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12 - Gender and Sexuality

from Part II - Catholic Life and Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2021

Margaret M. McGuinness
Affiliation:
La Salle University, Philadelphia
Thomas F. Rzeznik
Affiliation:
Seton Hall University, New Jersey
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Summary

It was the culmination of a months-long legislative fight, not to mention some eighty years of swirling allegations about Catholic sexual deviance, when the local sheriff and health commissioner arrived at St. Joseph Academy in remote Mena, Arkansas, where Catholics represented a tiny minority of the population. The county officials entered the school under authority bestowed by the state’s new Convent Inspection Act of 1915, designed to end the rumored practice of Catholic institutions harboring girls for the sexual gratification, as one enraged Arkansan put it, of a “lecherous bunch” of priests.1 Discovering no evidence of crime or malfeasance among the several Sisters of Mercy and the small number of female students at the school, the sheriff, evidently impressed by his hosts, apologized to them and promised to return for a social visit with his wife. Meanwhile, elected officials in Georgia successfully installed a similar law aimed at routing out Catholic perversion, and legislators in seven other states – from Iowa to Oregon to Minnesota – debated their own versions of a convent inspection bill. Together, these largely forgotten efforts at policing sexual activity in Catholic institutions hint at how significant and controversial Catholicism has been in the history of gender and sexuality in the United States.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Cummings, Kathleen Sprows. New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Henold, Mary J. Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Leon, Sharon K. An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Massa, Mark S., SJ. The Structure of Theological Revolutions: How the Fight Over Birth Control Transformed American Catholicism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Tentler, Leslie Woodcock. Catholics and Contraception: An American History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Vander Broek, Allison. “Rallying the Right-to-Lifers: Grassroots Religion and Politics in the Building of a Broad-Based Right-to-Life Movement.” Ph.D. dissertation, Boston College, 2018.Google Scholar
Yacovazzi, Cassandra L. Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign against Convents in Antebellum America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.Google Scholar

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