Augsburg Fortress Canada

Chapter Seven

American Women in Catholicism
and Sectarianism

Chapter Summary

Chapter Seven examines the activities of and attitudes toward women in the Catholic and sectarian communities in the nineteenth-century. Catholicism in the twentieth-century, because of its size and close relationship with American culture, is normally considered to be part of the American religious mainstream. The nineteenth-century, however, was a century of settling in and of intermittent tension with the religious mainstream, which was Protestant in character. The sectarian communities which emerged in that century borrowed from the Protestant mainstream but gave what they borrowed distinctive interpretations. These groups in a variety of ways were also in tension with the religious mainstream.

Interest in women and the Roman Catholic community has led historians to examine the teachings of the church hierarchy on gender roles. The ideology of two spheres and true womanhood, as you will see from the discussion in Her Story, formed an important framework for Catholic teaching. Recently historians have also pointed out that views on Catholic women must be seen within a context of total lay submission to a powerful hierarchy. Another question they now pursue is how far Catholic women were obedient to the teachings of silence, submission, and domesticity. One way of probing this issue is to explore the lives of ordinary Catholic women as Robert Orsi has done in his book Thank You, St. Jude.

Although consistently absent from past Catholic histories, female religious orders that settled or originated in America also are providing a vital source of knowledge of the experiences of Catholic women. The stories of the Catholic sisters begin in the seventeenth-century and include a growing body of critical publications by and about women such as Juana Ines de la Cruz. By the time we reach the nineteenth-century, the sisters are engaged primarily in nursing and education. In your reading of this chapter be sure to note the specific ways in which they helped to advance the Catholic faith and build bridges between Catholics and Protestants. How, for example, do the sisters working at Saterlee Military Hospital (7.2) enhance the status of Catholicism and relate to Protestant patients? The sisters also provided important role models for the whole church in their willingness to adapt to conditions in America. Historians do not see the sisters as proto-feminists: they do not agitate for an end to an exclusively-male clergy and they tended to work within existing gender ideology. They did, however, sometimes use this ideology to expand their roles and they sometimes challenge the clergy. Women such as Sister Caroline Friess made their voices heard when they saw the need to change past practices to accomplish their goals. In the selection from her biography (7.1), note the kind of work she does, the relationship between the sisters and the clergy, and the basis for her argument that cloistering requirements need to be dropped. New scholarship is beginning to contrast and compare the significance of Protestants societies for women with the Catholic religious orders.

The second part of the chapter focuses on five sectarian groups in nineteenth-century America. Be sure that you understand how the scholarly community generally defines a sect. We know that both men and women were attracted to these alternative religious communities for a variety of reasons, including eternal salvation, the fellowship of others and economic security. What has also interested scholars is whether these groups attracted women by giving them status and opportunities that they did not find in more traditional Christian churches. Initial research responded with a resounding yes. With the refinement of inquiry, however, has come the conclusion that the sects were a mixed blessing for women.

Certainly some of the sectarian communities emphasized a new way of thinking about God. Both Christian Science and the Shakers spoke of God as "dual" or having male and female aspects. Pay attention to the development of this idea and the implications of it for the Shakers. The reading from Charles Nordhoff on organization among the Shakers (7.5) reminds us that women were accepted as leaders in sectarian groups and as channels for special divine revelation. The community at Oneida (7.3), with its provision for multiple sexual relationships and birth control, and the Shakers, with their rule of celibacy, freed women in different ways from conformity to marriage and motherhood. And such communal groups also gave ordinary women time away from housekeeping to pursue other activities. More study of women's writing is needed to establish more clearly why they joined and remained in sects.

More extensive work on the sects in the past two decades also points out that their association with the goals of feminism is a qualified one. While giving women equality in sexual relations and work, the leaders at Oneida continued to believe that women lacked practical intelligence which made them unsuited for business and governing. And while Spiritualist women were welcomed on the lecture platform under the control of the spirits, the meetings were run and organized by men. As you read about the sectarian communities, think about the ways in which they both advanced and hindered the equality and self-determination of women.

A large body of scholarship has appeared in the past two decades on Mormon women to supplement what has already been learned about the groups discussed in Her Story. Historians have revealed the powerful position women held in Mormon Relief Societies and Mormon support for professional women. They have also begun to construct a picture of what polygamy may have meant for Mormon wives. Mormon feminists have used the position of women in the Mormon past to challenge patriarchy in the modern church.

Additional Readings

  • Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach and Anderson, Lavina Fielding, eds. Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Cultural and Historial Perspective. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
  • Braude, Ann D. Radical Spirits: 2 America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
  • Braude, Ann D. "Spirits Defend the Rights of Women: Spiritualism and Changing Sex Roles in Nineteenth-century America." In Women, Religion and Social Change, edited by Yvonne Haddad and Ellison Findly, 419–31. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985.
  • Brewer, Eileen M. Nuns and the Education of American Catholic Women, 1860–1920. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1987.
  • Brewer, Priscilla J. " 'Tho' of the Weaker Sex': A Reassessment of Gender Equality among the Shakers." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (Spring 1991): 609–35.
  • Bushman, Claudia L., ed. Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah. New ed. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1997.
  • Chmielewski, Wendy E. et al., eds. Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993.
  • Coburn, Carol K. and Smith, Martha. Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
  • Daynes, Kathryn M. More Wives than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System 1840–1910. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
  • Denig, Stephen. "Catholic Education in the United States: Meeting the Challenge of Immigration." In Commitment to Diversity: Catholics and Education in a Changing World, edited by Mary Eaton et al., 210–239. New York: Cassell, 2000.
  • Foster, Lawrence. Women, Family and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community and the Mormons. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991.
  • Gottleib, Robert and Wiley, Peter. "The Priesthood and the Black Widow Spider: Women and the Church." In America's Saints: The Rise of Mormon Power, 187–213. New York: Putnam's, 1984.
  • Hanks, Maxine, ed. 2 . Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992.
  • Humez, Jean M. "Weary of Petticoat Government: The Specter of Female Rule in Early Nineteenth-Century Shaker Politics." In Communal Societies, edited by Michael Barkun, 1–17, vol. 11. Evansville: Communal Studies Association, 1991.
  • Iadarola, Antoinette. "The American Catholic Bishops and Woman: From the Nineteenth Amendment to ERA." In Women, Religion and Social Change, edited by Yvonne Haddad and Ellison Findly, 457–76. Albany: State University of New York, 1985.
  • Juana Inés de la Cruz. A Sor Juana Anthology. Translated by Alan S. Trueblood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
  • Kenneally, James J. The History of American Catholic Women. New York: Crossroad, 1990.
  • Kitch, Sally L. "Brother and Sister in Eden: The Shaker View of Genesis 1–3." In Genesis 1–3 in the History of Exegesis, edited by Gregory Allen Robbins, 255–82. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988.
  • Kirk, Pamela. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz: Religion, Art and Feminism. New York: Continuum, 1998.
  • Klaw, Spencer. Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
  • McDonald, Jean A. "Mary Baker Eddy and the Nineteenth-Century 'Public' Woman: A Feminist Reappraisal." Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2 (1986): 89–111.
  • Mercadante, Linda A. Gender, Doctrine and God: The Shakers and Contemporary Theology. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990.
  • Merrim, Stephanie, ed. Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.
  • Misner, Barbara. Highly Respectable and Accomplished Ladies: Catholic Women Religious in America, 1790–1850. New York: Garland, 1988.
  • Newby, Alison M. "Shakers as Feminists? Shakerism as a Vanguard in the Antebellum American Search for Female Autonomy and Independence." In Locating the Shakers, edited by Mick Gidley, 96–105. Exeter, Eng.: University of Exeter Press, 1990.
  • Orsi, Robert. Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996.
  • Owen, Alex. "Women and Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism: Strategies in the Subversion of Femininity." In Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy, edited by Jim Obelkevich, 130–53. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.
  • Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana, or, The Traps of Faith. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1988.
  • Setta, Susan M. "When Christ Is a Woman: Theology and Practice in the Shaker Tradition." In Unspoken Worlds: Women's Religious Lives, edited by Nancy Auer Falk and Rita M. Gross, 221–32. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1989.
  • Tavard, George H. Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Theology of Beauty: The First Mexican Theology. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991.
  • Tavard, George H. "The Pilgrimage in the Works of Juana Inés de la Cruz." Dialogue and Alliance 6 (Winter 1992–93): 49–63.
  • Thompson, Margaret Susan. "Women and American Catholicism, 1789–1989." In Perspectives on the American Catholic Church, edited by Stephen Vicchio and Virginia Geiger, 123–42. Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1989.
  • Thompson, Margaret Susan. "Women, Feminism and the New Religious History: Catholic Sisters as a Case Study." In Belief and Behavior: Essays in the New Religious History, edited by Robert P. Swierenga and Philip R. VanderMeer, 136–163. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
  • Wayland-Smith, Ellen. "The Status and Self-Perception of Women in the Oneida Community." Communal Societies, edited by Michael Barkun, vol. 8, 18–53. Evansville, Ind.: Historic Communal Societies Association, 1988.

Questions for Reflection

  1. Review the attitudes of the Catholic hierarchy toward women discussed in this chapter. Have any of these ideas and their implications lingered on through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century?
  2. What was the significance or importance of the work of the Catholic sisters in nineteenth-century America? Do they continue to have an impact on American society and religion in the same way? In a different way?
  3. Some historians argue that the Catholic women in religious orders were the most "liberated" women in the United States. Was this the case?
  4. Discuss the similarities you might find between the experiences of the Catholic sisters and the experiences of Protestant women in the voluntary societies.
  5. How did the life offered to women in some of the sectarian communities differ from what they were offered in mainstream Protestant society?
  6. What features or characteristics of sectarian communities made them more or less congruent with feminism?
  7. In what ways might the sectarian communities have contributed to patriarchy and the oppression of women?
  8. Are you familiar with any alternative religious communities? What is the status of women in the group or groups you know about?

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