Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834 (review)

In 1727, a group of Ursuline nuns arrived in New Orleans. Like their sisters back home in France, the mission of these women was to educate women and girls and spread the Catholic faith. Their ideals and the community that they founded would survive not only the long voyage from France but also the city's passage from French to Spanish colonial rule and finally its integration into the new, primarily Protestant, American Republic. Emily Clark's book tells the story of how this remarkable community of women adapted to these changes and in the process helped shape American history.

From the outset, the nuns were forced to compromise and adapt to meet the needs of their new environment. The leaders of New Orleans originally sought nurses to run the public hospital, but a nursing shortage led them to turn to the Ursulines, a teaching order. The contract signed by the nuns specified that their work was to center primarily on the hospital, although they were permitted to conduct some educational work on the side. But once they arrived, the nuns managed to delay taking on the hospital work for seven years until their new convent, adjacent to the hospital, was completed and were thus able to focus on their educational mission. The success of that mission is evidenced by the unusually high level of female literacy in eighteenth-century New Orleans.

The nuns brought with them a "spiritual universalism" and an activist female piety that were rooted in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Their mission was inclusive of all the women of New Orleans, and their students came from diverse social and racial backgrounds. With the arrival of Spanish rule in the 1760s, the nuns had to adapt to a more rigidly hierarchical racial code by, for example, segregating white students from students of color. Even more challenging was the adjustment to the emerging slave society of the American Republic. While the nuns were not opposed to slavery—and were themselves slave owners—their efforts to evangelize African slaves encouraged the emergence of a "distinctly feminine" multiracial Church in New Orleans.

Clark's gendered reading of Louisiana's transition from colony to statehood shows how competing ideals of femininity were at the heart of struggles over political and religious authority in the years after the Louisiana Purchase. If the "transformation of Louisiana's inhabitants from colonial subjects to republican citizens" (p. 229) was based on the exclusion of nonwhites and women, the convent offered a site of resistance to the construction of the white male citizen. Clark argues that the convent as an institution was fundamentally incompatible with republican ideals of womanhood in that it offered women a space independent of home and family, thus challenging the ideal of domesticity upon which the new Republic rested. While Clark's portrayal of Protestantism as inherently more restrictive of women than Catholicism is a bit over-simple, she is right that Protestantism was more easily incorporated into the republican patriarchal model of the early Republic, and her argument helps us to understand the violent attacks on convents in nineteenth-century America as more than just expressions of nativism.

This meticulously researched and engaging book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the intertwined histories of race, gender, and religion in American history. Clark's mastery of both European and American sources, and her deep understanding of the European religious culture that shaped the New Orleans Ursulines, make this a model of transatlantic history. Drawing on Old World traditions, these "masterless mistresses" left a legacy of female community that provided a vital alternative to the dominant ideologies of race and gender in early America.