In the preceding chapter we saw how writers use the female voice and the public speech it generates in order to launch a powerful critique of nineteenth-century middle-class culture. By engaging in the wide range of political discussions that sustained the public sphere throughout the century, the woman-authored novels that I treat in the following chapters challenge bourgeois notions of the separate spheres of influence. However, all of these texts enhance their rhetorical power and so their political impact by depicting the complex relation between the female voice and women's public speech. Each of the political movements I survey invokes in one way or another the female voice as a part of its political rhetoric, but the novels that contribute to these debates include in their depictions of the female voice its influence on women's public speech. In so doing, they remind readers of the cultural significance that, as I have shown, accrues to the female voice in nineteenth-century America and thereby maximize the impact of their public political discourse. In subsequent chapters I will explore women writers' contributions to the labor reform, pro-slavery, abolition, and woman's suffrage movements, but in the following pages I want to assess the nature of Maria Monk's profound effect on the nativist movement and related discourses of nationalism.

American Anti-Catholicism

The anti-Catholic movement in nineteenth-century America initially developed in reaction to the dramatic increases in immigration beginning in the 1830s, primarily from Roman Catholic Ireland, but the movement gained political force in the three decades preceding the Civil War.