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Abstract
A body of scholarship on the history of the lives of Catholic teaching sisters has thrown up various challenges to educational historians. One challenge can be posed by asking how teaching sisters were able to go on to take up leadership positions. This is prompted by the observation that a particular body of literature for the period 1940–1965 indicating that they underwent a strict ‘formation’ regimen intended to prepare them for total obedience to their superiors, inculcate in them a non-questioning attitude and deprive them of opportunities to take initiative, how then were they able to go on to take up leadership positions? The paper outlines the results of an oral history project which addressed this apparent paradox in the case of a group of women who worked as sister principals in Ireland. The results suggest they had a significant amount of freedom and room for questioning and initiative, and that this stood them in good stead when they went on to become sister principals.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding received.
Notes
1 This distinction is explained in E. Smyth, ‘Professionalization Among the Professed: The Case of Roman Catholic Women Religious’, in Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work, ed. E. Smyth, S. Acker, P. Bourne and A. Prentice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 234–54.
2 While it is certainly the case that nuns also sometimes ran schools and taught in them, they were greatly outnumbered by teaching sisters.
3 L. Fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950: The Undoing of a Culture (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2002), 163.
4 D. Lord, Letters to a Nun (Missouri, USA: Reynolds, 1947), 133.
5 E. Smyth, ‘Much Exertion of the Voice and Great Application of the Mind: Teacher Education within Congregations of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, Canada, 1851–1920’, History of Education Review/Historical Studies in Education (Joint Issue) 6, no. 3 (1994): 97.
6 E. Smyth, ‘Professionalization Among the Professed: The Case of Roman Catholic Women Religious’, 235.
7 Ibid.
8 J.A.K. McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
9 P. Wittberg, The Rise and Fall of Catholic Religious Orders: A Social Movement Perspective (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994).
10 M. Danylewycz, Taking the Veil: An Alternative to Marriage, Motherhood, and Spinsterhood in Quebec, 1840–1920 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987).
11 E. Smyth, ‘Writing Teaches Us Our Mysteries: Women Religious Recording and Writing History’, in Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History, ed. B. Boutilier and A. Prentice (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), 101–128; ‘Writing the History of Women Religious in Canada (1996–2001)’, International Journal of Canadian Studies 23 (2001): 205–12.
12 S. Burley, ‘An Overview on the Historiography of Women Religious in Australia’, Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society 26 (2005): 43–60.
13 T. O’Donoghue, Upholding the Faith: The Process of Education in Catholic Schools in Australia, 1922–65 (New York: Peter Lang, 2001).
14 C. Trimingham Jack, Growing Good Catholic Girls: Education and Convent Life in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999).
15 C. Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1987).
16 M. Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
17 D. Raftery, ‘The ‘Mission’ of Nuns in Female Education in Ireland, c.1850–1950’, Paedagogica Historica 48, no. 2 (2012): 299–313.
18 B. Walsh, Roman Catholic Nuns in England and Wales: A Social History (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002).
19 C.M. Mangion, Contested Identities: Catholic Women in Nineteenth-century England and Wales (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).
20 See note 23.
21 See, for example, the evidence of travel writer Dervla Murphy, and of novelists Maeve Binchy and Edna O’Brien, in J. Quinn, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (London: Methuen, 1986), 67–151.
22 T. O’Donoghue, Come Follow Me and Forsake Temptation: Catholic Schooling and the Recruitment and Retention of Teachers for Religious Teaching Orders, 1922–1965 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004).
23 Here we are referring to a body of literature in the form of books and papers produced by historians and sociologists who are not members of religious congregations, or who have not been commissioned by religious congregations to produce their histories. This body of literature is what is most readily available as secondary source material in university libraries across the English-speaking world. The other body of literature (that produced by religious congregations or commissioned researchers) tends to have a more restricted circulation and not be as readily available. It merits investigation in its own right and will be examined by the present authors as they take forward the course of research on which this paper is based. It is possible that the investigation will provide a very different portrayal from what is offered here as representative of that in the first body of work.
24 M.S. Thompson, ‘Sisterhood and Power: Class, Culture and Ethnicity in the American Convent’, Colby Library Quarterly 25 (1989): 150.
25 M.B. Bernstein, Nuns (Glasgow: Collins, 1978), 87.
26 P. McLaren, ‘Making Catholics: The Ritual Production of Conformity in a Catholic Junior High School’, Journal of Education 168, no. 2 (1986): 55.
27 This is a dominant theme running through M. Loudon, Unveiled: Nuns Talking (London: Vintage, 1993).
28 P. Stanosz, Reproducing Celibacy: A Case Study in Diocesan Seminary Formation (PhD thesis, Fordham University, 2004), 20.
29 T. O’Donoghue, Come Follow Me and Forsake Temptation, 99–122.
30 L. Fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950, 166.
31 T. Inglis, Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998), 214.
32 T. Flannery, The Death of Religious Life (Dublin: Columba Press, 1997), 20.
33 Ibid., 196–206.
34 M.M. MacCurtain, ‘Godly Burden: Catholic Sisterhoods in Twentieth-century Ireland’, in Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, ed. A. Bradley and M. G. Valiulis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1997), 245–56.
35 Ibid., 43.
36 Y. McKenna, ‘Entering Religious Life, Claiming Subjectivity: Irish Nuns, 1930s–1960s’, 195.
37 P. Woods, Sociology and the School (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 7; T. O’Donoghue, Planning Your Qualitative Research Project: A Beginner’s Guide to Research in Education (London: Routledge, 2007), 32–49.
38 As late as 1961, only 13% of the workforce were professionals, managers and employers, yet in the secondary schools their children heavily outnumbered those from lower-status occupations. Children of the unskilled, or semi-skilled manual workers, benefited least from secondary education. See Investment in Education: Report of the Survey Team (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1965), 51.
39 See P. Duffy, The Lay Teacher (Dublin: Fallons, 1967), 79.
40 J. Harford, ‘The Emergence of a National Policy on Teacher Education in Ireland’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 1 (2009): 45–56.
41 See P. Duffy, The Lay Teacher, 79.
42 Y. McKenna, ‘Entering Religious Life, Claiming Subjectivity: Irish Nuns, 1930s–1960s’, Women’s History Review 15, no. 2 (2006): 192.
43 Ibid.
44 J. Harford and T. O’Donoghue, ‘Continuity and Change in the Perspectives of Women Religious in Ireland on Themselves both as Religious and as Teachers in the Years Immediately Prior to, and Following, the Second Vatican Council (1962–65)’, Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 3 (2011): 404–8.
45 T. O’Donoghue, The Catholic Church and the Secondary School Curriculum in Ireland, 1922–1962 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 24–25.
46 P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); J. Sangster, ‘Telling our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History’, Women’s History Review 3, no. 1 (1985): 5.
47 A. Strauss and J. Corbin, ‘Grounded Theory Methodology: An Overview’, in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994).
48 R. Perks and A. Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge, 1998).
49 A. Winter, Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
50 G. Grace, Catholic Schools: Mission, Markets and Morality (London: Routledge Falmer, 2002), 55.
51 C.A. Sheehan, Role Conflict and Value Divergence in Sister Administrators (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1972).
52 M.M. Reid, Sisters for Justice and their Patriarchial Church: The Love, the Loss, the Dream (EdD thesis, Harvard University, 2002).