in the cult of sentimentalism, some men tried, and failed, to gain acceptance for a distinctively working-class style of masculinity, while advice givers subsumed all classes into a respectable, and implicitly middle-class, identity centered around

Catholic faith and masculine and feminine domesticities, a representation that obscured economic and ethnic differences. Although it offered the lived experience of faith and belonging to a greater community (both temporal and spiritual), and provided a path towards respectability for all believers, in the long term, the highly gendered

Catholic cultural system contributed to the ongoing “confusion about class” in

America.385

385 The phrase is Richard Bushman’s, Refinement of America, 323. As Geertz notes, “religious concepts spread beyond their specifically metaphysical contexts to provide a framework of general ideas in terms of which a wide range of experience – intellectual, emotional, and moral – can be given meaningful form.” Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, 123. Patricia Kelleher , “Class and Catholic Irish Masculinity in America: Young Men on the Make in Chicago” Journal of American Ethnic History 13, no. 2 (Summer 2009), 7-42; Mary Chapman and Glen Hendler, eds., Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009). Sentimentalism continued throughout the century and into the twentieth.

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Political Know-Nothingism and anti-Catholicism waned during and after the

Civil War. Sectional divisions over slavery proved more significant then religious and ethnic differences, and after the war finding ways to cope with the unimaginable loss of life took precedence. However, nativism and anti-Catholicism resurfaced after

Reconstruction as waves of “new immigrants” from Eastern Europe immigration increased the number of Catholics and labor unrest exacerbated with a second wave of industrialization, Democratic socialism, Marxist communism, and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution entailed troubling implications for both Catholics and Protestants.

Within the Catholic church, the question of “Americanization” provoked heated debate in the 1870s and 1880s as some groups, especially Germans, hoped to maintain their traditions and even to reproduce European Catholicism in the United

States, while others, notably Irish immigrants, hoped to create a distinctly American church.386 It is in this context of controversies within the Church and external threats, along with industrialization, immigration, and urbanization, that Catholics began to write books and articles of advice.

386 Pope Leo XIII condemned “Americanism” in 1897. For nativism and stereotypes of Catholics, see Billington, The Protestant Crusade; Knobel, Paddy and the Republic; for the Catholic response, Hueston, Catholic Press and Nativism. For the “Americanization” controversy, see Ahlstrom, Religious History, 449-54, 825-841; Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 234-37, 294-320; for a comparison of devotionalism between the “immigrant church” and the “Americanists,” Chinnici, Living Stones, 119-33; David Mislin, “The American Catholic Encounter with Organic Evolution, 1875-1896,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 22, no. 2 (Summer 2012), 133-62.

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Writers of Catholic prescriptive literature from 1865 through 1890 used highly gendered language to express fears and concerns about unsettling social, political, economic, and cultural trends. In their view, and adhering to the Catholic faith and gender system was the only possible solution to secularism, anarchy (both political and interpretative), and chaos – including the “woman question,” encompassing not only suffrage but more broadly, women’s roles in society.387 Notably, a number of articles in the Catholic World on woman’s “place” were written by women, sometimes anonymously. In so doing, women aimed to empower themselves through strengthening their domestic position and their roles in the church, rather than through

387 The classic study remains Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (rev. ed. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1975). Among the extensive literature on the postbellum women’s rights movement, see Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminisn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987); Ellen DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Rosiland Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). In recent years, “remonstrants” have received more attention. Jane Jerome Camhi, Women Against Women: Anerican Anti-Suffragism, 1890-1920 (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1994); Thomas Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party: Female Anti-Suffratists in the United States, 1868-1920 (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1994): Carolyn Summers Vacca, A Reform Against Nature: Woman Suffrage and the Rethinking of American Citizenship (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Susan Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign Against Women’s Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); Susan Goodier, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement (Women in American History Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); and especially Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith, 158-96, for discussion of Catholic journalist and antisuffragist Katherine Conway.

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challenging the patriarchal structure of their church.388 Like Julia Compton’s letters, obituaries in the Catholic Mirror, and novels, nonfiction works by women writers in the Catholic World engaged creatively with the dominant culture to create their own understanding of themselves. Their perspectives paralleled those of Father Bernard

O’Reilly, the preeminent male Catholic advice writer.

His Mirror of True Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Women in the

World (1877) and True Men as We Need Them (1878) remained in print through multiple editions until 1903 and 1901, respectively. (They appeared in a combined edition in 1878, perhaps to appeal to couples). The books were not labeled for

“Catholic women” and “Catholic men,” but for O’Reilly and his intended readership,

“true” was identical to “Catholic.” He also wrote several novels and biographies, including Life of Leo XIII (1887), whom he knew personally. As an Irish immigrant,

O’Reilly, like Mary Sadlier, was concerned with the problems of maintaining religious

388 Cummings argues that Catholic nuns and laywomen felt more marginalized as Catholics than as women, and chose to empower themselves through their church rather than challenge its patriarchal structures, and, drawing on Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s work, compares their strategy to that of African-American women who felt more marginalized as African Americans than they did as women; both groups sought to empower themselves within, rather than in opposition to, their churches. These studies suggest the complex interplay among gender systems, ethnicity, race, religion, and the dominant culture. Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith: Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Jane Dabel discusses how African Americans, men and women, deployed women’s middle-class respectability to position themselves for racial equality, A Respectable Woman: The Public Roles of African American Women in Nineteenth Century New York (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

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and ethnic identity in a new country, as well as with poverty, low wages, and overcrowded living conditions in immigrant neighborhoods, and with religious education. He also wrote lavishly illustrated historical books about Biblical and New

Testament times, along with essays on contemporary issues.389 Mirror of True

Womanhood and True Men as We Need Them reveal how he appropriated middle- class, native-born Protestant gender roles into a uniquely Catholic context, used gender norms to critique industrialization, individualism, and capitalism, and presented all Catholics, native-born and immigrant, of all social classes, as respectable. His works also reveal nostalgia for an idealized medieval “age of faith” when organic unity rather than individualism held sway. In them he offered

389 O’Reilly, Heroic Women of the Bible and the Church: Narrative Biographies of Grand Female Characters of the Old and New Testaments, and of Saintly Women of the Christian Church, both in Earlier and Later Ages (New York: J.B. Ford, 1877); Illustrious Women of the Bible and Catholic Church History: Narrative Biographies of Grand Female Characters in the Old and New Testaments, and of Saintly Women of the Holy Catholic Church, both in Earlier and Later Ages (New York: J. Dewing, 1889), adobe PDF eBook. He believed that public education should be religious, and taxpayers should fund both Protestant and Catholic parochial schools. “How to Solve the School Question,” North American Review 155, no. 432 (November 1892), 569- 74. For the rising popularity of “interior prayer” and St. Therese of Lisieux’s devotion to the “sacred heart of Jesus” after 1865, see James P. McCartin, “The Sacred Heart of Jesus, Therese of Lisieux, and the Transformation of U.S. Catholic Piety, 1865-1940,” U.S. Catholic Historian 25, no. 2 (Spring 2007), 53-67; for the popularity of Lourdes water see McDannell, Material Christianity, 132-62. For antebellum Protestant fascination with Catholicism see Franchot, Roads to Rome; for late nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic romantic nostalgia for the Middle Ages see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 141-215.

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recommendations for specific devotions, expressed concern about destructive influences in “the world”, emphasized the authority of Church and Pope under God as a defense against the “anarchy” of Protestant individualism; and recast the domestic ideal in a uniquely Catholic social and ideological context.

Nostalgia for an “Age of Faith” and the Critique of the Success Ethic

Both Catholic and Protestant writers often longed for an idealized, romanticized medieval past. In 1869, the Catholic World reprinted a French article on

“The Ignorance of the Middle Ages.” The title could be interpreted two ways: as the lack of learning in the Middle Ages, or as the prevailing ignorance of the intellectual accomplishments of the era. According to the author, the belief that the “Middle Ages” were an era of illiteracy, ignorance, and superstition between the intellectual glories of ancient Greece and Rome and the renewal of learning in the Renaissance was due to

“absolute ignorance of the nobility of the Middle Ages.” Rather, they were the golden age of classical learning, an era when popes founded schools, inside the great fortresses soldiers studied the seven liberal arts, scholars translated Greek classics into

Latin, Charlemagne brought great scholars to his castle, women read Greek, Latin, and

Hebrew, attended schools where they “received the same instruction as men,” and in the sixth century St. Radegonde (a queen who chose the monastic life) required all nuns at her Poitiers convent to study.390 By telling these stories about how eminent

390 “The Ignorance of the Middle Ages,” CW 8, no. 47, February 1869, 598-618. In an 1843 diary entry, Hecker, drawing on the pre-Reformation educated nuns, wrote that

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leaders, both male and female, respected learning, the writer both implicitly encouraged his (presumably well educated) readers, both men and women, to emulate them and expressed fears about contemporary cultural decline.

Similarly, in True Men as We Need Them, Father O’Reilly wrote that

“heroism, courtesy, and gentleness of manners” originated in “chivalry and the knightly enterprises.” Indeed, the poetry of the Spanish Reconquest had “all the great virtues of the true man described and illustrated in the lives of numberless warriors.”391 The “diligent, laborious, preservering, self-denying, and self-reliant” man would be familiar to readers of Protestant or secular advice literature. Yet Protestant and secular prescriptive literature, from Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac and Autobiography to British author Samuel Smiles’s 1859 advice on Self-Help

(which remained in print through the nineteenth century), to Horatio Alger’s novel for boys such as Ragged Dick (1868), emphasized individual ambition and accomplishment, measured by the acquisition of wealth. For Franklin, Smiles, and

Alger, the virtues of self-discipline and responsibility were grounded in the modern

only the Catholic church gave “full scope to women’s capacities and powers”; in Questions of the Soul (1855) he criticized excessive individualism and in Aspirations of Nature (1858) argued that only Catholicism could satisfy “the whole man – reason, heart, senses.” Reher, Catholic Intellectual Life, quotes p. 42, 45.The Catholic World also published poetry patterned after that of the Middle Ages; for example, George H. Miles, “Christine: A Troubadour’s Song,” CW 3 (16), July 1866, 433-42. The liberal arts were the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) for beginners and trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics) for more advanced students. 391 O’Reilly, True Men as We Need Them, quotes on pp. 218, 30.

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marketplace, not the bonds of home and church from an idealized age of chivalry and faith.392

Of course, a typical medieval peasant would stare in blank incomprehension at the descriptions of their era from O’Reilly and other advice givers, whose portrayals of medieval life were very different, to say the least, from the difficult, even sordid, realities of life in a feudal village. Such longings for an idealized time and culture reflected the fears and concerns of authors who used nostalgia as a rhetorical strategy

392 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help: with Illustrations of Conduct and Perserverance (1859) was originally self-published in Great Britain, but also read in the United States; Smiles later elaborated on the points he made in Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1887). However, the most influential didactic literature for men was probably Horatio Alger’s novel for boys, Ragged Dick, the quintessential success narrative about the poor boy, who through “pluck and luck” grows rich which inculcated the values of the success ethic to generations; Alger wrote a series of popular novels starring this protagonist. Smiles, Self-Help, Project Gutenberg EBooks, http://www.gutenberg.org/935; Alger, Ragged Dick. In 1905, Max Weber observed that capitalism was most advanced in Protestant areas and critiqued Protestant ideology, specifically how the Calvinist concept of a “duty in a calling” had been turned towards moneymaking as an end in itself, rather than as a means to live: “Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life…[this] reversal of what we should call the natural relation” … [is] “a leading principle of capitalism.” The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), repr. Taylor & Francis Adobe PDF eBook, 2005. More recently, Daniel Bell has analyzed how “market values” can undermine traditional Protestant values. A few feminists have challenged the widespread acceptance of such individualistic competition as the best pathway towards women’s empowerment. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has critiqued the alliance of feminism with individualism. According to Arlie Russell Hochschild, “[f]eminism is to the commercial spirit of capitalism as Protestantism is to the spirit of capitalism. The first legitimates the second. The second borrows from but transforms the first.” Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (rev. ed. New York: Basic Books, 1996); Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions; Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002), quote p. 23.

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to critique modern developments, especially industrialization, individualism, and secularization, by contrasting the present age with an idealized past when medieval people all had their places in the “Great Chain of Being” in an organic, hierarchical society under God.

In contrast to the advice from Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Smiles, and the success narratives of novelists such as Horatio Alger, which were based first and foremost on the idea of the individual man competing in market society for riches,

O’Reilly and other Catholic writers followed the medieval Catholic corporatist ideal.

In the theology of the Church on earth as the “body of Christ,”393 each person had a specific place, though since all were members of the community of faith, all would be honored both here and for eternity. Indeed, O’Reilly quoted Self-Help to criticize the ambition “to bring up boys as gentlemen… [as] lacking any solid foundation for manly or gentlemanly character, and the result is that we have a vast number of gingerbread gentry.” Rather than wealth or social position, faith and the behaviors that the writers believed were the products of faith, were the true measure of respectability.

Moreover, he represented the old European nobility as a group inspired by the ideal of noblesse oblige: they were “for the most part to be seen among the most laborious of

393 The Biblical references are in the Pauline letters: “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ…Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular” (I Corinthians 12:22, 27) and “From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love” (Eph. 4:16, KJV).

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the public servants.”394 As with his portrayals of medieval life, O’Reilly’s nostalgia for a unified, organic, hierarchical society with a hereditary nobility represented an idealized past to portray fears about the fragmentation and individualism of the present. By the 1880s, Catholic historians, novelists, and authors of catechisms, cast the “romantic mood” in a uniquely Catholic context, extolled the Middle Ages as an ideal past that could serve as a pattern for the future.395 In their criticisms of modernity and nostalgia for the past, they drew upon Pope Pius IX’s 1864 encyclical Quanta

Cura with its “Syllabus of [Modern] errors condemning naturalism, rationalism, pantheism, socialism, communism, and liberalism.396

Throughout the course of the nineteenth century (although there were dissenting voices) the normative view of women remained that of domesticity. Ideas

394 O’Reilly, True Men as We Need Them, 141. 395 The phrase is Sydney Ahlstrom’s. The broad intellectual movement encompassed an intellectual, literary, and philosophical revolts against Enlightenment rationalism in Europe among both Catholics and Protestants. In the wake of the Revolution and Napoleon’s wars, French theologians such as Rene de Chateaubriand and Joseph de Maistre praised medieval Catholicism and called for a return to Church and Pope as “keys to peace and social order.” Ahlstrom, 583-93; quote p. 592; for American developments in the late nineteenth century see McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful, 37- 38; Gleason, Keeping the Faith, 37-40; Dolan, 313-16; for uses of nostalgia among Episcopalians and Anglicans see Lears, No Place of Grace, 141-215; for sentimentalism the essays in Chapman and Hendler, eds., Sentimental Men, especially Scott Sandage’s analysis of “epistolary beggars”, their desperation (and sometimes redemption) in “The Gaze of Success: Failed Men and the Sentimental Marketplace, 1873-1893,” 181-201. 396 Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura: Condemning Modern Errors and The Syllabus of Errors, December 8, 1864, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9quanta.htm, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9syll.htm.

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about femininity did not change as much as did ideas about masculinity, which transitioned from an emphasis on community to a stress on the individual. The process had been underway during the first stages of the “market revolution,” but regardless of social political, and economic changes, Catholics continued to adhere to the older corporatist idea.397 That is not to say that Father O’Reilly and other advice givers neglected the need to “succeed,” or that sentimentalism was lacking in Protestant and secular contexts. In some ways, O’Reilly agreed with the Protestant and secular success literature, advising men to “create your opportunities” and “have a purpose in life.” Still, for him all must be subordinated to the faith; education, like moneymaking, was a means to an end, not an end in itself: the only purpose of education was to prepare for “the work which the Divine Will sets out for every individual.” Poor men were respectable: “the mind and heart of man, though born in a sheep-cot or the hut of a savage, are a soil capable of bearing a rich and immortal harvest of Godlike virtues and merits.”398

Although O’Reilly gave specific advice to men depending upon their occupations (lawyers, physicians, statesmen, writers, businessmen, and laborers) in all cases, faith and conscience must be central. For example, readers were told that

397 In the extensive literature, see especially Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 398 Bernard O’Reilly, True Men as We Need Them (New York: Peter F. Collier, 1878, Adobe PDF eBook), 20.

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“conscience should be the soul of all business.”399 To Catholic advice givers, whether a man was engaged in business, philosophy, or science, separating work from religion would be unimaginable. Catholic writers incorporated both men and women into the corporatist religious ideal, in contrast to the Protestant and secular gender ideologies, which posited individualism for men and Victorian domesticity for women.400

Despite developing the critiques of individualism, industrialization, and capitalist exploitation, which were embedded in his advice-giving, O’Reilly had no new vision for society. Like many Catholics who saw destruction in the wake of industrialization and individualistic capitalism, he would have restored a distant, idealized Medieval past of organic unity and hierarchy. Catholics did not propose a new socioeconomic order, but rather created a “useable past” to critique the present and to constitute Catholicism as the truest form of Americanism. This was an ongoing process through the nineteenth century: Bishop John Spalding of Peoria, whose

“influence on Catholic thought may have been greater than that of any other Catholic

399 Ibid., 25. 400 See for example McDannell, Christian Home in Victorian America; Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Stephanie Coontz, Social Origins of Private Life; Steven Mintz, A Prison of Expectations: The Family in Victorian Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 1983); for the “pastoralization of housework” in the antebellum era, when women’s unwaged domestic labor was not construed as “work,” Boydston, Home and Work.

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prelate,” wrote in 1847 that in the church all were “reduced to the same level of humble suppliants for mercy.”401

O’Reilly, linking Spalding’s views to advice for individuals, absorbed all social classes into an ideal Catholic respectability based on the old concepts of the universal need for salvation and of the church as “the body of Christ,” a supernatural entity in which all had their part, rather than on an idea of expanding rights. He emphasized the duty of men to be good husbands, “diligent, laborious, persevering, self-denying, and self-reliant,” and promised that all men “be they born ever so lowly

– are God’s true gentlemen,” and implicitly, respectable in a way that eliminated differences between the working and middle classes.402 Social class differences, at

401 The assessment of Spalding’s influence is from Mel Piehl, Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origins of Catholic Radicalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 34; Spalding, “Influence of Catholicity on Civil Liberty,” quoted in Chinnici, Living Stones, 42. Spalding also maintained that the first Lord Baltimore introduced freedom of worship to the colonies and that the Magna Carta was Catholic in origin. As previously noted, writers of obituaries also represented Catholicism as the most genuine form of Americanism. 402 O’Reilly, True Men 29-30. Sociologists and historians have proposed numerous models of social class formation, and an in-depth discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice to say that class may be as much a matter of ideology and representation as it is of economic relations. Max Weber noted the importance of status (prestige) as well as class (economic relations); Anthony Giddens posited “market capacity” as the key factor; Pierre Bordieu emphasizes performative aspects of social representation. More sociological and historical studies have focused on the creation of the working class than of the middle classes; E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966) is foundational, as is Paul Johnson for the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Stuart Blumin, drawing on Weber’s view of class primarily in social and cultural terms and on Anthony Giddens, found the difference between manual and nonmanual work to be crucial to middle- class definition (although he also noted other factors, including residency and

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least in his imagination, would be absorbed into a respectable Catholic identity, the working class absorbed into the middle class, and all men would be fathers, either of their own children or as priests. Although he gave advice to both married and single women, his omission of lifelong bachelors reflected his fears and anxieties. Believing that the home was being endangered by the modern forces of industrialization,

participation in voluntary societies); “class awareness” and “class consciousness” are different, and denial of social class can be a part of class awareness. William Sewall draws on Giddens and Pierre Bordieu’s concept of “habitus” and cultural schemas. Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of Advanced Societies (London and New York: Harper and Row, 1973); his Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) provides useful analyses. Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class; William Sewall, “A Theory of Structure” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (1992), 1-29; For the ideology and regulation of behaviors, Robert Wurthnow, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). For studies of the complex interrelations between the gender system and middle class identity, Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; for working class women, Stansell, City of Women; for class, gender, race, ethnicity, and the life course, Boylan, Origins of Women's Activism. According to Burton Bledstein, the “middling sorts” of the late eighteenth century became the “middling classes” of the antebellum era, and in turn the “middle class was in the process of taking the form of an adjective, pointing to the shift from plural – middle classes – to singular in the second half of the nineteenth century.” Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnson, eds., The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class (New York: New York University Press, 2001), quote p. 8. I suggest that the ideological construction of a unitary Catholic middle class is evident in prescriptive literature; however, this was a matter of representation rather than reality. As Dolan points out, the “immigrant church” was divided along lines of class and ethnicity; its class structure “resembled a pyramid, with very few professionals or families of wealth at the top and large numbers of immigrants situated at the bottom level of society; in between was a small class of immigrants and native-born Catholics.” Over the course of the century, the structure remained unchanged, although the middle class grew larger. Dolan, American Catholic Experience, quote p. 156.

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capitalism, science, revolution, secularization, and challenges to traditional gender roles, he and others turned towards an idealized medieval past for answers, and to

Church and pope to defend against what they considered dangers of the modern age that threatened to tear society asunder.

Single Women, Respectability, and the Critique of Industrialization

O’Reilly’s nostalgia for the Middle Ages, and fears for the spiritual and moral safety of home and family, probably influenced his representations of women as either married, domestic, middle class, and comfortable, or as single, struggling servants, shopgirls, or factory workers. He was deeply sympathetic towards the plight of women who worked twelve-hour days in factories and who were treated as “the slaves of our wealthy shopkeepers, forced to give their taskmasters unlimited labor without the legal right to be housed, clothed, cared for in illness, or secured by their owners against sheer starvation.”403 He longed for a more paternalistic, less individualistic ideal of human relations, an idealized Middle Ages when masters fed and housed apprentices and (at least in his imagination), pious mistresses supervised domestic servants, society was bound together into an organic whole, and everyone attended mass.404

After the Civil War, many women who had hoped and expected to marry now realized that, in the wake of the catastrophic loss of life, they would spend the rest of

403 O’Reilly, Mirror of True Womanhood, 406. 404 As part of the Romantic movement in art and literature and revolt against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, non-Catholics also celebrated the Middle Ages. Lears, No Place of Grace, 141-180.

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their lives as spinsters, working for wages.405 Some Catholics maintained that the

Church was more accepting of single women, even representing the single life to be best for some women. As one writer pointed out in the Catholic World, in the culture at large, “the very title of ‘old maid’… entails odium and contempt.” Moreover, the best remedy for bad marriage was not marrying. Dreading the single life, many women paid little attention to whether or not they and their prospective partners would be compatible, instead reducing their attention to “pecuniary affairs.” As a consequence, as a writer for the Catholic World lamented, the wife began to consider her husband “almost as an adversary.” Women who did not have the “vocation” for marriage would be miserable if they married, so better to remain single.406 These views built upon Protestant perspectives on “companionate marriage,” but added the uniquely Catholic perspective of “vocation” (that some individuals were “called” to the religious life, some to marriage and childrearing, and some to the single life). All vocations were respectable; the key was for individuals to find theirs, not to force themselves to conform to another’s, or to societal expectations of marriage.

405 Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War discuss the gendered dimensions of the Civil War; see Faust, Republic of Suffering, for the tremendous casualty rate and the culture of mourning. 406 “Thoughts for the Women of the Times,” CW 14 (82), 467. See For the history of marriage in the United States, see Cott, Public Vows; Hartog, Man and Wife in America; for an in-depth study of one troubled marriage, see Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic. Although the Wirts lived decades before this article appeared, the issues of disillusionment in marriage, and of some wives feeling trapped in unhappy marriages with little hope for the future, are similar.

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Similarly, O’Reilly maintained that any woman, regardless of marital status, could be a “true woman,” addressing his advice to women according to whether they were married or single, with specific advice to mistresses of prosperous households, domestic servants, and factory workers. He thought much more favorably of domestic service than he did of factory work, maintaining that domestic service was not inherently exploitative, for it accorded well with the domestic ideal, and resembled the medieval households for which he waxed nostalgic. In his imagination, servant girls worked under the supervision of pious, implicitly Catholic, mistresses, whom he advised to be “more mother than mistress,” never to overwork servants, and to instruct them in religious matters. He advised servants to pray, read the Bible, and accept their lot with forbearance, using examples of servants who had been canonized to assure them that they too might attain the highest rank in heaven.407 His instructions to mistresses of domestic servants were to be charitable; businessmen were to practice noblesse oblige, for a “tiny addition to the pittance” paid to workers would be better for the soul than thousands “squandered in ostentatious charity”408 embedded social commentary.

407 O’Reilly, Mirror of True Womanhood, 311-16, 447-55. 408 O’Reilly, True Men, 451. The only place in his voluminous writings where he acknowledged that some mothers worked for wages was in this exhortation to businessmen to treat “the over-worked mother, or daughter, or sister” more kindly and fairly. Significantly, he only acknowledged the existence of these women in his advice to men; his advice manual for women did not discuss wage-earning married women, so perhaps he assumed that wage-earning mothers were widows, not wives.

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O’Reilly represented women’s lives in simplistic terms, with married women as wives and single women as working for wages outside the home, when in reality many married women worked for wages and some middle-class single women did not, many wage earning women worked as teachers, not as domestic servants, shopgirls, or in factories, and many wage-earning women were not “women adrift,” but lived with their families and supported the “family economy.” By ignoring working-class married women, and middle-class single women, he conflated gender with social class while subsuming both in an all-encompassing representation of Catholic respectability. (One might imagine Julia Compton looking askance at an advice manual that ignored single women and teachers). Moreover, he seemed incapable of imagining single mothers as successful heads of families, although single women did head households and went to great lengths to avoid the “placing out” of their children.409

He was not interested, however, in journalistic accuracy, but in giving advice to his readers while stating his views about what an improved, implicitly more

409 The term “women adrift” for single wage-earning women in cities is Joanne Meyerowitz’s. Patricia Kelleher convincingly challenges Hasia Diner’s view of single motherhood as the product of distress, instead emphasizing the agency of these women who held their families together. “Maternal Strategies: Irish Women’s Headship of Families in Gilded Age Chicago,” Journal of Women’s History 13 no. 2 (Summer 2001), 80-106; Diner, Erin’s Daughters. For working women, Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time, Alice Kessler Harris, Out to Work; Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Eileen Boris, Home to Work; for single women in cities Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

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Catholic, society would be like. In keeping with the traditional Catholic view of society as an organic, unified whole, he acknowledged the larger, structural causes of economic difficulties, although he offered laboring women only the usual platitudes about piety and respectability, encouraging shopgirls to dress modestly, to save when possible, to take care in choosing moral companions, and to receive the sacraments frequently. Noting that in the wake of the Civil War there were more “girls raised in affluence and forced to labor, he praised the virtue and respectability of governesses and “lady companions,” which indicated his sympathy for what he perceived as their plight. It also suggested that in addition to hierarchies of social class and gender, there was also a hierarchy of marital status, with married women enjoying a higher social position than spinsters. The only economic remedies he had for single wage-earning women readers drew on remedies from the medieval era: guilds and Beguinages.410

Significantly, O’Reilly embedded his critique of industrialization in his advice to women who worked in factories, discussing long hours and appalling working conditions, how the dust in factories caused health problems, and how factory owners preferred to hire women and children because their labor was cheaper. Workers at the

410 O’Reilly, Mirror of True Womanhood, 423-25. Traditional guilds provided a pathway through apprenticeship, and standards, for entry into crafts; they also regulated wages and prices and provided mutual benefits for members in case of sickness or death of a guild member. The Beguines of the fourteenth century lived in groups but without taking formal religious vows; because they were associated with heresy the Pope closed this option for women. See Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565 (The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

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Lowell Mill had voiced similar concerns a half century ago, and men in

Workingmen’s Associations deplored the loss of independence for men who had been independent artisans and now were wage workers, and into the twentieth century male unionists objected to women working in factories because they would bring wages down, undermining their goal of a “family wage” for men sufficient to support a family.411

Using the rhetorical strategy of appealing to self-interest as well as morality, as he did when encouraging mothers and mistresses to treat children and domestic servants kindly, O’Reilly castigated manufacturers who repaired their machinery but cared nothing for the health of their poor workers. Employers should examine their consciences as to how they treated their dependents; moreover, capitalists “cannot persist in violating laws of conscience, of humanity, of nature, without at length turning and bonding against their heartless greed all the forces of the moral world.”

Recognizing that, in a modern, secularized culture, the industrialists would not

411 See for example, Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution; for antebellum women, work, and family, Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work; Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work; Boydston discusses “the pastoralization of housework” in Home and Work. For wage earning women and families in the second half of the nineteenth century see Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time; for single women Meyerowitz, Women Adrift; for “shopgirls” see Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-194 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

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regulate themselves, but rather do whatever they thought would produce the greatest profit, he deplored how “modern legislation is heedless of this servitude.”412

Viewing Like many industrialization and individualistic capitalism as destructive, O’Reilly would have restored a distant, idealized Medieval past of organic unity and hierarchy. He and other Catholics polemicists did not propose a new socioeconomic order, but rather created a “useable past” to critique the present. When

O’Reilly and other advice givers absorbed all social classes into an ideal Catholic respectability, they looked to the past more than current conditions. He never considered expanding political and economic rights to marginalized peoples, and his comment about state regulation was based on medieval corporatism, paternalism, and charity – the duties of the owners rather than any rights of workers.

Representing Catholic Marriage: Masculine and Feminine Domesticities

The idea that the home was under siege was quite widespread by the 1890s.

Writing for the Catholic World, Helena Goessman quoted an unnamed “Philosopher” who lamented that “[t] he average American home of today is rapidly becoming only a roof over the old people, and a lodging-house for the young.” Blending advice giving with social and cultural commentary, she wrote that

412 O’Reilly, True Men, 450-51; Mirror of True Womanhood, 406, 414. He was not the first to advance this critique; for example, in 1840 convert Orestes Brownson wrote that slave labor was “least oppressive” compared with the “free labor” of factory workers. Brownson’s Quarterly Review 3 (1840), 368-70.

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[t]he home elevated is the center of moral living, the home degraded the epitome of all social evils, and the home sustained the dearest truth of noble manhood and womanhood… Affection, unselfishness, and contentment have perished for want of nourishment by these firesides, and the genii of indifference, selfishness, and restlessness – that grim trio – have arisen in their places to exult in this domestic destruction [emphasis in original].413

She regarded the home as central for both men and women, “every good man’s haven and every true woman’s kingdom,” but criticized departures from the ideal in highly gendered terms, castigating men who “manicure their dainty digits,” while warning would-be society belles that, if they did not mend their ways, they would be relegated to a “solitary state” some day.414 True, lasting happiness could be found only in the home, the focus of life, and the foundation of society.

O’Reilly agreed that to “build up the True Christian Homes” was the work of all men, both laymen and priests. In so doing they would “prepare for the heavenly home.” While he recognized that some women would remain single, he ignored the fact that some laymen would remain unmarried, for such men would stand outside his imagined world where all men, whether married heads of households or priests, were fathers. He regarded the home as central to the practice of religious virtues, and believed that all men who would do so, whatever their station in life, could share in the respectable Catholic identity of fatherhood.415 To illustrate that marriage was

413 Helena T. Goessmann, “At All the Sacrifices,” CW 57 no. 341 (August 1893), 650. 414 Ibid., 654. 415 O’Reilly, True Men, 28.

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central, not only in the lives of individuals but for Church and society as a whole,

O’Reilly reminded his readership of aspiring “true men” that Christ’s first miracle took place at a wedding.416

In many ways, O’Reilly’s views that women were naturally domestic, and that the family was the foundation of society, paralleled some writings of antebellum

Protestants: “[g]enerosity, devotedness, self-sacrifice are the characteristic virtues of woman.” The “true woman” must have “a lively faith, a piety full of sweetness and modesty, a generous hospitality, holiness of life, and innocence of conversation.”

According to O’Reilly, a home under the “influence” of such a “true woman” would be “a little paradise.”417 Such ideas about the roles of men and women in marriage, and of the family as the foundation for society, had their origin in the earliest Christian writings, the “household codes” of the New Testament.418

Both Catholic and Protestant advice manuals for wives emphasized “separate spheres,” wifely submission within the companionate marriage ideal, and frugality. To

O’Reilly, husbands and wives had separate natures, duties, and responsibilities. The father was “by the divine law of nature, king in his own family…The first duty of the

416 Ibid., 320-22. 417 O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 2, 29, 57. 418 According to Peter Brown, the Pauline passages on relationships of husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants “in the church, as in the city, the concord of a married couple was made to bear the heavy weight of expressing the ideal harmony of a whole society.” Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 57.

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wife is to study to be in every way she can the companion, the help, and the friend of her husband.” In marriage and in childrearing, the “duty falls on the father first”; as head of the household, his responsibility was greater than hers. 419 Men and women should be prepared for their different roles through different educations; according to

O’Reilly, women’s domestic nature meant that girls did not need as good an education as did boys: “his success as a professional man or a businessman depends on this thorough knowledge, whereas his wife must only “please and help her companion.”

Because man’s duty is “to labor for the home and protect it…he has also certain mental and moral qualities which woman does not need,” implying that women needed a different, but not a lesser, education than men.420

O’Reilly followed traditional views from a half century earlier about women’s nature: woman “has by nature the powers, the acts, and the disposition to please, to soothe, to charm, to captivate.” Yet although a wife was expected to defer to her husband, she had power as “dispenser of the home treasures,” and could compel obedience in their sphere, the home: “The first care of the wife is to establish discipline and order… To have discipline, where there are children and servants, the mistress must have authority.” He emphasized the duty of men to be good husbands,

419 O’Reilly, True Men 28, 30. For discussions of companionate marriage, see Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage; Cott; Pubic Vows; Hartog, Man and Wife in America. 420 O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 59-60, 75-76. Women who established academies would have disagreed with his assessment. Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 66-101.

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“diligent, laborious, perservering, self-denying, and self-reliant,” and promises that

“such men -- be they born ever so lowly – are God’s true gentlemen.”421

Yet O’Reilly’s presentation of domesticity was uniquely Catholic, using the self-sacrifice of the Virgin Mary and female saints, and the “sweet and virginal piety” of early Christians, as examples for the women of his day. He subsumed differences of wealth and social position among Catholic women, O’Reilly under an all- encompassing yet diverse ideal of piety, with saints for women in every station of life to emulate. Wealthy wives must avoid extravagance: “Waste is always a sin against

God, against your husband and children, as well as against the poor.” According to

O’Reilly, poor wives, like their more fortunate sisters, are to make the home a haven for their husbands and children: “royalty of the spirit can and ought to be theirs,”422 reassuring impoverished women that when workers faced the constant, unremitting struggle of survival in a precarious economy, they could console themselves with the thought that, spiritually, they were equal to their wealthier counterparts.

Emulating Lydia Maria Child, who a half century previously had included a chapter on “How to Endure Poverty” in The American Frugal Housewife, he presented domesticity as ameliorating the problem of destitution. “What our country…needs most, are those great-minded wives, mothers, and sisters in the dwellings of our over- burdened laborers; women for whom the roof above them and the four walls which

421 O’Reilly, True Men, 108. 422 O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 26-30, 79, 435-37.

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inclose their dear ones are the only world they care to know, the little paradise…”423

As with the antebellum concept of women’s “influence,” he believed that the private home should be the foundation for changes on a larger scale.

Significantly, while O’Reilly based his advice to women on their marital status, he provided specific instructions for men based on their occupations; men’s qualities outside the home, especially in their professional work, must be cultivated and developed. To O’Reilly, “the fear of God is the strong foundation of all true manliness”: men must be prepared to “wage warfare against error and infidelity.”

Although “fearlessness to the cause of truth” and adherence to the faith were essential, such qualities alone did not make a “true man.” He must also practice a masculinized version of submission, obeying his “superiors,” and demonstrating “respect and deference to one’s seniors.”424

Every professional occupation, he wrote, must be grounded in the Catholic faith, and he provided role models from the past in saints and in other exemplary men from the past. Lawyers must not only be impeccably honest, but should practice

“Christian generosity and charity,” as did Saint Ivo Kaermartin, thirteenth century

French contemporary of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who was known as “the advocate of the poor, eventually became a priest, established an orphanage and hospital near his

423 Ibid, 30. 424 Ibid., 266-74, 289.

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home.425 In the course of exhorting physicians to be dutiful and pious, O’Reilly praised the Sisters of Charity for their work in the Civil War, and during yellow fever epidemics. Saints Luke, Cosmos, and Damian were presented as models (O’Reilly had a saint, or saints, for every station in life) as were French physicians who ministered to the souls, as well as bodies, of “all classes of men and women poisoned with Voltarian unbelief.” 426 O’Reilly refused to even consider “politicians,” whom he regarded as corrupt, but praised “statesmen” who served the public good, and embedded social and political commentary in his advice to statesmen, businessmen, and laborers, but in all cases urged faith and loyalty to church and pope, and a return to the medieval organic view of society. From the masculine domesticity of the True Man, all else would follow: “let the heart of a true man only be set on making of his own home the most attractive and soul-satisfying spot on earth and he cannot fail of success,” both financial and moral. Displaying his nostalgia for the Middle Ages, O’Reilly wrote that

425 O’Reilly, True Men, 380-86. He deplored the greed and crime of the lawyers of his day, instead, “every lawyer should be the advocate, the defender, the devoted and disinterested counselor of the poor” (381). 426 O’Reilly, True Men, 395-97. The same year True Men was published, a Catholic publisher provided an abridged edition of Butler’s Lives of the Saints (originally published 1756-59) which carried an ecclesiastical imprimantur and was more popular, and affordable. Alban Butler, Lives of the Saints, ed. John Gilmary O’Shea (Benzinger Brothers 1878; 1894), Sacred Texts, accessed April 14, 2013, http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots.

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the true man must practice “Christian chivalry,” protecting innocence, and treating all women with “sovereign respect.” 427

The most significant difference between Catholic and Protestant views of marriage was that for Catholics it was a sacrament, while for Protestants it was a civil contract. He counseled forbearance for women in unhappy marriages and even in cases of infidelity: “a cardinal principle in home-life is, never to allow one’s self to suspect or to distrust one’s dear ones.” Even with “incontrovertible” evidence, “the terrible truth must be kept secret from every living soul.” Perhaps in response to anti-

Catholic anxieties about lurid practices in confessionals, O’Reilly advised women even against confiding in their priests: “[t]here must be extreme necessity… to justify a wife in revealing her troubles to [a] priest.” Nor should women tell their friends, for they “have destroyed the peace of many a home”; even worse were “gentlemen friends,” whose very existence would be “a monstrosity.”428

If O’Reilly credited the good wives with a “supernatural” influence on their families, he blamed the bad wives for problems in the home Entering the middle class, and even acquiring riches would not ensure respectability: the wealthy, “fashionable woman” who lacked piety would produce only “splendid misery” for herself and her family. Women’s self-sacrifice and influence to “make others good” had a reverse side: if women failed to adhere to the ideal, disaster would be the inevitable result.

427 Ibid., 126; True Womanhood, 274.. 428 O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 113-14.

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Adhering to the ideal of companionate marriage, O’Reilly noted that “[t]rue love is founded on esteem, and esteem rests on respect, and when respect fails, there is no ground for love.”429 His advice on choosing a mate was different for men and women.

Men should choose a wife of “maidenly innocence,” truthful, pious, and from a “well- regulated home,” for they could lose all by marrying women who did not conform to the ideal of pious domesticity. Women should seek and follow the counsel of their elders, their priests and mothers, which implicitly elevated the status of the mother by placing maternal advice on the same level as that of a priest.430

He provided a wider range of advice on masculine domesticity than on feminine domesticity. While he told women to be pious, circumspect, and avoid vanity, he told men that their domestic defects such as “ill temper,” “irascibility,”

“irritability,” “fault finding,” “moodiness,” “weak ambition,” and “meanness, greed, cruelty, and misery” were “home destroyers.” Men must avoid “seeking pleasure outside the home” in such nefarious places as “the tavern, the low theater, the club house.” Both extravagance and miserliness could destroy the home. He castigated men who spent money on themselves rather than their families, “men living for years upon the earning of wives, who had not been brought up to such labor,” and men “of weak ambition” as destructive to society as well as to their families: the true man was a true worker. Conversely, avarice and greed must be avoided: “money is a means to an end,

429 Ibid., 46-54; quote p. 53. 430 Ibid.; O’Reilly, True Men, 326-27.

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not an end in itself.”431 As cautionary tales, he presented both didactic stories and historical cases, including the apostate kings of the Hebrew Bible and English King

Henry VIII, choices that implicitly expressed fears about apostasy and that it would lead to destruction of individual marriages, families, and homes and with that, chaos, anarchy, and degradation in society. Men could be as much to blame as women for bad marriages; men who transgressed his ideal of masculine domesticity were called

“home destroyers.”432

Catholic Motherhood and Gendered Childrearing

In keeping with the ideology of “separate spheres,” O’Reilly provided more advice on childrearing to mothers than to fathers, and directed it towards mothers of all social classes, maintaining that the “general principles… apply to all homes and all mothers,” explicitly addressing “the wives of laboring men” as well as the wives of middle-class men.433 However, his readership was mostly middle-class, and when

431 O’Reilly, True Men, 107-13, 157-60, 177. The idea that wealth does not lead to happiness and is a means to that end, not the end itself, is found in thirteenth century Scholastic theologian, philosopher, and Doctor of the Church St. Thomas Aquinas, who applied the philosophy of Aristotle to the Catholic faith. In the Summa Theologica he distinguished between “natural wealth,” which “serves man as a remedy for his natural wants, such as food, drink, clothing, dwellings,” desires that can be satisfied, and “artificial wealth,” which is “invented by the art of man’; desires for money can be unlimited. (II, 2, 1). Summa of the Summa, ed. and annotated Peter Kreeft, trans. Fathers of the Dominican Province (San Francisco: Ignatius Press), 37- 38. Under Pope Leo XIII, neo-Thomism became the official philosophy of the church. 432 O’Reilly, True Men, 326-29. 433 O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 170-72.

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discussing motherhood, he neglected the fact that wages for working-class men were not sufficient to support a family, and assumed domesticity for married women. (He did address low wages in True Womanhood in the context of advising single women, and in True Men while exhorting businessmen to treat their employees fairly.) Yet he acknowledged the difficulties new immigrants, especially those from Ireland, faced.

With a panegyric similar to those Mary Sadlier presented in her Irish novels, O’Reilly wrote of an idealized past of Irish village traditions of “honor, bravery, chastity,” with homes where “the authority of father and mother was sacred in the eyes of all.” He encouraged Irish immigrants to maintain “the most precious and venerable traditions of their former home,” despite poverty and the challenges of adapting to life in a different society and culture, where immigrants were separated from neighbors, friends, and family members, living in overcrowded cities where the benevolent influences of community, tradition, and church could be lost.434

Significantly, although O’Reilly extolled the Catholic father who was “king within his own home,” he regarded the authority of both father and mother as sacred, a point that was especially pertinent when he advised mothers to educate their children and instruct them in the faith. Indeed, the mother had an almost priestly role in effecting the salvation of her children: “the temporal and eternal welfare of her children depends chiefly, generally… on the influence which a noble mother can wield over the mind and heart and the whole conduct of her dear ones.” O’Reilly stated that

434 Ibid., 176.

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it would be a grave error for mothers to rely on “natural affection”; rather, he encouraged mothers to make deliberate efforts to “win the hearts” of their children.435

Much of his advice to mothers paralleled that found in antebellum Protestant prescriptive literature. Readers of Godey’s Lady’s Book would be familiar with practical advice to “be cautious and deliberate,” “consistent and truthful,” “just, kind, and gentle,” to never favor a child “except the suffering or infirm,” and to exercise maternal authority with “firmness, gentleness, kindness.” The need to practice self- control was paramount: mothers must never “administer reproof, correction, or punishment when under the influence of passion or emotion.” Because he believed that even after baptism children were tainted by original sin, firm discipline was necessary even for the very young: good mothers were aware of “the manifestations of evil disposition which early peep out in the child” and were “careful to check the temper of their youngest infants.” (He did not suggest what forms this discipline might take or give any indication of what misbehavior by infants would merit punishment).

Yet at the same time as he emphasized the need for chastisement of willful children, he warned mothers not to be too severe, “not to check in childhood the manifestations of a joyous spirit which is ever ready to break forth.”436 The good mother must strike a

435 O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 141-43. 436 Ibid., 146-47, 153. For changes in beliefs about children and childrearing, see Linda Pollock, Forgotten Childhood: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992.

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balance between nurture and discipline; although he did not mention the important factor of the children’s ages.

By implying that mothers not only influenced, but actually controlled the development of their children, and eventually their salvation or damnation, O’Reilly placed them in a quasi-priestly role. While empowering women in their roles as mothers, O’Reilly also blamed mothers if their children did not fulfill parental expectations; for example, cruelty, greed, and excessive ambition were “the result of neglect in the parent, or of a training in every way vicious,” suggesting that such an outcome was the result of mothers who failed to inculcate virtue and piety in their children.437 Moreover, he maintained that lack of proper maternal influence created social problems and even led to crime. He listed a range of social, political, and economic problems, including “forgeries, the wide thrust for ruinous speculation, for gambling on the stock exchange,” politicians “bribing in order to supply the inconceivable extravagance of their wives and daughters,” and placed the blame squarely upon women. Rather than considering the agency of those who engaged in such behaviors, O’Reilly maintained that “all this is due either to the early lack of strong moral home-culture, or to the neglect of woman’s holy influence over boyhood,” or to the “baneful influence” of women who valued pleasure over morality.

Extolling the virtues of the good mother thus had a converse: he credited good mothers with ensuring the salvation of their children and blamed bad mothers for the

437 O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 204.

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failure of their children to attain the ideal, and in turn, for social disaster. The language he used reflected his longing for the Middle Ages, since the fears he voiced were the product of ambition and the greed of the Gilded Age. Political corruption and bribery were widespread, and businessmen contributed to both political parties, ensuring that, whomever happened to be elected, their interests would be served. Yet without providing any evidence, he essentially blamed the “extravagance” of women for such problems, implicitly asserting that if feminine “influence” could lead men astray in a way that would bring society to its knees. Here was a modernized version of the Eve myth.

In the home, the mother’s authority was supreme; O’Reilly even implied that in the domestic domain, her authority could supersede that of her husband. A goal of

“Christian motherhood” (by which he meant Catholic motherhood) was “training up an army of true women to withstand and cry down untruthfulness, dishonesty, and corruption, and an auxiliary army of true men, to be in their lives the embodiment of truth, honor, and incorruptible integrity.”438 The metaphor was clearly military motherhood, with the good mother raising armies of future mothers and, in turn, creating a virtuous, and implicitly Catholic, society. Significantly, he referred to “true men” as “an auxiliary army.” Using such military language subverted the idea that

438 O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 241. This is similar to antebellum Protestant domesticity. For example in the 1840s Catharine Beecher “generally participated in the bargain being struck between women’s social roles and domesticity. If women would agree to limit their participation in society as a whole… then they could ascend to total hegemony over the domestic sphere.” Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 113.

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women were inevitably passive and submissive; the “true woman” deferred to her husband and to church authority, but led the defense of her home against the forces of secularism, excessive individualism, and corruption. To produce good Catholic

Christian soldiers, the good mother must be able to inculcate “the ideal of true manhood” in her sons, and that ideal, in all its variations depending on the future occupation of the men, was grounded in “the fear of God.”439

His instructions to mothers were more detailed than was his advice to fathers, and focused on the home, while for men the commentary was more on their roles in the world. Men were given advice based on their occupations, women only as mothers. In addition, although nothing was said about fathers’ duties towards adult children, maternal duties never ended, and the mother’s influence, even authority, over her adult children should remain significant throughout their lives. “Make it your duty,” he wrote, “to accompany your grown-up sons and daughters to every public amusement which you may sanction.”440 Perhaps he did not specify the type of “public amusement” so that his readers would include practically everything, from shopping in department stores to attending public lectures, or perhaps plays (although elsewhere he inveighed against attending the theater). Or this could imply that if the mother did not directly determine the public activities of her grown children, she would still have considerable influence, and would keep her watchful maternal eye on them. In

439 O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 264. 440 Ibid., 282.

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addition, ideally her married children would live nearby: “Love to have your married children settle near you; encourage and help them to build homes like your own.”441

Perhaps he was influenced by settlement patterns in immigrant communities, by the desire to maintain Irish cultural traditions, and to prevent apostasy. In obituaries for instance, the image of the mother surrounded by adult children and grandchildren was a frequent motif.

The self-sacrificing mother acted from self-interest as well as from faith and maternal sentiments. O’Reilly concluded his advice to mothers by reminding his female readership about the inevitability of old age, and that by inculcating virtue in her children, the good mother was not only performing her maternal duty and serving

God, but also securing her own future against the frailties of dotage: “it is her own interest we are pleading… The young and active and energetic mother of today will be the aged, feeble, helpless invalid of tomorrow.” However, he cautioned mothers to

“never put yourself in your children’s power.”442 Generational hierarchy must be maintained.

441 Ibid., 324. 442 Ibid., 293-95. Antebellum Protestant ministers also portrayed women’s domestic authority; see Carolyn Lawes, “Capitalizing on Mother: John S.C. Abbott and Self- Interested Motherhood,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 108 (2000), 343-95, and for Catholic mothers as “priestesses of the domestic shrine,” McDannell, The Christian Home and “Catholic Domesiticy” in Karen Kennelly, ed., American Catholic Women, quote p. 61; Brent Waters, The Family in Christian Social and Political Thought (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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There were many similarities between Catholic and Protestant prescriptive literatures, especially in the ideal of domesticity. Yet their development was different, for Protestants developed the advice book as a genre earlier, although Catholics expressed similar themes in letters, obituaries, novels, sermons, and lives of the saints.

Catholic domesticity emphasized marriage as a sacrament, and combined appeals to self-interest, virtue, morality, and faith, absorbing the ideals of Protestant domesticity and adapting them to a uniquely Catholic context. Unlike among Protestants, for whom “by 1860, ‘character formation’ had effectively replaced religion as the primary basis for learned moral behavior in both the school and the home,”443 religion remained central.

Devotions, Holy Objects, and Feminized Worship

Like other advice givers, O’Reilly emphasized the importance of distinctive features of Catholic worship: prayers to the saints (and to Mary) and use of holy objects, such as religious statues, medals, scapulars, candles, and holy water in the home. Defending such practices from Protestants who called them “idolatry” and who deplored images of Jesus suffering on the cross and of the saints, Catholic advisors encouraged the use of both prayer and holy objects in private as well as public

443 Sklar, Catharine Beecher, 129; for Protestant families and religion in the colonial era see Demos, Little Commonwealth and Morgan, Puritan Family; for moral instruction and education in the early republic Wishy, The Child and the Republic; Reinier, From Virtue to Character; for Victorian literature and “character formation” see Mintz, Prison of Expectations, esp. 11-39; for a critique of literature and secularization see Fessenden, Culture and Redemption.

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worship. As the two practices evolved, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to

Mary underwent changes, depending on individual clergy or advisor preference.444

While John Carroll, the church’s first American bishop, and Martin John Spalding, archbishop of Baltimore, and the Georgetown Jesuits favored practices emphasizing the Sacred Heart of Jesus, German prelates encouraged devotions to Mary and to the saints. John Neumann, who was born in Bohemia, immigrated to America, and was canonized in 1977, kept diaries from 1832 to 1839 in which he wrote prayers to Mary, to the saints, and to his guardian angel.445 Similarly, John Hughes, an Irish immigrant who became bishop of New York, urged the use of an 1859 prayer book, A Manual of

Catholic Devotions for Those who Desire to Live Piously and Die Happily with its

“contractual” approach to prayer and varied opportunities to find appropriate role

444 According to Taves, Bible reading in the home did not become popular until the 1880s. Analyzing the content of nineteenth-century prayer books, she found that the most popular devotions were to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Stations of the Cross, the Angelus (a prayer to Mary), the rosary, prayers to the saints, and prayers for souls in purgatory. Many devotions were parish-based and associated with the liturgical calendar, particularly the prescribed prayers and services during Lent. Taves, Household of Faith, 22-45. See also McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 19-42; Chinnici, Living Stones, 35-51; McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful, 10-41. 445 Their Pious Guide to Prayer and Devotion (1793) stated that “it lies within the reach of all degrees of people to perform all our daily actions in union with the Sacred Heart.” Quoted in Chinnici, Living Stones, 31. The devotion became even more popular after the death in 1897 of the “little flower,” St. Therese of Lisieux, whose Story of a Soul became very popular. McCartin, “Sacred Heart of Jesus;” Chinnici, Living Stones, 43..

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models.446 The church encouraged standardized parish-based devotions that bound the laity more closely to the hierarchy.447

After the Civil War, advice on the significance of routine and ritualized prayer and devotional practices remained widespread in Catholic circles. Despite “the danger of cold formality from the steady use of prescribed forms” as one 1868 Jesuit advisor put it, most clerical advisors agreed that rituals “have a power and efficiency apart from any impression they may make on the beholder.”448 Archbishop Spalding, defending the church from charges of idolatry, encouraged “warm devotional feeling, even if it sometimes appears to be exaggerated, rather than that cold, caviling piety, which seems always uneasy and trembling, lest it should be transported too far, and be led to say or do too much.” 449 Like Catholic novelists who contrasted Protestant austerity with Catholic warmth, advisors like Spalding elevated Catholic religious practices to an ideal level while also displaying a nostalgia for the religious unity they associated the Middle Ages. In perhaps the most popular devotional manual of the era,

Faith of Our Fathers(1876), Cardinal James Gibbons represented Catholicism as the

446 Chinnici, Living Stones, 62-65. 447 Taves suggests that such devotional practices “directly and indirectly enhanced the hierarchy’s control over the laity” in the mid-nineteenth century and McCartin analyzes the “deeply conservative spiritual orientation American Catholics, one of submission and obedience” after the Civil War. Taves, Household of Faith, 111; McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful, quote p. 40. 448 Rev. M. O’Connor, S.J., “The Catholic Ceremonial,” CW 4 no. 24 (March 1867) 721-725. 449 Archbishop Spalding quoted in Chinnici, Living Stones, 77.

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truest form of Americanism and stated that “Jesus Christ intended that His Church should have one common doctrine… and one uniform government to which all should be loyally attached.”450

Bernard O’Reilly’s advice fell within the same realm, combining sentimentalism with advice on devotional life. Mothers, he wrote, should inculcate piety early in their children’s lives, in particular through early devotion to “our crucified Lord” (“the foundation of all the rest… the Book of Books”) and ritual devotions: “morning and evening prayers… the sign of the cross, the use of holy water, or blessed candles – the devotion of the rosary, that of the way of the cross.”

Although he did not attribute agency to material objects as did Anna Dorsey and Mary

Sadlier, like Julia Compton he considered them essential for Catholic households. A

Catholic home should have and use holy water, study the life of Jesus, and pray the rosary – a devotional practice growing in importance even as he wrote.451 Catholic men should pattern their family lives on the example of the Holy Family. 452

450 Gibbons wrote Faith of Our Fathers: Being a Plain Exposition of the Church Founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ when, as bishop of Richmond, he was faced with the challenge of evangelizing a former slave state during the challenges of Reconstruction. Quoted in McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful, 44. Ryan analyzes how Gibbons was aware of, and influenced by, the presentation of Catholicism in novels in creating his “sentimental catechism” and adapted Protestant ideals of “true womanhood” for Catholics. Ryan, “Inventing Catholicism,” chapter 4.

451 Marian devotions gained popularity after in 1854 Pope Pius IX made the infallible pronouncement of the immaculate conception of the virgin Mary in Ineffabilis Deus: “in the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God… was preserved exempt from all stains of original sin.” Ineffabilis Deus: The Immaculate Conception, December 8, 1854, Papal Encyclicals Online,

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Domestic piety necessitated having sacred objects in the home.453 The Catholic

World insisted that, for wealthy Catholics, filling the home with such objects of devotion was a sacred duty: “every private room should have its crucifix, its Madonna, its vase of holy water,” and the oratory should be the “chief ornament of the home.”454

Such objects were signifiers of respectability as well as of piety, but according to

O’Reilly, women could create refinement and respectability in the midst of dire poverty, for “the poorest room can be made lovely by a woman’s cunning hand.” All

Catholics must have some religious objects: “There are few households so poor but they can afford to have…at least a good print of the crucifixion” and “a little statue or a print of the Angel Guardian.” He expected fathers to participate in the religious education of their children, encouraging fathers to read The Life of Christ by St.

http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9syll.htm. Popular devotions to the Immaculate Conception of Mary were evident in the Middle Ages, but the official pronouncement led bishops to encourage the faithful to pray the rosary, recite litanies to Mary, join parish-based confraternities honoring Mary, wear “miraculous medals,” and celebrate feasts honoring her. Taves, Household of Faith, 26-36, 87-90. According to Chinnici, “Mary, the Immaculate Mother of God, stood at the center of immigrant devotional life.” Chinnici, Living Stones, 41. 452 O’Reilly, Mirror of True Womanhood, 160-62, 260-61; True Men, 212. 453 In 1861, Pope Pius IX proclaimed that priests, as rectors of devotional confraternities, were empowered to bless holy objects. The Catholic Anecdotes (1870) referred to the “miraculous medal” of Mary as an “amulet of protection” and the Ave Maria (founded in 1865 by Edward Sorin) promoted Marian devotions, including water imported from Lourdes, the site of a famous apparition of Mary to Bernadette Soubiros. Taves, Household of Faith, quote p. 89, 97-98; McDannell, Material Christianity, 132-42. 454 “The Duties of the Rich in Christian Society: No. V: Private Duties,” CW 15, no. 87 (June 1872), 292.

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Bonaventura to their children every year.”455 O’Reilly’s emphasis remained on the life of Christ, rather than on the popular Marian devotions, and he associated material objects with women, books with men.

When it came to devote to individual saints, O’Reilly had favorites and chose specific saints for specific readers. To console the poor, he offered St. Patrick, “slave and shepherd”; to children St. Louis (King Louis IX of France), who ascended to the throne at the age of eleven, but was a model for obedience to, and respect for, his mother. To console mothers of wayward adult sons, he offered St. Monica, whose prayers were said to have led to the conversion of her son who became the great fourth century church father St. Augustine. For men, he suggested saints based on occupation, including saints from humble stations in life.456 An abridged version of

455 O’Reilly, Mirror of True Womanhood, 76, 130, 308; True Men; Barry, Sacramentals of the Holy Catholic Church. Bonaventure (d. 1274) was the Minister General of the Franciscans, the order of mendicant friars founded by St. Francis of Assissi. He was also, as the last of the followers of fourth century St. Augustine, the last opponent of thirteenth century Doctor of the Church St. Thomas Aquinas’s integration of Aristotle (whom Aquinas called simply “the Philosopher”) into Catholic philosophy and theology. Bonaventure was, to the present day, seen as conservative methodologically and theologically, and as more mystical than theological. His critique of Aristotle accorded well with the nineteenth century critique of naturalism, as he wrote about the “dangers in treating scientific knowledge of natural things as ends in themselves.” Kevin Hughes, “Bonaventure Contra Mundum: the Catholic Theological Tradition Revisited,” Theological Studies 74 (2013), 372-398; quote p. 376. 456 O’Reilly, Mirror of True Womanhood, 308; True Men, 436: “St. Patrick, a slave and shepherd… St. Isidore, a farmer, as one of the chief protectors of Spain; St. Genevieve, a poor shepherdess, the honored protector of Paris… Germaine Coudin, another poor shepherd girl…” were among the saints he mentioned.

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Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints published in 1878 highlighted the theme, with saints for every day of the year.457 If slaves, farmers, shepherds, and servants could become saints, then no one in the “body of Christ” should be looked down upon, or admired, because of wealth, poverty, or occupation. In this way, O’Reilly and Alban Butler made the lives of saints a form of prescriptive literature. O’Reilly’s two lavishly illustrated books about “heroic” and “illustrious” women in the church served similar purposes.458 Like the family Bible, such books had the potential to be seen as sacred objects.459

In promoting the use of sacramentals and sacred objects as important aspects of Catholic devotional life, advice-givers conferred upon the laity the authority to manage a broad area of religious practice. Unlike the seven sacraments, for which efficacy was based on the priestly office, there was no limit to the number of sacramentals the church could institute, and the laity could adopt. Engaging in liturgical prayer and devotional reading, using holy water, blessing food before meals,

457 Alban Butler, Lives of the Saints. Ed. John Gilmary O’Shea 1894, orig. ed. 1878, in Sacred Texts, accessed April 14, 2013, http://www. sacred-texts.com/chr/lots. 458 Bernard O'Reilly, Heroic Women of the Bible and the Church: Narrative Biographise of Grand Female Characters of the Old and New Testaments, and of Saintly Women of the Christian Church, Both in Earlier and Later Ages (New York: J.B. Ford & Co., 1877) and Illustrious Women of Bible and Catholic Church History: Narrative Biographies of Grand Female Characters of the Old and New Testaments, and of Saintly Women of the Holy Catholic Church, Both in Earlier and Later Ages. New York: J. Dewing Pub. Co., 1889, accessed March 14, 2013, http://ebooks.library.ualberta.ca/local/illustriouswomen00oreiuoft. 459 McDannell discusses the Protestant family Bible as a sacred object, and suggests that it became a “fashion statement.” Material Christianity, 67-102.

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giving alms, lighting of candles, reciting the rosary or a litany, and venerating particular saints were all practices available to permeate the lives of laypeople. The potential danger of expanding lay access to a wide arena of spirituality, or permitting laypeople to modify ecclesiastically sanctioned devotions, was not lost on the church hierarchy. In his 1858 book, The Sacramentals of the Holy Catholic Church, Rev.

William J. Barry cautioned the faithful not to add “their own devotion, the name of their patron saint, or any other petition” to a litany of the saints.460 Barry clearly had observed behaviors that elicited the need for such an instruction. As pious individuals obtaining holy objects for their homes, and practicing other lay duties, women might empower themselves spiritually within the “household of faith,” the interconnected web of relationships with the living and the dead, ordinary people and saints.461

460 Barry defined a sacrament as the conferring of inward grace, by an outward sign, in virtue of divine institution” while a sacramental was also an outward sign but “of ecclesiastical origin.” Barry, Sacramentals, 20-22, 29; Henri Leclerq, s.v. “Sacramentals,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (1912), accessed March 14, 2013, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13292d.htm. 461 My interpretation focuses on women’s agency as they used sacramentals; however, other readings are possible. Taves suggests that the hierarchy intended “to relocate devotional practices in the parish church under the control of the priest” and Colleen McDannell, following Michel Foucault, argues that the church “sought to train and discipline bodies… through the sacramental system”; she specifically discusses the scapular. Taves, Household of Faith, 111; McDannell, Material Christianity, 24. These views can be reconciled: although church enhanced its institutional authority, laywomen empowered themselves within that framework. The use of Foucault and other theorists in historical analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter; for an overview see Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). For theory and women’s history, the key article is Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of

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Moreover, laywomen might also assert their authority in the home through practicing these devotions; the family could come to depend, for example, upon the mother’s intercessory prayers and litanies to the saints. Since their efficacy depended on the spiritual state of the person performing them, the good Catholic mother might assume a quasi-priestly role. Perhaps Barry emphasized the cautionary note precisely to stave off the danger of such an assumption by prescribing the exact recitation of prayers and litanies, forestalling individual innovation.

Home, Family, Church against the Destructive Influences of “the World”

The gendered language that O’Reilly and other Catholic writers employed when describing the dangers of “the world” reflected their concern with limiting lay authority. O’Reilly, for example, sought to make mothers in particular feel guilty if they indulged in novel reading or failed to protect their children from reading anti-

Catholic screeds. In “our eagerness to read the trash daily poured forth from the modern press,” he commented, we seem not to bestow one thought on that Book of

Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28-50; for a rather acerbic critique see Joan Hoff, “Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis,” Women’s History Review 3, no. 2 (1994), 149- 168. Still, the insight of poststructuralists that texts are “intertextual”, that they “intentionally or unconsciously allude to or incorporate other texts, so they make themselves open to multiple readings” is useful when considering how laywomen may have responded to novels and advice literature. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, “Introduction: Rethinking Popular Culture,” in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1991), 1-61; quote p. 47.

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books – the crucifix.”462 Advising mothers are to censor their children’s reading material and regulate their choice of friends, he singled out newspapers and books to which improper companions might expose children. Many such publications, in his view, portrayed “hideous obscenity” and reduced Catholicism “to the same level with infidelity,”463 becoming actually dangerous in the process. If devotional manuals and books such as his Heroic Women of the Bible and the Church were tantamount to sacred objects, then, conversely, other books could carry almost a type of spiritual contagion when they came from an implicitly anti-Catholic secular or Protestant press.464

Like many nineteenth-century advisors, he railed against novels’ dangers, though he seems not to have included explicitly Catholic novels in his warning that novelists “wished to dechristianize and corrupt [children] before they made them ripe for insurrection.”465 Without the protection of the Church and its authority, gullible novel-reading young people would succumb to the lure of revolutionary ideas. While

O’Reilly believed novels were politically dangerous, he was also concerned that they would awaken the desires of the flesh: dime novels, he wrote, were “a curse to our people; in particular, French novels were “poisonous”… a tenfold curse to our

462 O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 141-44. 463 Ibid., 194-96. 464 Ibid., 30. He seemed to regard even allowing such novels into the home as dangerous. 465 O’Reilly, True Men, 213.

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American homes.” Girls, he thought, were especially vulnerable to novel reading, so mothers must teach their daughters “a deep horror of the licentious and romantic literature of the day.”466

Newspapers were, if anything, worse than novels. “Our daily papers”, he claimed, were “filled, two thirds of it, with details of the most revolting immorality, and the remainder pertaining to the drama and the stage”; a True Man should not permit his wife and children to read the papers, with their sensationally lurid stories of murder, prostitution, and drunkenness, or attend the theater. Such critiques of novel- and newspaper-reading provided O’Reilly with opportunities to explore the causes of intemperance, as well as his fears, hopes, and attitudes toward women’s family roles, interfaith marriages, and Catholic ideals of respectability. O’Reilly was surely aware that Catholic men, like their Protestant counterparts, had been active in the antebellum temperance movement, joining “Father Mathew” societies and taking temperance pledges.467 He was likely also aware of contemporary temperance tales with their stereotypical tropes, on which he drew in his own social commentary.

466 O’Reilly, True Men, 235, 238; True Womanhood, 251. 467 For the temperance movement, see Ian Tyrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800-1860 (New York: Praeger, 1979); Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Bland, The Hibernian Crusade; Patricia Dockman Anderson, “By Legal or Moral Suasion Let us Put it Away”: Temperance in Baltimore, 1829-1870 (DeKalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, forthcoming), ch. 2 for Catholic temperance and ch. 4 for temperance tales; and David Reynolds and Debra J. Reynolds, Serpent in the

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In True Womanhood, O’Reilly began with the rhetorical question, “Why are so many, at length, driven to the tavern to seek forgetfulness in intoxication? Is it not because woman forgets to be loving and devoted and ingenious in the sweet acts [of domesticity]”?468 Employing familiar scenes that were quite similar to Protestant temperance tales, O’Reilly dramatized both the potentially beneficent and malign influence of “woman,” telling the story of a fifteen year old girl, “an angelic daughter and sister,” who cared for her consumptive mother and younger sister. When her father lost his job as an accountant, she did not berate him, but instead treated her erring father “with the tenderness, the respect, the delicacy due a sick and helpless father.” Due to her caring and her prayers, he resolved to stop drinking and secured another position with his former employer, a wealthy merchant. After her father died and her brother (who had been away from home working as an apprentice engineer) returned and fell ill, she inculcated piety in him as well.469

On the surface, O’Reilly’s tale was a very traditional one of feminine influence, albeit in a Catholicized version. But he added an unusual twist by having his protagonist receive help from her father’s former employer’s wife, “a Protestant lady of rare goodness.” Moreover, he provided the young Catholic woman with a marriage to the accountant’s son, who naturally was also Protestant. While sentimental

Cup: Temperance in American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). 468 O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 33-34. 469 Ibid., 40-43. Grob, Deadly Truth; Dormandy, White Death.

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Catholic fiction (especially that of Anna Dorsey) often featured miraculous conversions, O’Reilly did not go that route. In his tale, the girl married well, but did not convert her husband, which presented a strikingly positive view of interfaith marriage. Significantly, O’Reilly portrayed an interfaith marriage without offering any general advice on the desirability of such unions, other than noting that the good

Catholic girl married outside her faith only “after imploring the divine guidance and consulting the priest who had been her counselor and benefactor.” Apparently,

O’Reilly believed that questions of whom to marry were best settled on an individual basis, after prayer, reflection, and priestly guidance, and that an interfaith marriage, especially to a Protestant man of high status, could be acceptable and would not necessarily destroy the faith of a Catholic wife. Here, his representation reflected reality, as marriages between Protestants and Catholics were becoming more widespread and acceptable, and priests often performed the ceremonies.470

While O’Reilly confined his temperance tale for women readers to the domestic sphere, his tales for men incorporated direct commentary on social class and responsibility. One was of a physician who, due to a weeklong debauch, caused the death of a young pregnant woman; this was a cautionary tale directed towards physicians, lawyers, and clergymen who could be summoned by clients at any time.

471 Cautioning men against “the tavern, the low theater, the club house,” he relayed the

470 O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 48-54; Rose, Beloved Strangers. 471 O’Reilly, True Men, 398-400.

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fearful tale of a “young mechanic” brought to ruin by intemperance when, after he went “to assert his manhood and independence” in the tavern, his young wife died in childbirth and his drinking brought him to the insane asylum. Recognizing that his readers would very probably be middle-class, this tale was a thinly disguised call for elite men to “lead by virtuous example.” He appeared afraid both that some middle class men might participate in a rougher, working-class masculine culture centered around drinking, fighting, and gambling, and that working-class men were not following the ideal of middle-class Catholic masculine domesticity.472

O’Reilly feared that intemperance among all classes was increasing because of immigration and urbanization, and because cities played host to diverse styles of masculinity. As a solution, he proposed that men to adopt a respectable, domestic style of masculine behavior, placing the blame for their transgressions of young working men squarely upon the shoulders of elite men: “[t]he Mechanics’ Club and the connected tavern are only a copy of so many aristocratic resorts of the same nature, with… their hordes of wealthy husbands and fathers,” he thundered. Workers were

“copying the worst forms of fashionable amusement.” Going to the tavern, to

O’Reilly, was the result of “perversity of judgment and feeling” which elite men

“mistake for manliness and independence.”473

472 O’Reilly, True Men, 133-41. For “rough” working-class Irish masculinity, and the failed attempt of two men to incorporate this style into a middle-class identity, see Kelleher, “Class and Catholic Irish Masculinity.” 473 O’Reilly, True Men, 136.

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He contrasted respectable, responsible heads of Catholic households, with dissolute men, who could bestruggling immigrant workers or “’honorable and educated and high born” men going outside the home to drink and carouse. O’Reilly constructed a Catholic identity privileged behavior as the true measure of respectable masculinity. In the long term, this erasure of social class may have contributed to the ongoing belief that there are no social classes in America. On the one hand, such advice could enhance the self-esteem and self-respect of struggling workers, as they could claim an equal status in the church, but on the other hand, such representations erased the realities of social class and ethnicity.

Like intemperance, political patronage was damaging because it undermined the home. O’Reilly observed how political corruption was reported widely in the press, yet remained unpunished. It became impossible to “honor thy father” when the wealthy and respected politicians and bankers, the fathers of the state, acted “as if the wealthy classes of the community were the immediate descendants of a penal colony of thieves, forgers, swindlers, idlers, and pickpockets.” Because of such behavior, he wrote, the “national character” would be “debased.”474 In giving advice to individuals and illustrating how private lives and public duties, individual, family, and church were interwoven, O’Reilly seamlessly melded prescriptive literature into political commentary; conversely, writers in the Catholic World embedded advice to individuals while discussing social, political, and economic issues.

474 Ibid., 408, 413.

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Many Catholics believed that only the Church and Pope could defend the community from the perceived dangers of secularization, Mormonism, “anarchy,” modern science, and revolution, and controversialists used a rhetorical strategy invoking an imminent threat of secularism and Mormonism to present the case that, without the infallible guidance of the church, Protestantism would lead to interpretative anarchy. O’Reilly seemed to regard the modern specters of revolution and communism almost as forces of nature which could be stopped only through faith and divine intervention:

The waters of unbelief are daily rising higher and higher, undermining the hitherto secure foundations of the family and the community; the captious errors of the socialist and the communist are sinking deeply into the minds and hearts of the vicious and idle who will not work, and of the hard-toiling poor whose work is but ill-requited, like a conflagration which acquires fiercer destructive force from everything it preys upon.475

He incorporated political commentary in the context of his advice to statesmen and businessmen – those in the most public occupations – and to wives and mothers.

The beginnings of an American Catholic social justice teaching were evident in

O’Reilly’s advice and in articles the Catholic World published beginning in 1872.

While Philadelphia Catholic printer Matthew Carey and, of course, workers themselves wrote extensively on the plight of impoverished workers in the 1820s, and workers (including the women of the Lowell Mill) wrote, formed unions, and went on strikes, a uniquely Catholic version of the critique of industrialization emerged after

475 O’Reilly, True Men, 205.

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the Civil War. Ideas about gendered respectability were integral to the emergence of this teaching which, although not expressed in a systematic manner, provided grounding for a Catholic response to the plight of impoverished immigrant workers, especially women and children.476 When representations of a unitary pious Catholic respectability collided with the realities of an industrial system which violated the

Catholic gender system and the fragmentation of a diverse Catholic population of native-born middle class and impoverished immigrants, apologists responded with

476 Catholic laypeople turned their attention to social and economic problems in the antebellum era. Matthew Carey, an Irish immigrant who became one of Philadelphia’s leading printers, in 1831 refuted the claim that that individual flaws, such as laziness and intemperance, caused poverty, noting that wages for laborers were extremely low (calculating expenses for fuel, food, and lodging, he found that workers did not make enough to make ends meet, and that any job, no matter how disagreeable or poorly paid, would find takers). In particular, seamstresses, many of whom had been abandoned by husbands, worked up to fifteen hours a day for inadequate wages. A few years later, Orestes Brownson made the rhetorical argument that slave labor was “least oppressive” compared to “free labor” and claimed that factory work “ruined” the young women of the Lowell Mill. Although these were not specifically Catholic responses in that they did not cite Catholic doctrines, they foreshadowed the gendered language of the critiques of industrialization of O’Reilly and writers in the Catholic World, which did. For the Protestant Social Gospel and its relationships to liberal theology and to democratic socialism, see Ahlstrom, Religious History, chapter 47. According to Jay Dolan, “a definite change of attitude took place in the 1880s” due to industrialization and urbanization; however, conservative Catholics were out of step with liberal Protestant reformers and efforts to assist the poor remained more parish-based. Pope Leo XIII’s famous 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum did not lead to widespread systematic reform efforts because “intellectually [Catholics] had no tools, no methodology, to apply its universal intellectual principles to the American scene.” Dolan, American Catholic Experience, chapter 12, quotes p. 322, 335. Rerum Novarum, which criticized both the excesses of individualism and capitalism on the one hand and socialism and communism on the other, is often considered the foundational document in modern Catholic social justice teachings.

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critiques of the modern system as well as with nostalgia for an idealized medieval past. These responses were different from the traditional exhortations to charity because late nineteenth century writers, unlike their predecessors, did not posit an unchanging socioeconomic order, but rather recognized modern changes and perceived a need to respond to them in ways that strengthened their faith. While the

Catholic response to the plight of workers was “more institutional and practical than intellectual or moral,”477 some Catholic writers analyzed social and economic changes and criticized the emerging industrial system, often doing so in highly gendered terms, pointing out the dangers of rampant individualism and the destruction of traditional roles to the family and, in turn, to society.478

477 Piehl, Breaking Bread, 34. 478 In 1845 the first American chapter of the St. Vincent de Paul society of laypeople began providing parish-based charity, and nuns formed hospitals and orphanages. Such developments helped to provide grounding for Cardinal James Gibbons’s defense of the Knights of Labor (which included women as well as men) and Henry George’s “single tax” in 1887. According to Dolan, Gibbons’s defense of the Knights, Rerum Novarum, and the 1919 “Bishops’ Program for Social Reconstruction” were the keys developments in the American Catholic social gospel. Carey, to the Wealthy of the Land, Ladies as Well as Gentlemen, on the Character, Conduct, Situation, and Prospects, of Those Whose Sole Dependence for Subsistence, is the Labor of their Hands (Philadelphia: Wm. F. Geddes, 1831, in Seth Rockman, ed., Welfare Reform: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford St. Martins, 2003), 145-56; Brownson’s Quarterly Review 1840, 268-70; Cardinal James Gibbons to Pope Leo XIII, February 20, 1887, in John Tracy Ellis, ed., Documents of American Catholic History (Washington: Bruce Publishing, 1962), 441-56; Dolan, 334. Among the extensive literature on antebellum industrialization and workers’ responses to the transition from independent artisans to wage workers, see for example Wilentz, Chants Democratic; Sellers, Market Revolution; for women workers Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work.

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In addition to decades of Catholic responses to the plight of impoverished immigrants by both religious and laypeople, there were several varieties of social teachings in Europe that preceded Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum and could have influenced educated Catholics. In urging an ethic of charity and benevolence, both as individuals and as groups, in some ways O’Reilly and other

Catholic writers anticipated the famous encyclical, which elucidated Catholic social justice teaching, condemning both socialism and the rampant individualism which led to the excesses of capitalism, with its exploitation of workers and extremes of wealth and poverty, while upholding both the right to private property and the right of workers to form unions.479

479 The encyclical drew on medieval corporatism, but the beginnings of Judeo- Christian social teachings can be traced back to the Hebrew prophets, who regarded neglect and mistreatment of the poor, widows, and orphans as social sins which would bring God’s punishment, and several Church fathers in the late Roman empire taught of the importance to care for the poor (according to Peter Brown, this marked a transition from classical to medieval ethics). St. Thomas Aquinas, following on Aristotle’s argument that man is by nature social and political, maintained that wealth could not be the source of happiness, distinguished between “natural” and “artificial” riches (the desire for natural wealth is limited; for artificial wealth unlimited), and regarded charity as preeminent among the three “theological virtues”(“in the order of perfection, charity precedes faith and hope because both faith and hope are quickened by charity”). Following Aquinas, Jesuit Cardinal Robert Ballarmine, Chair of Controversial Theology from 1576 to 1587 drew on Aquinas to and traditional medieval corporatism to write of the dignity of labor, the common good, and justice with “the virtue determining equity among the many.” During the nineteenth century, Catholic social teachings responding to industrialization emerged in Belgium, France, Germany, and Italy, with liberal, conservative, and social democratic variants. For example, Prussian Adam Muller (who coined the phrase “human capital” in his 1809 Elements of Statecraft) urged the revival of the pre-French Revolution guilds, extolled “the clerisy” and presented feudal relationships and the interdependent farm family as models to follow in contrast

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to the individualism of Adam Smith. French Viscount Alban de Villeneuve- Bargeman’s 1834 textbook on political economy was sharply critical of extremes of wealth and poverty in the wake of English industrialization, associated pauperism with moral degeneration, and called for a more equitable distribution of wealth by incorporating Christian ideals in the state. In 1842, Spanish native Father Jamie Balmes presented themes evident in O’Reilly and the Catholic World: that Protestantism led to the horrors of the French Revolution and that Catholicism (as in the great medieval universities), not Protestantism, was the source of learning. In 1861, the French Restorationist Charles Perin argued that Catholicism did not hinder progress, but argued that only with a Catholic political economy would it be sustainable. German Bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler has been called “the great predecessor” of Leo XIII. According to Misner, his 1864 book The Labor Problem and Christianity and his 1869 sermons were “the most important step forward between 1848 and 1891 in terms of social Catholics coming to terms with industrialization.” Ketteler noted that through no fault of their own, workers’ wages were below subsistence levels, defended the labor movement, and urged priests to take action. Significantly, he recognized that legislation would be necessary for his aims an end to factory labor by women, a minimum age for workers, factory inspections, and regular days off: the Church alone (and individual initiative alone) could not solve “the social question.” Johan Leemans, Brian J. Matz, and Johan Verstraeten, eds. Reading Patristic Texts on Social Ethics: Issues and Challenges for Twenty-First Century Christian Social Thought (Catholic University Studies in Early Christianity. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2011); St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II, 2, 1; II, 62, 4, in Peter Kreeft, Summa of the Summa, 360-63, 467; Gary D. Glenn, “Situating Tocqueville Between Modern Political Philosophy and Pre-Modern Catholic Political Philosophy About What Constitutes Society” The Catholic Social Sciences Review 17 (2012), quote p. 35; Paul Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe from the Onset of Industrialization to the First World War (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1991), quote p, 135; Antiono Almodovar and Pedro Teiseira, “The Ascent and Decline of Catholic Economic Thought, 1830s-1950s,” History of Political Economy 40 (2008), 62-87; Leo XIII. Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1891), http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo13/113.rerum.htm. The encyclical inspired the most influential priest-reformer of the Progressive era, John P. Ryan, who wrote A Living Wage (1905) and later supported Franklin D. Roosevelt, becoming known as “the right reverend New Dealer.” Charles M.A. Clark, “From The Wealth of Nations to Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples): Wealth and Development from the Perspective of the Catholic Social Thought Tradition,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 71, no. 4 (October 2012), 1047-10072; Chinnici, Living Stones, 137-45; Ahlstrom, Religious History, 1004: Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 334-38.

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Catholic apologists regarded excessive individualism as the basic cause of the economic plight of workers. The critique of the excesses of capitalism and of Social

Darwinism was related to nostalgia for the medieval corporatist model of society, to the theology that salvation required good works, as well as faith, and to a challenge to

Adam Smith’s “free market” economic theories. An American Catholic critique of industrialization appeared in the Catholic World in 1869 when an anonymous author recognized the need to “distinguish between accidental impoverishment and pauperism as an organic malady,” calling for a return to the “trades-unions” and

“pious foundations” of the twelfth century, tracing the problem back to the enclosure movement and dissolution of the monasteries in the wake of the Protestant

Reformation, and proposing that religious orders obtain land and colonize emigrants in the West.480

A series of articles on “The Duties of the Rich in Christian Society” published in 1872 developed the critique, sometimes expressing it in gendered language, merging it with advice to the wealthy. For the sake of their own self-preservation, as well as for the salvation of their souls, the wealthy had a duty to “ameliorate and elevate” the lives of workers, for a “mere moneyed aristocracy, possessing privileges

480 “Who Shall Take Care of the Poor,” CW 8, no. 48 (March 1869), 734-46. Because it drew on nostalgia for the Middle Ages and was from a more overtly Catholic perspective, it differed from the antebellum critiques of industrialization by Carey and Brownson, which did not refer specifically to Catholic doctrine.

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without corresponding duties…would be the most anti-Christian… and would be succeeded by Communism [emphasis in original].”481

The position of the Catholic World can be distinguished from traditional exhortations to charity because, rather than positing a static socioeconomic order, the author recognized changing economic and social conditions: factory workers were dehumanized, “regarded and treated as working machines, not as moral and religious beings,” were too exhausted to attend Mass, and were subjected to conditions better suited to “apes” than human beings.482 Significantly, the same series of articles advised the wealthy to contribute to Church buildings and missions, to adorn their homes with holy objects, and to educate their sons “for some profession or business,” their daughters to “be their own housekeepers, or even to earn their living by their education and accomplishments,” for all to live modestly, and for education to be

“cheap and accessible to boys and youths of all classes.”483 Combining advice to individuals with social and political commentary, the author interwove public and private realms.

481 “The Duties of the Rich in Christian Society: Number 1: in Reference to Communism, CW 41, no. 83 (February 1872), 579; “The Duties of the Rich in Christian Society: Number 2: Political Duties,” CW 13, no. 84 (March 1872), 754. 482 “The Duties of the Rich in Christian Society: Number 3: Social Duties,” CW 15, no. 85 (April 1872), 37-41. 483 “The Duties of the Rich in Christian Society, Number 4: Duties to the Church,” CW CW 15, no. 86 (May 1872), 145-49; “Number 5: Private Duties,” CW 15, no. 87 (June 1872), 289-94; “Number 6: Private Duties,” CW 15, no. 88 (July 1872), 510-18.

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Similarly, a 1872 article on “The Homeless Poor of New York City” voiced these concerns in gendered terms, calling attention to the plight of the poor, especially homeless women and children, describing how widows of all ages “attempt[ed] to eke out a miserable living by sewing,” and noting the need to create “night homes, either by charity or legislative enactments” to safeguard “the morals of homeless young women” by providing separate quarters for men and women. Anticipating the work of

Jacob Riis, the author provided a vivid portrayal of tenements, the “fearful and sickening odor” of the police station houses where the homeless took refuge, distinguishing among women, those who sought but could not find employment, whom government should assist with relief and jobs, and the undeserving “inebriates and worthless idlers.”484

Several years later, the Catholic World presented a more fully developed critique of a competitive economic order that led to extremes of wealth and poverty.

Discussing “Some Barriers between Capital and Labor,” one 1878 writer posited a

“law of aggregation” by which “the poor grow more numerous and poorer and the rich fewer and richer,” called for a “graduated income tax,” and regarded providing gas, coal, water, and transportation as “legitimate functions of government.” Legislation would be necessary, for “mere philanthropy would not be sufficient motive” to remedy

484 “The Homeless Poor of New York City,” CW 16, no. 92 (November 1872), 206-12; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1890), Adobe pdf eBook.

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the problems.485 The following year, another article sharply challenged Adam Smith’s ideal of laissez-faire: “The theory of ‘competition’ as a solution of social and industrial disorder is as baseless as it is immoral,” wrote one writer. Normative gender roles were central to this analysis. In addition to stating that “the labor question is at bottom a moral and religious problem,” the author argued that economics was not a science at all, for its principles were not “capable of universal application’; indeed, the individualism that gave rise to political economy produced “an inane mass of jargon.”

Society was an aggregation of families, not individuals, and society, like families, required acknowledging duties as well as rights. Distorted gender roles were evidence that “mammon has usurped the place of God” in industrial society. The article cited statistics on the labor of women and children, noting that machinery had “thrown the husbands out of employment and compelled the wives to support the family on greatly reduced wages,” which was “the complete reversal of the natural and moral order of society.”486 Restoring proper gender roles, through both church action and legislation, was central to this emerging American Catholic social justice teaching. While the economic analysis anticipated that of later Progressive economists, it was grounded in

485 “Some Barriers between Capital and Labor,” CW 28, no. 164 (November 1878), 230-42; quotes p. 230, 238. 486 “The Material Mission of Society,” CW 28, no. 16 (February 1879), 659-71; quotes p. 663, 665. The author of the article notes that according to a Massachusetts Labor Bureau report, one third of factory workers were women and children.

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traditional Catholic teachings and the antebellum ideology of “separate spheres” for men and women.

O’Reilly, like the authors of the Catholic World, feared anarchy, individualism, secularization, and the abandonment of traditional gender roles, and prescribed piety, responsibility towards the community, and even state regulation, as remedies. He looked towards an idealized medieval corporatism and asserted that the decline began with the Protestant Reformation. Although the starting point of the

Catholic World was the general socioeconomic question and O’Reilly’s was advice to individuals (especially statesmen and businessmen) both presented similar critiques and social teachings. O’Reilly agreed that the family, not the individual, was the foundation of society, and urged a return to idealized Catholic principles. Alluding to the Communist Manifesto, he wrote that “the apostles of evil are endeavoring to inculcate on the mind of the laborer, that home and its duty are the creation of the laborer’s worst enemies.” 487

487 O’Reilly, True Men, 30. In alluding to the critique of the family, O’Reilly presented the conservative Catholic position that faith and family were the solution to the social and economic disruptions of industrialization. “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation… The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Englels, The Communist Manifesto [1849], ed. Frederic L. Bender (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1988), 71-72

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In gendered ways, men and women could, in O’Reilly’s imagination, prevent the twin evils of revolution and socialism. Advising “statesmen,” he acknowledged the independence of “the civil authority within its own proper domain,” while noting that

Christian charity “should be at the heart of public duties.” Secularization and individualism could only lead to disaster, for “socialism and communism present a frightful caricature of the helpful brotherly love which is the soul and the bond of unity in all States obeying the law of the Gospel.”488 To O’Reilly, such spurious versions of cooperation were particularly dangerous because they omitted faith. He advised his elite male readers to practice charity and justice: a lawyer should be “the advocate, the defender… the counselor of the poor” and statesmen must adhere to the ideal of “service to God while serving the interests of the commonwealth.”489

His advice to merchants and businessmen embedded social justice teaching in the language of the Bible. “Modern industry, modern business, like Eve” would find that the forbidden fruit “lasts but a moment, leaving behind the bitterness of death.”

Manufacturers “set aside all laws of natural equity and – too often, alas – of humanity itself in their dealings with the laboring masses.” Appealing to their hope for salvation, he stated that “a tiny addition to the pittance” employers paid their workers would be better for the souls of the wealthy than would many public acts of charity. Their

488 O’Reilly, True Men, 28, 30, 408. He implied that competition and individualism were against the law of nature: “Take a lesson from the bird and the bee, and cooperate with one another for the benefit of all” (p. 28). 489 Ibid., 409, 432.

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responsibility was the greatest; however, within their domestic sphere, “kind and charitable mistresses can prevent socialism.”490

Yet he believed that individual acts of charity would not suffice. The Church as a whole must act to ameliorate poverty, for only by so doing could it safeguard family life among the poor, and in so doing, save society from what he considered the evils of revolution and socialism: “the whole effort of religion, and of the most favored members of the social body, should aim at assisting the poor man to create for himself a home, and to adorn it with all the best virtues of fatherhood.” Alluding to the

French Revolution, he asserted that maintaining implicitly Catholic virtues, expressed in clearly gendered terms, would protect families and societies: “If all classes in society will only revive in their hearts and homes and lives this threefold respect for

God and His Law, for parental authority, and for womanly purity, we need not fear the inflow of new ideas or the changes threatened by political revolutions.”491 Implicit in this prescription were several ideas: the traditional assumption of an organic, hierarchical society, with those in the superior position assisting the others, both because that is part of the traditional Catholic “corporal works of mercy,” necessary for salvation – and because when the lowest members of the “body of Christ on earth” are marginalized and suffering, then the whole society would experience potentially catastrophic effects.

490 O’Reilly, True Men, 445- 451; True Womanhood, 310-12. 491 O’Reilly, True Men, 28, 213.

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O’Reilly and writers for the Catholic World recognized a role for the state in ameliorating the effects of industrialization, and they presented while Catholicism and opposition to industrialization as the true Americanism. Adhering to the Jeffersonian vision of the United States as a land of independent yeoman farmers, he maintained that the Puritan settlers “never imagined that “their descendants should cramp their souls, stunt their bodies, impoverish their blood, and make their homes barren and desolate by turning the fair land into a vast workshop.” Grateful that the “political, social, and moral blunder” of industrialization, which had so afflicted England, was confined to the northeastern United States, O’Reilly proposed that it “should be regulated,” much as it had been in Switzerland. 492 Thus, as early as the 1870s some

Catholic writers proposed an early version of social justice teachings, albeit not in a systematic form, and presented the traditional family with its gender norms as the foundation of society. Looking backward as they contemplated the future, they extolled medieval corporatism and castigating modern individualism while recognizing the structural causes of poverty and the need for state intervention to ameliorate the suffering of workers under a modern industrial economy.

492 O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 423-24. Although he did not specifically mention the passage of social legislation under Otto von Bismarck in newly unified Germany, perhaps because he would have been appalled by the Chancellor’s Kulturkampf (culture struggle) against Catholics, whom the chancellor regarded as (like Socialists) dangerous internationalists, O’Reilly would have known of the laws limiting hours of labor for women and children and providing workers’ compensation and pensions.

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The [Catholic] “Woman Question”: Remonstrance and Rights

To Catholic apologists, the True Woman’s place was in the home and church, and in the course of advising women how to raise families, run households, and carry out their devotional duties, writers attacked “dangerous” ideas such as women’s suffrage. To their minds, the better alternative was to empower women within the domestic sphere and claim respect for women in their traditional roles as mothers and wives and members of religious communities (whether in the role of laywomen or nuns). At the same time, they advocated improved education for women, and claimed public roles for women through an expansive “women’s sphere.” Perspectives and practices among Catholics varied, and writers addressed both the larger culture and differences within their faith community.493

In the late 1860s and early 1870s, the Catholic World published a series of articles on women’s sphere and women’s rights, which presented arguments against women’s suffrage based, above all, on traditional views of women as domestic by nature. For example, in 1866 one writer cautioned women against “the tendencies of the age.” As pagan women had been relegated to the “the Eastern harem, the Hindoo suttee, the Indian burden-bearer,” secularization would lead to a decline in the status of, and respect for, women. Similarly, to O’Reilly, the only authority with “the ability

493 As James Ryan points out, “the rhetoric of American Catholicism during the nineteenth century was intellectually fragmented, regionally variant, often produced without official church sanction, and subject to a wide range of interpretations.” Ryan, “Inventing Catholicism,” 10.

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to save woman, to save our homes, to save society and civilization from the joint destructive forces of an industry without conscience and a socialism without a God” would be the Catholic church. A medieval corporatist rather than a democrat, he wrote of suffrage in general as “a delusion and mockery”; to him, a public political role for women was unimaginable.494 An 1868 article by an anonymous “Lady” instructed

Catholic women that their “rights” were to do more work for the Church.495

The following year, the Catholic Worker published an article on “The Woman

Question” by Orestes Brownson, writing anonymously and vociferously attacking women’s suffrage, to which he was “decidedly opposed. While he claimed to have “no opinion” on the Reconstruction issue of African-American enfranchisement, he stated that no one, including white men, could claim a right to vote since suffrage was “a trust from civil society,” not a natural right. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in

1868, enfranchised African-American men but not women, and divided former allies including Lucy Stone and Frederick Douglass, who supported it, and Susan B.

Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who would have preferred a Constitutional amendment granting universal suffrage. Referenda on the questions of women’s suffrage and black suffrage in Kansas proved especially divisive (the voters rejected

494 “Woman,” CW 4, no. 21 (December 1866), 417-423; O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 288; True Men, 409. For a nuanced analysis of religion and secularization, see Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption. 495 “The Rights of Catholic Women, by a Lady,” CW 7, no. 42 (Sept. 1868), 844-48.

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both). These divisions over the Fourteenth Amendment eventually led to the formation of two national suffrage organizations.496

Avoiding the question of the equality of women by stating that “the two sexes are different, and between things different in kind there is no relation of equality or inequality,” Brownson presented a vitriolic attack on women’s political activism, arguing that “the most corrupt epochs” were those in which “women have mingled most in political affairs” and comparing social reform in general, and the expansion of suffrage in particular, to “dram-drinking,” with its predictable result. One by one,

Brownson refuted the arguments of suffragists, stating that votes for women would not bring about reforms but would “break up and destroy the Christian family,” which would in turn exacerbate the “growing lawlessness and crime” that threatened to destroy the nation. At the time, many Americans feared a “great upsurge of abortion,” and there were campaigns to make it illegal at the state level.497 In Brownson’s fevered imagination, votes for women could lead to the ultimate disaster not only for America, but for the entire world:

496 Suffragists hoped to win both, but when Republicans mounted an “overtly anti- feminist campaign,” feminists appealed to Democrats (however, Anthony and Stanton were “nearly alone” in their alliance with notorious racist George Francis Train). Ellen Carol DuBois, “The Kansas Campaign of 1867,” Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), quotes pp. 80, 98. 497 The phrase is James Mohr’s. According to Mohr, physicians and legislators began mounting campaigns to make abortion illegal when they thought that more native- born, middle-class women were using it. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy (New York: Oxford University Press), 46-85, 119-46.

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Mothers will repress their maternal instincts; and the horrible crime of infanticide before birth, now becoming so harmfully prevalent, and actually causing a decrease in the native population of several of the states of the Union as well as in more than one European country, will become more prevalent still, and the human race be threatened with extinction.498

Elizabeth Cady Stanton responded to such ideas, writing that that “the Catholic idea” of authority, as expressed in Catholic World essays, would “ring the death-knell of individual liberties.” Yet there was no unitary Catholic position on women’s suffrage; both clergy and women disagreed among themselves. For example, suffragist Mrs. E.

M. Cullen wrote that women should be free to exercise their God-given talents

“without any social or political disqualifications whatsoever.”499 In the 1880s and

1890s a growing number of Catholics supported women’s suffrage. For example, while many Catholic women such as Katherine Conway were anti-suffrage, the

Chicago Catholic Women’s League was pro-suffrage. The clerical hierarchy was divided with the majority, such as Cardinal James Gibbons, opposed but others

498 [Orestes Brownson], “The Woman Question,” CW 9, no. 50 (May 1869), 145-57; quotes p. 148, 151; http://www.orestesbrownson.com/80.htm. Brownson claimed that the destiny of all women, even those who did not marry, was to assume a maternal role. 499 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Catholic World on Women’s Suffrage,” Revolution (1869), quoted in McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 95; Mrs. E.M. Cullen to Isaac Hecker (1868), quoted in Karen Kennelly, American Catholic Women, 5; James Kenneally, “A Question of Equality,” in Kennelly, Catholic Women, 135-37.

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including Archbishop John Ireland in favor. The church never took an official position on women’s suffrage.500

Still, there was a distinctively Catholic antisuffrage position. Historical interpretations vary on the question of why some women opposed women’s suffrage, but Catholic antisuffragists grounded their opposition to the vote in their belief that they could better empower themselves through their church and interest in defending it, their Catholic identity, and through education.501 In 1872, the Catholic World made

500 For Katherine Conway see Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith, 157-96, the Catholic Women’s League of Chicago and clerical positions on women’s rights see Kenneally in American Catholic Women, 125-51.

501 Their perspective was thus similar to that of progressive muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell, who thought that women should focus on “the right to an education, and the right to earn a living.” Cummings notes that unlike other “Remonstrants,” Catholic antisuffragists were marginalized by their religion; Conway’s Irish ethnicity also placed her outside the mainstream of American native-born Protestantism, and she sought to enhance the Church, and women’s roles within it. Cummings’s interpretation of women’s choice to seek empowerment within a patriarchal church, rather than in opposition to it, is a significant departure from that of previous historians, and implies that a focus on suffrage is too narrow. (Sixteen years after Leslie Woodcock Tentler observed that Catholics were “on the margins” of American historiography, Cummings noted that “Catholic women hold little appeal for women’s historians, who privilege as subjects women who either espouse or prefigure modern feminism, of which support for women’s suffrage is simply the earliest of litmus tests.”) Jane Jerome Camhi, Women Against Women, 148; Tentler, “On the Margins;” Cummings, New Women, 159-60. Eleanor Flexner devoted a chapter to antisuffrage in her classic study, noting the contributions of men, the affinity of antisuffragists for the liquor, railroad, steel, and oil interests, and the role of nativists, southern racists, and conservative clergymen. Susan Marshall argues that defense of their gendered position of class privilege was the key motive of the remonstrants. However, according to Karen Blair, suffrage was simply not a high priority for clubwomen. Examining remonstrant ideology, Thomas Jablonsky suggests that suffragists did not represent the interests of all women; remonstrants adhered to ideas of “duty, nature, and stability” to argue that

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the hyperbolic claim that “the woman of the nineteenth century owes all the advantages of her social position to the Catholic church,” while advising women to tend to their domestic duties, educate their children as future citizens, and avoid

“fruitless attempts to build up women’s rights upon the ruins of her ancient safeguards.” These arguments hearkened back to the ideal of the “republican mother” educating her sons as virtuous future leaders while seamlessly blending advice to individual readers with political commentary.502

women would lose their nonpartisan “influence,” voting and campaigning would be burdensome and would not improve the lives of wage earning women, and women were already well represented by the men in their families; he also notes the role of bigotry against African Americans, Asians, and immigrants in the campaign. Jane Jerome Camhi discusses these factors, and also notes that from the era of the American Revolution the citizen-soldier was gendered male, that remonstrants feared masculinized women and feminized men. She introduces the more psychological interpretation that “a vulnerable sense of self-esteem… was at least a contributing factor.” Carolyn Summers Vacca observed that the Remonstrants changed the terms of the debate “from a rights to an expediency argument” shortly after the Civil War when suffragists abandoned equal citizenship perspective for the argument that women’s special feminine qualities would bring about needed reforms such as Prohibition, and instead appealed to class, race, and nativist bigotry. For an excellent analysis, see Manuela Thurman, “’Better Citizens Without the Ballot”: American AntiSuffrage Women and Their Rationale During the Progressive Era,” Journal of Women’s History 5, no. 1 (Spring 1993), 33-60. Flexner, Century of Struggle, 304-18; Susan Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign Against Women’s Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); Karen Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980); Thomas Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party (Brooklyn, Ny: Carlson Publishing, 1994), quote p. 32; Jane Jacobs Camhi, quote p. 205; Vacca, Reform Against Nature, quote p. 129. 502 “Thoughts for the Women of the Times,” CW 14, no. 82 (January 1872), 467, 472. For republican motherhood, see Kerber, Women of the Republic and No Constitutional Right to be Ladies; Lewis, “The Republican Wife.”

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A series of four historical articles on “the rights of women,” published anonymously by Blanche Murphy in the Catholic World, articulated that position.

Like earlier writers who had sketched the republican mother ideal, Murphy looked to about eminent women of past to build her argument. Educated women had fulfilled roles as leaders and saints from ancient Judaism to the sixteenth century, she noted, yet throughout the centuries, “no precise relation in which she is to stand to man is defined.” Far from being oppressed, a woman might be a wife and mother, a members of a religious order, or “a governor, a regent, a queen.” All such possibilities were available through the Catholic church, the true creator and defender of women’s rights. Indeed, in Murphy’s view, “women’s rights associations” emerged only as “a reaction against the Protestant atmosphere of repression.”503 Catholic women need only look to role models such as St. Catherine of Siena, who counseled popes, was named a Doctor of the Church, and had “many disciples, both men and women” to realize that “Catholic womanhood has all that is claimed by women outside the church.”504 Like Protestant women writers of women’s history in the antebellum era,

503 [Blanche E. Murphy], “How the Church Understands and Upholds the Rights of Women: First Article: Ages of Martyrdom,” CW 15, no. 85 (April 1872), 78-79. According to Cummings, Katherine Conway followed this perspective in the 1890s. Cummings New Women, 183-84. The classic discussion of how elite women created the republic ideal remains Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic. 504 “How the Church Understands and Upholds the Rights of Women: Fourth and Last Article: The Middle Ages,” CW 15, no. 88, 490-94.

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Murphy drew on women from the past as role models, believing that “the past had the power to shape the present.”505

Women’s sphere could thus be flexible and expansive. Yet it remained a given; both Catholic antisuffragists and Catholic advocates of women’s political rights grounded their arguments in an ideology of domesticity. Indeed, Rev. Edward

McSweeney, writing in the Catholic World in 1889, went further than simply advocating votes for women on the grounds that “society is… purer and better where men and women live, move, and work together”; like many suffrage advocates he also endorsed women’s right to vote as a natural right of citizenship. In his view, there was

“something unconstitutional and un-American” in preventing women from voting. He argued that, short of becoming priests, women should enjoy expanded roles in the church. Women should be “in part control of every… municipality and state” as well as serving in academia, medicine, law, and charities. Moreover, he presented a surprisingly complementary and egalitarian view of gender norms, stating that “he who shows only manly qualities only represents one-half the entire human, and she who is all heart and sentiment is an imperfect and partial type of humanity.”506 Men

505 Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 191-244, quote p. 230. 506 Rev. Edward McSweeney, D.D., “Das Ewige Weiblich” [The Eternal Feminine], CW 149, no. 291 (June 1889), 326-33. The phrase derives from the end of second part of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, where a mystical chorus sings “the Eternal Feminine lures to perfection.” Catholic writers after World War II represented the ideal as the long-suffering, self-sacrificing domestic woman, a view that was challenged in the 1960s. Clearly, the “eternal feminine” carried diverse meanings. Goethe, Faust, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 503;

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and women both needed masculine and feminine qualities, and women should be equal politically. Although his were hardly mainstream views, the publication of

McSweeney’s essays alongside Blanche Murphy’s and others like them underscored the existence of “multiple versions of Catholic gender ideology” in the late nineteenth century.” 507

Catholic prescriptive literature encompassed more than specific advice manuals such as O’Reilly’s; it also included saints’ lives, obituaries, letters, fiction such as temperance tales and novels, and even political and social commentary that also advised individuals on the course their lives might take to improve social conditions as well as their own lives. Prescriptive literature sometimes addressed political, social, and cultural critiques; conversely, political commentary embedded advice to individuals. Frequent themes in both included nostalgia for the Middle Ages as part of a search for a “useable past” which, in the Catholic imagination, could provide guidance for the future. In the imaginations of Catholic advice givers, divisions of social class and ethnicity were erased under an idealized, unitary, and uniquely Catholic respectability, which they grounded in normative gender roles and

Mary J. Henold, Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 507 The phrase is Penny Edgell Becker’s. According to her analysis, some stories in the popular devotional journal Ave Maria reveal how the Catholic domestic sphere was flexible and fluid. Becker, “’Rational Amusement and Sound Instruction’: Constructing the True Catholic Woman in the Ave Maria, 1865-1889,” Religion and Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 8, no. 1 (Winter 1998), quote p. 59.

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piety, representing this as the truest form of Americanism, while critiquing individualism, industrialization, and the success ethic.

Writers of Catholic prescriptive literature simultaneously reflected concerns of their time and attempted to shape society, as well as individual lives, for if the family were the foundation of society, then women in their domestic roles could bring about real social changes. Such works were the product of complex interactions and interrelationships among the clergy and laypeople, fiction writers and advice givers,

Catholics and the dominant culture. While advice givers created a uniquely Catholic version of the domestic ideal, the ideal was flexible, fluid, and at times even inherently contradictory. Laywomen, along with male writers, were active subjects in creating, adapting, challenging and negotiating the domestic ideals, and in shaping new ones as through a process of creative engagement with their church and the broader culture, forging a new understanding of themselves and their world and contributing to

American Catholic social justice teachings.

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Chapter 5

CONCLUSION

In 1893 and again in 1894, the Catholic World sponsored conferences on “the woman question” and published articles by some of the women who participated. By this time, the two rival suffrage organizations had joined to form the National

American Women’s Suffrage Association, while women of all religious persuasions remained divided on the question of how expansive “women’s sphere” might be. The women at the conference discussed not only whether or not women should be voters, but broader questions of what women’s roles might be, and how Catholics might engage with emerging ideas about the “new woman.”508 At the first of the conferences, the Catholic World chose to publish writings by antisuffragists and at the second writings by suffragists, but within both of these positions there was considerable variation. That all were grounded in the Catholic faith and gender system suggests that

508 Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith analyzes how Catholic laywomen and nuns felt more marginalized as Catholics than as women and how they chose to empower themselves within their church, rather than in opposition to its patriarchal authority; see especially her discussion of antisuffragist Katherine Conway, whom Cummings calls “the historical mother of [conservative Catholic activist] Phyllis Schlafly,”quote p. 195.

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it might be more accurate to discuss varieties of Catholic gender systems, rather than a unitary Catholicism.509

Mary Josephine Ornahan predicted “a future when for many customs, laws, and practices prescriptive now there will be no distinction between the sexes.”

Although Alice Timmons Toomy was opposed to suffrage, she asserted that “there is a public sphere for Catholic women,” who after all were already working in the realms of education, philanthropy, and with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. By contrast, Eleanor Donnelly maintained that women who entered public life would lose their special privileges and posed a rhetorical question: “What work accomplished by gifted women in art, literature, science, or statecraft can compare with the molding of a single childish character…?” To John Paul MacCorrie, the “New Woman” was

“unpardonably ridiculous” as she “launches her tiny javelin at the very corner-stone of the social edifice,” marriage and the family.510

The issues were complex: suffrage, education, the relation between them, and also of whether women’s nature was to be wives and mothers. Teacher F. C. Faircloth challenged the view that women must choose the convent or marriage: women were individuals and girls, like boys, should be encouraged to develop their unique gifts.

509 Ryan, “Inventing Catholicism,” uses this approach in his analysis of literary Catholicism and print culture, discussing “Catholicisms” in the plural. 510 Alice Timmons Toomy, Eleanor C. Donnelly, Katherine Conway, “The Woman Question Among Catholics: A Round Table Conference,” CW 57 no. 341 (August 1893), 668-684.

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Mary Spellissy did not address the suffrage issue but did note that often widows were faced with “that bitter problem, how to earn a living” and had best be prepared.

Katherine Mullaney observed that “social prejudice,” which she compared to Chinese foot binding, led to “vanity and inanity.” Temperance advocate Mary Dowd went furthest, answering the antisuffragists’ argument that votes for women would destroy the home by observing that women would vote for prohibition, which would benefit the home (it was “sheer nonsense” to think that women would vote against prohibition to please their husbands). Moreover, she noted the disparity between the very public actions of the Remonstrants and their domestic ideology, observed that the church never mandated marriage or the cloister, and asserted that women should be able to enter any profession. “The fact is,” she wrote, “we cannot absolutely draw the line separating the domestic from the public life. The boundary of women’s sphere is constantly shifting…”511

Although she did not express them directly, Julia Compton lived Mary Dowd’s ideas a half century before the Catholic World conference. As a single Catholic laywoman who established and managed her own school, Julia was an independent woman who discovered and created her own roles as teacher, mentor, friend, daughter, and surrogate mother. Moreover, she enjoyed the friendship of nuns and married women without ever feeling that, as a lifelong spinster, she was in any way inferior to

511 “F. C. Farinholt, Mary A. Spellissy, Katherine F. Mullaney, Mary A Dowd, “The Public Rights of Women,” CW 59, no. 351 (June 1894), 299-320.

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them. She negotiated her own path within a Catholic gender system that was more flexible and fluid than it may have appeared to be. For her, as for Mary Dowd, the domestic sphere was expansive and education led them to claim their place in their church and in civil society.512

Julia Compton, the women who wrote for the Catholic World, the writers of obituaries, and novelists Mary Sadlier and Anna Dorsey defended their faith, repositioned Catholicism from the margin to the mainstream of American culture, engaged creatively with the dominant culture to create their own understandings of themselves and their culture, and interpreted and negotiated the Catholic gender system. For all of them, their religious belief systems were lived experiences, central to their identification of themselves as respectable. Their writings suggest that they were doing theology apart from the formal institutional setting, and sometimes their views were somewhat at odds with those of the mainstream church. Through private letters (which could also be semipublic communications when shared) and various genres of print culture, Catholic women expressed their beliefs and behaviors.

Studying Catholic laywomen suggests that historians and scholars of religion might broaden their concepts of what it means to practice theology: although the historiography has advanced considerably over the past two decades, still women’s history and religious studies are often practiced in isolation from one another when

512 See Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak on women’s empowerment through education and “performative strategies” for negotiating a place in civil society.

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mutually informed analysis could lead to a more nuanced interpretations.513 While

Catholic writers may have represented a unitary gender system with identities of pious respectability, the realities were always differences of race, gender, ethnicity, and social class. They negotiated the gender and the class systems, representing respectability, and implicitly social class, in terms of ideology and piety rather than of socioeconomic status. Their lives, experiences, and writings suggest how Catholic laywomen as subjects negotiated the complex interrelationships among multiple cultural systems to discover and create their own understandings of themselves, their lives, and their identities. They did not view the patriarchal structures of their church as something to be escaped or challenged directly, but rather to be accepted, lived with, and negotiated. In that sense, they both contrasted with and foreshadowed the

Catholic feminists of the twentieth century who did challenge their exclusion from formal structures of power, but chose to remain within the church and its gender system while negotiating within it.

513 Brekus, “Searching for Women,” in Religious History of American Women; Amy G. Remensnyder, “Meeting the Challenges of Mary”; Amy Holloway, “Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography”; Hackett, “Gender and Religion in American Culture, 1870-1930”; Ann Braude, “Women’s History IS American Religious History,” in Tweed, ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History.

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Articles

Alexander, Ruth M. “‘We Are Engaged as a Band of Sisters’: Class and Domesticity in the Washingtonian Temperance Movement, 1840–1850.” Journal of American History 75 (1988): 763–85.

Almodovar, Antonio, and Pedro Teixeira. “The Ascent and Decline of Catholic Economic Thought, 1830–1950s.” History of Political Economy 40 (annual suppl. 2008).

Anderson, Clare. “(Post) Colonialism, Citizenship, and Domesticity: Intersectionality in Feminist Histories.” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 315–25.

Anderson, M. Christine. “Negotiating Patriarchy and Power: Women in Christian Churches.” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 3 (2004): 197–96.

Behrent, Michael C. “The Mystical Body of Society: Religion and Association in Nineteenth-Century French Political Thought.” Journal of the History of Ideas 9 no. 2 (April 2008): 219–43.

Becker, Penny Edell. “’Rational Amusement and Sound Instruction’: Constructing the True Catholic Woman in the Ave Maria, 1865–1889.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 8 (Winter 1998): 55–90.

Behrent, Michael C. “The Mystical Body of Society: Religion and Association in Nineteenth-Century French Political Thought.” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (April 2008): 219–243.

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Clark, Charles M. A. “From The Wealth of Nations to Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples): Wealth and Development from the Perspective of the Catholic Social Thought Tradition.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 71, no. 4 (October 2012): 1049–72.

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______. “Gendering Religion.” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 163–69.

Finn, Daniel. “Human Work in Catholic Social Thought.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 71, No. 4 (October, 2012): 874–85.

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Hackett, David, Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, R. Laurence Moore, and Leslie Woodcock Tentler. “Forum: American Religion and Class.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 15, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 1–29.

336

Hareven, Tamara. “The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change,” American Historical Review 96 (February 1991): 95–124.

______. “Modernization and Family History: Perspectives on Social Change. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2 (August 1976): 190–201.

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______. “Maternal Strategies: Irish Women’s Headship of Families in Gilded Age Chicago.” Journal of Women’s History 13, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 60–108.

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337

Lewis, Jan. “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (October 1987): 689–721.

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Marino, John A. “Law and the Early Modern City in Political Thought and Social Theory: From the Catholic and Protestant Natural Law Tradition to Giambattista Vico.” Journal of Urban History 39 (2013): 570–75.

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Mislin, David. “The American Catholic Encounter with Organic Evolution, 1875– 1896.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 22, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 133–62.

Moloney, Diedre. “Who’s Irish? Ethnic Identity and Recent Trends in Irish-American History.” Journal of American Ethnic History 28, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 100– 109.

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Pehl, Matthew. “The Remaking of the Catholic Working Class, 1939–1945.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 19, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 37–67.

Remensnyder, Amy G. “Meeting the Challenges of Mary.” Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 195–206.

Sewell, William H. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (July 1992): 1–29.

338

Tentler, Leslie Woodcock. “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” American Quarterly 4 (March 1993): 104–27.

Thurman, Manuela. “’Better Citizens without the Ballot”: American AntiSuffrage Women and Their Rationale during the Progressive Era,” Journal of Women’s History 5, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 33–60.

Vicchio, Stephen J. “Baltimore’s Burial Practices, Mortuary Art, and Notions of Grief and Bereavement, Maryland Historical Magazine 81 (1986): 134–48.

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Wiesner-Hanks, Merry. “Women, Gender, and Church History.” Church History 71, no. 3 (September 2002): 600–20.

Zagarri, Rosemarie. “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44 (June 1992): 192–215.

Dissertations and Unpublished Papers

Anderson, Patricia Dockman. “The Mission and Duties of Catholic Women: Charles White and the Promotion of Catholic Domesticity in Antebellum Baltimore.” Paper presented at the Society for Catholic Historians conference, Philadelphia, 2003.

Dolde, Jenifer Grindle. “Legacy of Land on the Chesapeake: Three Centuries of Farming and Family in Kent County, Maryland.” Unpublished paper in author’s possession.

______. “‘My Dear Nannie’: Society and the Role of Women in Nineteenth Century Maryland and Washington DC through the Letters of Julia R. Compton to Anna Martha Young.” Unpublished paper in author’s possession.

Hume, Janice Rose. “Private Lives, Public Values: Historic Newspaper Obituaries in a Changing American Culture.” PhD diss, Univ. of Missouri, 1997.

Kirschner, Ann. “‘God Visited my Slumber’: The Intersection of Dreams, Religion, and Society in America, 1770–1830.” PhD diss., Univ. of Delaware, 2004.

McCarthy, Maureen. “The Rescue of True Womanhood: Convents and Anti- Catholicism in 1830s America.” PhD diss., Rutgers Univ., 1996.

O’Brien, Marie Regina. “Scribbling Brigids: The Search for Identity by Irish- American Women Writers, 1847–1911. PhD diss., Univ. of Delaware, 2001

339

Rehm, Maggie Amelia. “The Art of Citizenship: Suffrage Literature as Social Pedagogy.” PhD diss., Univ. of Pittsburgh, 2011.

Ryan, James Emmett. “Inventing Catholicism: Nineteenth Century Literary History and the Contest for American Religion.” PhD diss., Univ. of North Carolina, 2000.

Wilkinson, Stephanie. “A Novel Defense: Fictional Defenses of American Catholicism.” PhD diss., Univ. of Virginia, 1997.

340