Carmen M. Mangion

‘Good teacher’ or ‘good religious’? the professional identity of catholic women religious in nineteenth-century England and Wales

Abstract Roman Catholic womens congregations are an enigma of nineteenth-century social history. Over ten thousand women involved in these congregations have been rendered invisible in history. Despite their exclusion from historical texts, these women featured prominently in negotiating the boundaries of religious life, sometimes to their collective benefit, sometimes not. Prescriptive literature gave one model of womanhood, married life, with a second model, single life, clearly an inauspicious alternative. Women religious provided a different model and created a religious, occupational and professional identity that varied from the prescriptive literature of the day. Their religious identity had as its goal their own ‘perfection’ and the salvation of others. Their occupational identity as ‘nun’ often encompassed a wide variety of tasks, but by the end of the century, the professional identity of nun as teacher or nurse was firmly in place.

Laying "good strong foundations": the power of the symbolic in the formation of a religious sister

The two formal stages of training, the postulancy and the novitiate, prepared women for the spiritual, vocational and communal aspects of religious life. Novitiate training in church history, doctrine and theology as well as her formal vocational training indicated that the novice was meant to be an educated and effective evangeliser of her faith. Ritual was an important part of convent life, especially as women moved from lay to religious life. Ceremonies, processions and devotions were rich in symbolism and emphasised the sacredness of the life being entered into. It was through the successful negotiation of the postulancy and novitiate that Catholic women religious demonstrated their power, although paradoxically it was obedience and docility that formed the basis of this power.

To console, to nurse, to prepare for eternity: the Catholic sickroom in late nineteenth-century England

This essay examines, using Foucaults concept of heterotopias and the Foucauldian notion of surveillance, the Catholic sickroom as a sacred space, created and managed by women religious, where women could be mediators of the sacred. It considers how women religious shaped the meanings of the sickroom using a salvific spiritual message found in the directives, actions and bodies of the sister-nurse. By examining the Catholic sickroom as a crisis heterotopia, the multiplicity of meanings which were present in this ‘real place’ emerges. Catholic women religious in England provided alternate sites of medical treatment for Catholics where the medical and the sacred could co-exist. They entered into social relationships through a cultural discourse that structured their work as ‘caring’, yet they also took the opportunity to mould the religious practices and behaviour of patients within these spaces. The heterotopian place of the Catholic sickroom exposed the ‘real space’ where women ministered in all but sacramental ways to the spiritual needs of patients. This study positions women religious as key protagonists in the development of the sacredness of the sickroom as a social space thereby expanding the spheres of influence of women. The Catholic sickroom, both in the institution and in the home, provided an alternate social space where the politics of religion, theology, and gender added to the complex meanings of the sickroom.

Faith, philanthropy and the aged poor in nineteenth-century England and Wales

In the last half of the nineteenth century, Victorians grappled with welfare issues regarding the aged poor as social investigators sought to explain their dependency and poverty. Elderly men and women who were unable to care for themselves, and without a family or community to attend to their needs, had few alternatives outside the workhouse in nineteenth-century England and Wales. Catholic homes for the elderly managed by communities of women religious such as the Sisters of Nazareth provided an important option to the aged poor who often needed both accommodation and medical care. These homes provided a unique form of social welfare which attracted the attention of Protestants as well as Catholics as benefactors. Protestant reformers, looking for different approaches to maintaining the aged poor, inspected these Catholic homes in order to develop their own institutional solutions. Perhaps more pointedly, this interaction between Protestants and Catholics offers a counter narrative to the usual histories that emphasise anti-Catholicism, sectarianism and conflict. Despite the anti-Catholic tenor of the times, the homes for the aged of the Sisters of Nazareth were recognized and funded by both Catholics and Protestants as they were seen as providing a much needed form of charitable aid for the aged poor. As an alternative to poor law workhouses, the institutions created and managed by Catholic women religious formed an integral part of the mixed economy of welfare in the nineteenth century.

Housing the ‘decayed members’ of the middle classes: social class and St Scholastica's Retreat, 1861–1901

This study of St Scholastica’s Retreat offers an opportunity to examine a charity for the middle classes and the horizontal relationship between middle-class benefactors and recipients that did not appear to stigmatise middle-class recipients of charity. Middle-class inhabitants accessed a mix of resources, from personal resources, kinship relationships, friendship and charitable networks, as part of a ‘mixed economy of welfare’ so often discussed by welfare historians in Britain. Their ‘choices’ were limited but their personal networks enabled them to maintain their middle-class identities. This research not also demonstrates the flexibility of almshouse accommodation but also the meanings inherent in the domestic space that emphasised middle-class respectability.

‘The business of life’: educating Catholic deaf children in late nineteenth-century England

Much of the debates in late nineteenth-century Britain regarding the education of deaf children revolved around communication. For many Victorians, sign language was unacceptable; many proponents of oralism attempted to ‘normalise’ the hearing impaired by replacing deaf methods of communication with spoken language and lipreading. While debates on language were raging in late nineteenth-century England, another facet of normalisation, that of occupational training, was being developed at St John’s Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, the only Catholic deaf school in England. This school not only functioned to develop the Catholic faith of the deaf, but also expected to improve the social and economic status of deaf Catholics. Elementary education, and particularly occupational training, was meant to transform the deaf child into a faith-filled, respectable, working-class citizen. This essay aims at moving the normalisation debates away from language skills and towards this alternative mode of integration.