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Lay-Sisters and Good Mothers: Working-class Women in English Convents, 1840-1910*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
When convents were re-established in mid-nineteenrh-cenrury England, after a break of over two hundred years, they mirrored the developments in religious life pioneered on the Continent during the Catholic reformation and in response to the French Revolution. By 1850 new forms of active and apostolic vocation co-existed with the traditional enclosed and contemplative vocation. Yet even the most traditional convent was novel in early nineteenth-century England, and it is only with benefit of hindsight that we assume the willing response of Irish and English women to the call of a religious vocation. The reestablished Church might promote the virtue of vocation, particularly to the new apostolic congregations which were so useful to hard-pressed priests. But it was not inevitable that the religious life would take root in a culture deeply suspicious of conventual ‘secretiveness’ and, moreover, at a time when the ideology of hearth and home had such vitality. In the event, the active congregations multiplied rapidly and attracted women of all classes. As a result, by the end of the century the Roman Catholic Church in England had found employment for thousands of women as full-time, professional church workers. More than one-third and perhaps as many as half of these women were from working-class families, and it is with the working-class members that this paper is concerned.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1990
Footnotes
*
I am grateful to the Nuffield Foundation for financial support during 1988-9. My thanks also to the congregations in whose archives I have worked, and particularly to Sister Joan Loveday, RSCJ, and Sister Moira Geary, FMSJ.
References
1 See Murphy, J. N., Terra incognita: or, The Convents of the United Kingdom (London, 1873 Google Scholar) and Steele, F. M., The Convents of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1923 Google Scholar) for surveys of convents in England, and Langlois, C., La Catholicisme auféminin: les congregations françaises à supérieure au xix’ siècle (Paris, 1984 Google Scholar) on developments in the religious life in France.
2 There are several pages on lay-sisters in Clear, C., Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Dublin, 1987) and a detailed study of the class origins of the members of several convents, pp. 168’74 Google Scholar. Status is also discussed in Campbell-Jones’s, S. In Habit: An Anthropological Study of Working Nuns (London, 1979 Google Scholar), which, like this essay, compares two (unnamed) congregations, one of which is Franciscan and the other a teaching congregation based on the Jesuit Constitution.
3 I owe this insight to the archivist of the Sisters of Notre Dame. Notre Dame was one of the earlist and most radical of the post-Revolutionary undivided congregations, but it rapidly became dominated by élite women. For a glimpse of the class-consciousness in Notre Dame, see Clarke, A. M., The Life of the Hon. Mrs. Edward Petre… Sister Mary of St Francis, of the Congregation of the Sisters of Notre-Dame of Namur (London, 1899 Google Scholar).
4 The divided congregations are: Society of the Holy Child Jesus [hereafter SHCJ]; the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary [hereafter 1BVM]; the Faithful Companions of Jesus [hereafter FCJ]; and the Society of the Sacred Heart [hereafter RSCJ]. The undivided congregations are: Sisters of the Cross and Passion [hereafter CP]; Poor Servants of the Mother of God [hereafter SMG]; and the Franciscan Missionaries of St Joseph [hereafter FMSJ].
5 Few of the nineteenth-century teaching sisters in the fee-paying schools of the RSCJ and IBVM had teaching qualifications. By the 1880s, however, their attitude had caused a crisis at the IBVM’s Bar Convent [St Mary’s] at York: ‘Reverend Mother Michael [IBVM Loreto Superior] kindly informed us that she had heard from some priests that our school is not thought as much of as formerly, that it is old-fashioned, and that we shall lose our children unless we adopt modern teaching methods’. IBVM Archives, St Mary’s Convent, York, 6/2B.
6 Evidence cited in Quinlan, M. H., Mabel Digby, Janet Erskine Stuart:Superiors General of the Society of the Sacred Heart 1895-1914 (1984. Privately printed. Available from 153 Magazine St., Cambridge, MA 02139, USA), pp. 35’6 Google Scholar.
7 Rules and Constitutions of the Religious Called Sisters of Mercy (Dublin, 1926), pp. 9–11, quoted in Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland, p. 96.
8 One of the best sources of information about the requirements of different congregations and orders is Hohn, H., ‘Vocations’: Conditions of admission etc. into the convents, congregations, societies, religious institutions etc. according to authentical information and the latest regulations (London, 1912 Google Scholar). My thanks to Fr. David Lannon of the Salford Diocese for telling me about this work.
9 It is interesting to note, for example, that in the Sisters of the Cross and Passion, founded in Manchester as a congregation where even illiterate women could be received, all but three of the several hundred who entered between 1852 and 1910 were able to sign their profession vows. CP Archives, Great Billing, Northampton.
10 Some impressions, particularly about the lay-sisters’ own perceptions of vocation, have also been drawn from reading oral interview transcripts of elderly sisters made by the RSCJ in the 1970s. For reasons of confidentiality they have not been quoted.
11 Williams, M., RSCJ, The Society of the Sacred Heart: History of a Spirit 1800-1975 (London, 1978), p. 76 Google Scholar.
12 Figure calculated from the convents listed in the Catholic Directory for 1870. Clear’s calculations for Ireland (based on the same kind of source) show a much higher proportion of convents with lay-sisters: 97 per cent in 1850, and still as high as 73 per cent in 1900. Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland, p. 187, n. 65.
13 Williams, , The Society of the Sacred Heart, pp. 70’6 Google Scholar.
14 White, A., Frost in May (London, 1933, repr. 1978 Google Scholar). See also her essay ‘A Child of the Five Wounds’, in Greene, G., ed., The Old School (London, 1934 Google Scholar).
15 SMG Archives, Maryfield Convent, Roehampton. Correspondence B. 9 February 1887.
16 Acton (1842) moved to Roehampton 1850; Wandsworth (1874); Brighton (1877); Carlisle (1889), and Hammersmith (1893).
17 Sophie Barat recommended that this should be the ratio in the Sacred Heart: see Quinlan, , Mabel Digby, Janet Erskine Stuart, p. 43 Google Scholar. Calculations based on the registers in the archives of FCJ, SHCJ, and IBVM show that the same ratio was maintained by them.
18 RSCJ Archive, Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton. Calculated from the card-index of aspirants and members.
19 Quinlan, , Mabel Digby, Janel Erskine Stuart, p. 43 Google Scholar.
20 RSCJ Archives. Card-index of aspirants and members. See also Morris, J., SJ, ed., The Life of Mother Henrietta Ken (Roehampton, 1892 Google Scholar).
21 1BVM Archives. MS Custom Book of St Mary’s Convent, IBVM, York 1889, pp. 66-9. Copy in St Mary’s Convent, Fitzjohn’s Avenue, London.
22 Constitutions et Règles de la Société du Sacré Coeur de Jésus (Paris, 1852), p. 310.
23 Ibid.
24 IBVM Archives, MS Custom Book of St Mary’s Convent, York 1889, pp. 58-9.
25 IBVM Archives, York. MS Annals V6/2. 1872, p. 42.
26 SHCJ Archives, MS St Leonard’s Notebook, 1877-9 gives the convent offices and time table for different sectors of the convent, as does the Custom Book of St Mary’s Convent, York.
27 SHCJ Archives, Necrologies.
28 Ibid.
29 Stuart, J. Erskine, The Society of the Sacred Heart (New York, 1914), p. 27 Google Scholar.
30 Lay-brothers in male religious congregations undertook similar works and were also often described in similar terms. However, it seems likely that the male congregations operated a greater degree of meritocracy than did the divided female congregations, where the notion of a ‘lady’ remained powerful. It would be interesting to follow up this line of thought, suggested to me by Dr Michael Walsh of Heythrop College, in relation to the English Jesuits.
31 FMSJ Archives, Worsley, Manchester. Typescript, ‘Rules-Constitutions-Directives 1871-1978’, p. 9. The FMSJ Archive has been slowly developed in recent years, but most of the MS material for the period prior to 1930 is still in the Archive of the Mill Hill Fathers.
32 FMSJ Archives, Photocopy MS ‘Father Benoit’s Register’ from original in Mill Hill Archive and MS Profession Registers.
33 For example, when all the small group of sisters volunteered to be sent on the Borneo Mission in 1883 ‘die name of each Professed Sister was written on a piece of paper which was folded and put into an empty lamp glass from the Sacred Heart shrine and left on the al tar over night. The next day, after prayer, five papers were taken out of the glass and the names read out’: Franciscan Missionaries of St. Joseph: A Short History on the occasion of the Centenary of the Congregation 1883-1983 (Privately printed, Glasgow, 1983), p. 23.
34 FMSJ Archives, Typescript ‘Rules-Constitutions-Directives’, p. 9.
35 FMSJ Archives, Admissions Registers.
36 See The Franciscan Missionaries of St Joseph, and Light after Darkness: Mother Mary Francis, Foundress of the Franciscan Missionaries of St Joseph (Glasgow, 1963). Also two small typescript volumes of letters compiled by the congregation during the centenary year, containing all the corres pondence of the period before Alice Ingham’s death in 1890: ‘Letters of the Foundress Mother Mary Francis (Alice Ingham)’ and ‘The Preparation Period, 1870–1880: Rochdale to Mill Hill’.
37 For a more detailed discussion, see O’Brien, S., ‘Terra Incognita: the Nun in Nineteenth Century England’, PaP, 121, pp. 123’8 Google Scholar.
38 Leslie, S., ed., Letters of Herbert Cardinal Vaughan to Lady Herbert of Lea, 1867 to 1903 (London, 1942), p. 338 Google Scholar, and Light After Darkness, p. 90.
39 The Franciscan Missionaries of St Joseph, p. 11,
40 Father Gomair, OSF, to Alice Ingham 10 January 1878 in ‘The Preparation Period”, pp. 57-60, ‘I am sorry to see some of the sisters displeased and not happy…. Every where, my dear Alice, we must expect crosses and trials; 1 know there is not much encouragement from any one at your placey’.
41 O’Brien, , ‘Terra Incognita’, pp. 136—9 Google Scholar.