1. Members of Roman Catholic female sisterhoods have commonly been referred to as nuns although it is not accurate to call all sisters nuns. Under canon law, nuns are women who take permanent vows and live a cloistered life, and not all sisters fit this description. More recently, sisters are referred to as women religious. For a useful glossary of terms relevant to the lives of women religious, see Evangeline Thomas, C.S.J., ed., Women Religious History Sources (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1983), xxv–xxviiGoogle Scholar.

2. Both of these women really did exist, and Reed even lived in a convent for a short period, but the stories were made up and mostly ghostwritten (Schultz, Nancy Lusignan, Veil of Fear [West Lafayette, Ind.: NotaBell, 1999], viiGoogle Scholar).

3. On the Charlestown burning, see Franchot, Jenny, Roads to Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 137–41Google Scholar; Jeanne Hamilton, O.S.U., “The Nunnery as Menace: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834,” U.S. Catholic Historian 14 (Winter 1996): 35–65Google Scholar; and Schultz, Nancy Lusignan, Fire and Roses (New York: Free Press, 2000)Google Scholar, and introduction to Veil of Fear

4. Schultz, , Fire and Roses, 3Google Scholar; and Hamilton, , “Nunnery as Menace,” 61–62Google Scholar. The convent literature and opposition to nuns as a specific component of anti-Catholicism were examined by Billington, Ray Allen in The Protestant Crusade (1938; rept. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 68–76, 90–108Google Scholar. More recent studies include Franchot, , Roads to Rome, 135–61Google Scholar; Hamburger, Philip, The Separation of Church and State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002): 215–17Google Scholar; Jenkins, Philip, The New Anti-Catholicism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 44Google Scholar; Schultz, , Fire and Roses, 147–89Google Scholar; Mark S. Massa, S.J., Anti-Catholicism in America (New York: Crossroad, 2003), 22–25Google Scholar; Mannard, Joseph G., “Maternity of the Spirit: Nuns and Domesticity in Antebellum America,” U.S. Catholic Historian (Summer/Fall 1986): 305–24Google Scholar; and Welter, Barbara, “From Maria Monk to Paul Blanshard,” in Uncivil Religion, eds. Bellah, Robert N. and Greenspan, Frederick (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 43–71Google Scholar.

5. Drury, Marjule Anne, “Anti-Catholicism in Germany, Britain and the United States: A Review and Critique of Recent Scholarship,” Church History 70 (03 2001): 106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. On the total number of sisters in American convents in the 19th and 20th centuries, see Sister Catherine Ann Curry's study included in Stewart, George C. Jr, Marvels of Charity (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, 1994), 564Google Scholar.

7. SisterUrsula Clarke, O.S.U., The Ursulines in Cork, 1771–1996 (Blackrock, Cork, Ireland: Ursuline Convent, 1996)Google Scholar; Mary Ewens, O.P., “Women in the Convent,” in American Catholic Women, ed. Karen Kennelly, C.S.J. (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 18–24Google Scholar; Mannard, Joseph G., “‘Maternity of the Spirit’: Women Religious in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1790–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1989), 71–75Google Scholar; Misner, Barbara, “A Comparative Social Study of the Members and Apostates of the First Eight Permanent Communities of Women Religious Within the Original Borders of the United States” (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1980), 100, 107–8, 113Google Scholar; and Stewart, , Marvels of Charity, 487–88Google Scholar.

8. Another distinction among sisterhoods is between those who take what are referred to as simple vows and those who take solemn vows. For a concise explanation of the differences between vows, see Magray, Mary Peckham, The Transforming Power of the Nuns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 8–9Google Scholar. For a listing of foundation dates and national origins of American communities, see Stewart, , Marvels of Charity, 487–515Google Scholar; and Thomas, , Women Religious, 169–70Google Scholar.

9. Discussion of these early efforts to change the meaning of religious life for women include Patricia Byrne, C.S.J., “Sisters of St. Joseph: The Americanization of a French Tradition,” U.S. Catholic Historian 3/4 (Summer/Fall 1986): 241–48Google Scholar; Mary Anne Foley, C.N.D., “‘We Want No Prison Among Us’: The Struggle for Ecclesiastical Recognition in Seventeenth-Century New France,” U.S. Catholic Historian 14 (Winter 1996): 1–18Google Scholar; Lynn Jarrell, O.S.A., “The Development of Legal Structures for Women Religious Between 1500 and 1900: A Study of Selected Institutes of Religious Life for Women,” U.S. Catholic Historian 10 (1989): 25–35Google Scholar; and McNamara, Jo Ann Kay, Sisters in Arms (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 462–72, 484–86Google Scholar.

10. In New York City, for example, the Sisters of Charity and Sisters of St. Joseph both had academy schools that they used to finance their other work (McCauley, Bernadette, “‘Who Shall Take Care of Our Sick?’ Roman Catholic Sisterhoods and Their Hospitals in New York City, 1850–1930” [Ph.D. diss., Columbia University 1992], 152–53Google Scholar). The issue caused dissension among the Sisters of Mercy because some sisters felt that academy schools violated their mission to the poor (M. Forde to Archbishop Cullen, February 3, 1875: Archives of the Archdiocese of Dublin 322/1, vol. 7; and Healy, Kathleen, Frances Warde: American Founder of the Sisters of Mercy [New York: Seabury, 1973], 249–53Google Scholar).

11. Historians disagree on the impact of personal religiosity on Protestant female reformers over time, but certainly, in the early period of the 19th century, evangelical religion was a motivating factor in their reform efforts. Discussions include Berg, Barbara, The Remembered Gate Origins of American Feminism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 152–54Google Scholar; Ginzberg, Lori D., Women and the Work of Benevolence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 118–19Google Scholar; Ryan, Mary P., Cradle of the Middle Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 105–45Google Scholar; and Sklar, Katherine Kish, Catherine Beecher (1973; rept. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 95–96, 127–29Google Scholar.

The subject of the anti-Catholicism of Protestant female reformers warrants further attention, particularly when it comes to nuns. See Hendrick, Joan D., Harriet Beecher Stowe ([New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], 170–71Google Scholar), and Sklar, , Catherine Beecher (117, 296)Google Scholar, for brief references to the Beecher sisters, but also Stanton, Elizabeth Cady's comments about her pleasant visit to a French convent in Eighty Years and More (1898; repr., New York: Source Book Press, 1970), 340–348Google Scholar.

12. Clear, Caitriona, Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987), 48–53Google Scholar; Prunty, Jacinta, Margaret Aylward, 1810–1889 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999), 121–27Google Scholar; O'Connell, Marie, “The Genesis of Convent Foundations and Their Institutions in Ulster,” in Coming Into the Light, ed. Holmes, Janice and Urquhart, Diane (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queens University of Belfast, 1994), 171–80Google Scholar; Mary C. Sullivan, R.S.M., Catherine McAuley and the Tradition of Mercy (Dublin: Four Courts, 1995), 9–25Google Scholar; and Peckham, , Transforming Power, 15–22, 31Google Scholar. Nagle intended for her community, originally called the Sisters of the Charitable Instruction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to be a nonenclosed community of women who would take simple vows. After her death, the community received canonical approval as the Presentation Sisters, a community with solemn vows that practiced enclosure (Clear, , Nuns, 49Google Scholar).

13. Hoy, Sue Ellen, “The Journey Out,” Journal of Women's History 6 (Winter/Spring 1995): 69Google Scholar.

14. Ibid., 70. See Healey, Frances Warde, for more detailed biographical information.

15. SisterMary Hermenia Muldrey, R.S.M., Abounding in Mercy (New Orleans: Habersham, 1988)Google Scholar, is a biography of Carroll. Rev. Code, Joseph B.'s Great American Foundresses (1929; rept. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1968)Google Scholar, is hagiographic but a useful collection of thumbnail sketches of these and other examples of Hoy's point.

16. Judith Metz, S.C., “The Founding Circle of Elizabeth Seton's Sisters of Charity,” U.S. Catholic Historian 1 (Winter 1996): 21–22Google Scholar. The classic biography of Seton is Melville, Annabelle M.'s Elizabeth Bayley Seton (1951; rept. New York: Scribner's, 1976)Google Scholar. See a bibliography on works about Seton in Regina Bechtle, S.C., and Judith Metz, S.C., Elizabeth Bayley Seton Collected Writings (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City, 2000), 1: xvii–xixGoogle Scholar.

17. “Sisters of Charity 1869,” 25/58–64: Propagation Fide Archives, Rome.

18. Mannard, Joseph G., “Converts in Convents: Protestant Women and the Social Appeal of Catholic Religious Life in Antebellum America,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 104 (1993): 81Google Scholar. Mannard examined membership rolls of three early communities and found that a little over 11 percent of members between 1790 and 1860 were converts. Of the three groups he considered — Carmelites in Maryland, Visitandines in Georgetown, and the Emmitsburg Charitys — the Visitandines had the largest number of convert members. Their convert membership total was 17.4 percent compared with the Carmelites' 8.1 percent and the Charitys' 11.3 percent. The Visitandines were what is sometimes called semicloistered. They taught but did not leave the grounds of their convent. As noted in the text, the Carmelites were contemplative (84–85).

19. “Sisters of Charity 1869.”

20. Ursula Stepsis, C.S.A., and Dolores Liptak, R.S.M., Pioneer Healers (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 23Google Scholar; and U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Benevolent Institutions 1904 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1905), 184–92Google Scholar.

21. Leidel, Leslie L., “Indomitable Nuns and an Unruly Bishop,” Catholic Historical Review 97 (07 2000): 473Google Scholar.

22. The unnamed author of a reminiscence of the foundress of the Presentation Sisters in San Francisco explained in her introduction that because sisters cultivated humility “their lives are little known,” quoting an uncited poem on this point (Memoir of Rev. Mother Mary Teresa Comerford [San Francisco: P. J. Thomas, 1882], ivGoogle Scholar).

23. An excellent source of some of the most of the recent work on the history of women religious is the newsletter of the Conference of the History of Women Religious available c/o Karen M. Kennelly, C.S.J., 2311 South Lindberg Boulevard, St. Louis, MO 63131. See also the bibliographies in Coburn, Carol K. and Smith, Martha, Spirited Lives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)Google Scholar, and Stewart, Marvels of Charity.

24. Stewart, (Marvels of Charity, 565)Google Scholar admits this is a debatable total, but the exact number is not really the point. Elizabeth Kohlmer, A.S.C., made this suggestion in her essay “Catholic Women Religious and Women's History,” in Women in American Religion, ed. James, Janet Wilson (1976; rept. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 126–39Google Scholar. Unfortunately, Leslie Tender's comments regarding the lack of incorporation of American Catholic history into the larger landscape of American social history is still relevant when it comes to nuns (Tentler, Leslie Woodcock, “On the Margins: The State of American History,” American Quarterly 4 [03 1993]: 104–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

25. Coburn, , Spirited Lives, 3Google Scholar.

26. McCauley, , “Who Shall Take Care of Our Sick?” 235Google Scholar.

27. Moloney, Deirdre M., American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 8, 226 n. 1Google Scholar.

28. On the development of women's activism and its links to politics and feminism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, see Giele, Janet Zollinger, Two Paths to Women's Equality (New York: Twayne, 1995)Google Scholar; Hewitt, Nancy A. and Lebsock, Suzanne, Visible Women (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Ginzberg, Women and the Work; Marilley, Susan M., Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ryan, Mary P., Women in Public (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. American settlement women present perhaps the greatest contrast with sisters because the settlement women, too, lived together among the immigrants they worked with. The religiosity of Ellen Gates Starr at Hull House was an exception (see Carson, Mina, Settlement Folk [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 17–19, 27–46, 82Google Scholar).

29. Mary Ewens, O.P., “Women in the Convent,” in Kennelly, , Women in the Convent, 33Google Scholar; and Oates, Mary J., “‘The Good Sisters’: The Work and Position of Catholic Churchwomen in Boston, 1870–1940,” in Catholic Boston, ed. Sullivan, Robert E. and O'Toole, James M. (Boston: [Archdiocese of Boston], 1985), 176–78, 197Google Scholar. Oates notes that parochial school sisters were not entirely without autonomy.

30. McCauley, “Who Shall Take Care of Our Sick?”

31. McGreevy, John T., “Thinking on One's Own: Catholicism in the American Intellectual Imagination, 1928–1960,” Journal of American History 84 (06 1997): 98–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dolan, Jay, The American Catholic Experience (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985), 340–46Google Scholar.