We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2016
From the Counter-Reformation to the present, women in a variety of contexts of colonization, decolonization, and slavery crossed the threshold from missionary congregation to missionary workforce to live in Catholic religious community. Comparative, transnational analysis provides insights from a variety of angles into the myriad local factors that fashioned their understandings of the relationship between the spiritual and material benefits so gained. Their experiences were uneven, shaped by the race, gender, and status politics of each ecclesiastical and secular context, by their usefulness to the wider missionary project and the state, and by shifts in ecclesiastical rulings that were prompted by changes in the Vatican’s temporal status. In the later twentieth century, some became activists and advocates, using their symbolic power to work in the interests of women and poor people, and to reform the patriarchy at the core of the church.
I would like to thank Alanna Harris, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, and Carmen Mangion for their invitation to address ‘The Nun in the World’ conference, at the London Global Gateway of the University of Notre Dame, USA in 2015. Though this article bears little resemblance to that address, the invitation prompted me to return to the subject and to think about its transnational implications. I would also like to thank my colleague Peter Ross, the editors of the Journal of Global History, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
1 Wiesner-Hanks, Merry, ‘Crossing borders in transnational gender history’, Journal of Global History, 6, 2011, pp. 357–379 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Grimshaw, Patricia and Sherlock, Peter, ‘Women and cultural exchanges’, in Norman Etherington, Missions and empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 p. 189 Google Scholar.
3 On Europe, see the bibliography and notes in Lux-Sterritt, Laurence and Mangion, Carmen M., eds., Gender, Catholicism and spirituality: women and the Roman Catholic Church in Britain and Europe, 1200–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Latin America, see Chowning, Margaret, ‘Convents and nuns: new approaches to the study of female religious institutions in colonial Mexico’, History Compass, 6, 5, 2008, pp. 1279–1303 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leavitt-Alcantara, Brianna, ‘Holy women and hagiography in colonial Spanish America’, History Compass, 12, 9, 2014, pp. 717–728 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Asia, see Ward, Haruko Nawata, Women religious leaders in Japan’s Christian century, 1549–1650, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009 Google Scholar; Tran, Nhung Tuyet, ‘Les Amantes de la Croix: an early modern Vietnamese sisterhood’, in Gisele Bousquet and Nora Taylor, eds., Le Viet Nam au féminin, Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2005, pp. 51–66 Google Scholar.
4 Etherington, Missions and empire, p. 262.
5 Lux-Sterritt, Laurence and Mangion, Carmen M., ‘Introduction’, in Lux-Sterritt and Mangion, Gender, Catholicism and spirituality, pp. 1–18 Google Scholar.
6 McNamara, Jo Ann, Sisters in arms: Catholic nuns through two millennia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996 Google Scholar; Vicinus, Martha, Independent women: work and community for single women 1850–1920, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1985 Google Scholar; Nelson, Siobhan, Say little, do much: nurses, nuns, and hospitals in the nineteenth century, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evangelisti, Silvia, Nuns: a history of convent life 1450–1700, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 Google Scholar; Lux-Sterritt and Mangion, Gender, Catholicism and spirituality.
7 Robertson, Claire C. and Chaudhui, Nupur, ‘Editors’ note: revising the experiences of colonized women: beyond binaries’, Journal of Women’s History, 14, 4, 2003, p. 12 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Etherington, Missions and empire, p. 1; Bruner, Jason, ‘British missions and missionaries in the high imperial era, c. 1857–1914’, in Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie, eds., The Routledge history of Western empires, Abingdon: Routledge, 2014, p. 1005 Google Scholar.
9 Chowning, ‘Convents and nuns’, p. 1293; Lux-Sterritt and Mangion, Gender, Catholicism and spirituality.
10 van Heijst, Anneliese, ‘The disputed charity of Catholic nuns: dualistic spiritual heritage as a source of affliction’, Feminist Theology, 21, 2, 2012, pp. 155–172 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fiske, Jo-Anne, ‘Spirited subjects and wounded souls: political representations on an im/moral frontier’, in Myra Rutherdale and Katie Pickles, eds., Contact zones: Aboriginal and settler women in Canada’s colonial past, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005 Google Scholar; Yeates, Nicola, ‘The Irish Catholic female religious and the transnationalisation of care: an historical perspective’, Irish Journal of Sociology, 19, 2, 2011, p. 77–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pilgrim, David, ‘Child abuse in Irish Catholic settings: a non-reductionist account’, Child Abuse Review, 21, 2012, pp. 405–413 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Comparison with Buddhist nuns would also offer rich insights but space does not permit here.
12 Christian, David, ‘History and global identity’, in Stuart Macintyre, ed., The historian’s conscience: Australian historians on the ethics of history, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004, p. 140 Google Scholar.
13 Guldi, Jo and Armitage, David, The history manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (text updated 2015).
14 Adapted from Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000 Google Scholar.
15 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, ‘Women, reproductive rights and the Catholic Church’, Feminist Theology, 16, 2, 2008, pp. 184–193 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See some changes in the Philippines, however, in Cabal, Esperanza, ‘Reproductive health law in the Philippines’, Journal of the ASEAN Federation of Endocrine Societies, 28, 1, 2013, pp. 26–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Rapley, Elizabeth, The dévotes: women and church in seventeenth-century France, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990, p. 4 Google Scholar.
17 Evangelisti, Nuns, p. 44.
18 Ibid., p. 63.
19 Monteiro, Marit, ‘Power in piety: inspiration, ambition and strategies of spiritual virgins in the Northern Netherlands during the seventeenth century’, in Lux-Sterritt and Mangion, Gender, Catholicism and spirituality, p. 119 Google Scholar.
20 Holler, Jacqueline, Escogidas plantas: nuns and beatas in Mexico City, 1531–1601, ACLS Humanities E-book electronic edition, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008 Google Scholar, para. 21.
21 Rapley, Dévotes, p. 5
22 Evangelisti, Nuns, p. 210.
23 Rapley, Dévotes, pp. 193, 6–7.
24 Alberts, Tara, Conflict and conversion: Catholicism in Southeast Asia, 1500–1700, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, pp. 5, 72–83.
25 Ward, Women religious leaders, p. 5.
26 Andaya, Barbara Watson, The flaming womb: repositioning women in early modern Southeast Asia, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006, pp. 95–96 Google Scholar.
27 Alberts, Conflict and conversion, pp. 170–4.
28 Tran, ‘Amantes de la Croix’, pp. 51–3.
29 Cited in Alberts, Conflict and conversion, p. 169.
30 Ward, Women religious leaders, pp. 68–9, 14, 61, 31.
31 Ward, Haruko Nawata, ‘Jesuit encounters with Confucianism in early modern Japan’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 40, 4, 2009, p. 1055 Google Scholar.
32 Alberts, Conflict and conversion, p. 177–9.
33 Tran, ‘Amantes de la Croix’, p. 55.
34 Alberts, Conflict and conversion, pp. 187–9.
35 Ward, Women religious leaders, ch. 4.
36 Alberts, Conflict and conversion, p. 179.
37 Holler, Escogidas plantas, para. 83.
38 Lavrin, Asunción, Brides of Christ: conventual life in colonial Mexico, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008, pp.246–247 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 Holler, Escogidas plantas, ch. 2.
40 Holler, Escogidas plantas, paras. 157–9, 150, 162.
41 Ibid., para. 82, n. 42; Lavrin, Brides of Christ, p. 246.
42 Lavrin, Brides of Christ, p. 247.
43 Holler, Escogidas plantas, paras. 156, 159.
44 Ibid., para. 161; Lavrin, Brides of Christ, p. 248.
45 Lavrin, Brides of Christ, p. 249.
46 Ibid., pp. 248–55.
47 Holler, Escogidas plantas, para. 122.
48 Socolow, Susan Migden, The women of colonial Latin America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 Munro, Jessie, The story of Suzanne Aubert, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996, pp. 7–13 Google Scholar.
50 Ibid., p. 84.
51 Ibid., pp. 84–8.
52 Ibid., pp. 89, 110, 68–73, 111.
53 Ibid., pp. 111, 116, 3, 116, 136.
54 Pickles, Katie, ‘Colonial sainthood in Australasia’, National Identities, 7, 4, 2005, pp. 389–408 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
55 Wiesner-Hanks, ‘Crossing borders’. On nuns in Latin America, see Chowning, ‘Convents and nuns’; Leavitt-Alcantara, ‘Holy women’; Voekel, Pamela, Moreton, Bethany, and Jo, Michael, ‘Vaya con Dios: religion and the transnational history of the Americas’, History Compass, 5, 5, 2007, pp. 1604–1639 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Diaz, Monica, Indigenous writings from the convent: negotiating ethnic autonomy in colonial Mexico, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2010 Google Scholar; van Deusen, Nancy, Between the sacred and the worldly: the cultural and institutional practice of recogimiento among women in colonial Peru, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001 Google Scholar; Burns, Kathryn, Colonial habits: convents and the spiritual economy of Cuzco, Peru, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999 Google Scholar.
56 O’Brien, Anne, God’s willing workers: women and religion in Australia, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005, p. 165 Google Scholar; Taylor, Charles, A secular age, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007 Google Scholar, ch. 12.
57 Gibson, Ralph, A social history of French Catholicism, 1789–1914, London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 116–119 Google Scholar.
58 Clear, Catriona, Nuns in nineteenth-century Ireland, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987, p. 135 Google Scholar.
59 Hoy, Suellen, ‘The journey out: the recruitment and emigration of Irish religious women to the US, 1812–1914’, Journal of Women’s History, 6, 4, 1995, pp. 64–98 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O’Brien, God’s willing workers, part 3.
60 Evangelisti, Nuns, p. 175.
61 Clark, Emily and Gould, Virginia Meacham, ‘The feminine face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727–1852’, William and Mary Quarterly, 54, 2, 2002, pp. 410–448 Google Scholar.
62 Morrow, Dianne Batts, ‘Outsiders within: the Oblate Sisters of Providence in 1830s church and society’, U.S. Catholic Historian, 15, 2, 1997, pp. 35–54 Google Scholar.
63 Ibid.
64 Ochs, Stephen J., ‘Review: No cross, no crown: black nuns in nineteenth-century New Orleans, by Sister Mary Bernard Deggs’, Journal of Southern History, 69, 2, 2003, pp. 432–434 Google Scholar.
65 Sjorup, Lene, ‘The Vatican and women’s reproductive health and rights: a clash of civilisations? Feminist Theology, 7, 21, 1999, pp. 79–97 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
66 Mangion and Lux-Sterritt, ‘Introduction’, p. 10.
67 Jacobs, Margaret, ‘The habit of elimination: Indigenous child removal in settler colonial nations in the twentieth century’, in Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton, eds., Colonial genocide and Indigenous North America, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014, pp. 189–207 Google Scholar.
68 Miller, J. R., Shingwauk’s vision: a history of native residential schools, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996 Google Scholar, part 2; Riney, Scott, ‘Review essay’, Oral History Review, 24, 2, 1997, pp. 117–123 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
69 For metaphorical motherhood among single Anglican women missionaries, see Rademaker, Laura, ‘“I had more children than most people”: single women’s missionary maternalism in Arnhem Land, 1908–1945’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, 17, 2012, pp. 7–21 Google Scholar; Ganter, Regina, ‘Helpers-sisters-wives: white women on Australian missions’, Journal of Australian Studies, 39, 1, pp. 7–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
70 Fiske, ‘Spirited subjects’, p. 94
71 Ibid.
72 Choo, Christine, Mission girls: Aboriginal women on Catholic missions in the Kimberley, Western Australia, 1900–1950, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2001, p. 142 Google Scholar. See also Massam, Katharine, ‘“That there was love in this home”: the Benedictine missionary sisters at New Norcia’, in Amanda Barry, Joanna Cruickshank, Andrew Brown-May, and Patricia Grimshaw, eds., Evangelists of empire? Missionaries in colonial history, Melbourne: University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre, 2008, pp. 210–214 Google Scholar.
73 Massam, Katharine, ‘A leader without authority: Mary Consuelo de la Cruz Batiz and missionary women at New Norcia’, in Rosemary Francis, Patricia Grimshaw, and Ann Standish, eds., Seizing the initiative: Australian women leaders in politics, workplaces and communities, Melbourne: University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre, pp. 72–88 Google Scholar; Massam, ‘“That there was love in this home”’.
74 Choo, Mission girls, ch. 6.
75 Danylewycz, Marta, Taking the veil: an alternative to marriage, motherhood and spinsterhood in Quebec 1840–1920, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987 Google Scholar; 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 Google Scholar; O’Brien, God’s Willing Workers.
76 Cummings, Kathleen Sprows, New women of the old faith: gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010 Google Scholar.
77 Confoy, Mary Anne, ‘Religious life in the Vatican II era: “state of perfection” or living charism?’, Theological Studies, 74, 2, pp. 321–346 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
78 See Australian Government, Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, http://childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au (consulted 13 June 2016).
79 Confoy, ‘Religious life’.
80 Dries, Angelyn, ‘Living in ambiguity: a paradigm shift experienced by the Sister Formation Movement’, Catholic Historical Review, 79, 3, 1993, pp. 478–487 Google Scholar.
81 Suenens, Leon-Joseph Cardinal, The nun in the world, London: Burns and Oates, 1962 Google Scholar.
82 Schwaller, John Frederick, The history of the Catholic Church in Latin America: from conquest to revolution and beyond, New York: New York University Press, 2011, p. 228 Google Scholar.
83 McGrath, Sophie, These women? Women religious in the history of Australia: the Sisters of Mercy Parramatta, 1888–1988, Sydney: UNSW Press, 1989, pp. 150–151 Google Scholar.
84 Woolwine, Sarah H. and Dadlez, E. M., ‘When complementarianism becomes gender apartheid: feminist philosophers’ objections to the Christian right’, Southwest Philosophy Review, 30, 1, 2014, pp. 195–203 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
85 Ebaugh, Helen Rose, Lorence, Jon, and Chafetz, Janet Saltzman, ‘The growth and decline of the population of Catholic nuns cross-nationally, 1960–1990: a case of secularization as social structural change’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1996, 35, 2, pp. 171–183 Google Scholar.
86 Ibid.
87 Burke, Joan F., ‘These Catholic sisters are all mamas!’ Towards the inculturation of the sisterhood in Africa: an ethnographic survey, Leiden: Brill, 2001, p. 82 Google Scholar.
88 Smythe, Kathleen R., ‘“Child of the clan” or “child of the priests”: life stories of two Fipa Catholic sisters’, Journal of Religious History, 23, 1, 1999, pp. 92–107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
89 Schwaller, History of the Catholic Church, p. 254.
90 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, ‘The development of feminist theology: becoming increasingly global and interfaith’, Feminist Theology, 20, 3, 2012, p. 187 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
91 Higgs, Catherine, ‘Silence, disobedience, and African Catholic sisters in apartheid South Africa’, African Studies Review, 54, 2, 2011, pp. 1–22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
92 Ibid., p. 12.
93 Roces, Mina, ‘The Filipino Catholic nun as transnational feminist’, Women’s History Review, 17, 1, 2008, pp. 57–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
94 Claussen, Heather, Unconventional sisterhood: feminist Catholic nuns in the Philippines, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001, pp. 203–204 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
95 Australian Biography, Screen Australia Digital Learning, ‘Veronica Brady’, http://www.australianbiography.gov.au/subjects/brady/ (consulted 15 October 2015).
96 Pak-Poy, Patricia, A path is made by walking it: reflections on the Australian network to ban landmines, 1991–2006, Melbourne: David Lovell Publishing, 2006 Google Scholar.
97 Saturday Paper, 13–19 December 2014, p. 10.
98 Vincent, Eve, ‘Nuclear colonialism in the South Australian desert’, Local–Global: Identity, Security, Community, 3, 2007, pp. 103–112 Google Scholar; Madigan, Michelle, ‘Dumped-on elders down but not despairing’, Eureka Street, 2 May 2016 Google Scholar. See, for example, Lennon, Jessie, I’m the one that know this country!, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2011 Google Scholar.
99 Livermore, Collette, Hope endures: an Australian sister’s story of leaving Mother Teresa, losing faith and her on-going search for meaning, Sydney: William Heinemann, 2008 Google Scholar.
100 Brock, Megan P., ‘Resisting the Catholic Church’s notion of the nun as self-sacrificing woman’, Feminism and Psychology, 20, 4, 2010, pp. 473–490 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
101 O’Brien, Anne, Philanthropy and settler colonialism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
102 Landmark works include Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In memory of her: a feminist theological reconstruction of Christian origins, New York: Crossroad, 1983; Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and god talk: towards a feminist theology, London: SCM Press, 1983.
103 Ruether, ‘Women’.
104 Catholics for Renewal, ‘News 2014’, http://www.catholicsforrenewal.org/news2014.htm (consulted 13 October 2015); Julia Baird, ‘Catholic Church must accept feminism’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20–21 December 2014.
105 McClory, Robert, ‘Pope Francis and women’s ordination’, National Catholic Reporter 16 September 2013, http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/pope-francis-and-womens-ordination Google Scholar (consulted 13 October 2015).
106 Jenkins, Philip, The next Christendom: the coming of global Christianity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 197 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
107 See Carey, Hilary and Gascoigne, John, Church and state in old and new worlds, Leiden: Brill, 2011, p. 27 Google Scholar.
108 Williams, Shannen Dee, ‘The global Catholic Church and the radical possibilities of #BlackLivesMatter’, Journal of African Religions, 3, 4, 2015 p. 509 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
109 Ibid.
110 Ruether, ‘Women’, p. 184.
111 See Dolan, Frances E., ‘Afterword’, in Lux-Sterritt and Mangion, Gender, Catholicism and spirituality, pp. 180–186 Google Scholar.
112 Guldi and Armitage, History manifesto, pp. 55–6, 68–9.
113 Claussen, Unconventional sisterhood, p. 203.
