Women, the Family, and the Fate of the Nation in American Anti-Catholic Narratives, 1830-1860

In August 1849 New York City Police arrested Maria Monk for picking the pockets of her paramour. Newspapers in both Boston and New York reported that the arrest occurred near her "den," a euphemism for a brothel, in the Five Points district of New York.¹ In the minds and eyes of cultured middle-class men and women the Five Points was a despicable area of poor brothels, detestable crime, vermin, and disease best avoided by all respectable women. No virtuous family could survive within this "veritable sink of iniquitous pleasures."² The degraded reputation of the area also permeated the popular literature of the day. Upon arriving in the Five Points, Peter Precise, the fictional hero in Ned Buntline's 1848 novel, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York, exclaimed: "Oh God! Can this be a Christian city?"³ The arrest of a prostitute in the Five Points district, therefore, did not typically arouse much interest or surprise. Maria Monk, however, was a special case.⁴

Monk had captured the minds and imaginations of Americans in 1836, when, with the aid of Protestant ministers in New York, she published her autobiography, Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel-Dieu Nunnery.⁵ In her book Monk shocked the country by disclosing the terrible ordeals she had suffered among the nuns and priests in the Hôtel-Dieu Nunnery in Montreal, Canada, including incidents of seduction, rape, torture, infanticide, and murder. Almost immediately after the book's publication, however, journalists investigating her background discovered information that placed Monk and her supporters on the defensive. These journalists revealed that the woman celebrated by Protestant leaders and the public for disclosing the sexual evils and dangers of Catholicism in fact represented the very vice, sexual promiscuity, and licentious behavior that these leaders purported to condemn. The child Monk had delivered after her escape, a child she had attributed to her rape by a priest, was linked instead to a sexual tryst with an unidentified man in a brothel. Monk's mother, whom Monk blamed for not protecting her from the lures of Catholicism, provided a legal deposition claiming that her daughter experienced periodic fits of insanity. After a series of lawsuits the Reverend J. J. Slocum admitted to having fabricated Monk's story in order to arouse anti-Catholic sentiments. This disclosure of her sordid past, however, did not dissuade the public from indulging in her story. By 1860 Awful Disclosures had sold 300,000 copies, second in sales only to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin during the nineteenth century.⁶

The autobiography of Maria Monk is familiar to historians of the nineteenth century in part due to its repeated reference in works relating to nativism, the growth of the Know-Nothing Party, Irish immigration, and the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.⁷ The tremendous focus on her autobiography, while merited, obscures other anti-Catholic publications, including both "autobiographies" and novels, that capitalized on the success of her book and addressed similar issues and concerns. Recent scholars have begun to analyze why issues of female sexuality dominated the themes of these texts, pointing to the anxieties of nineteenth-century Americans toward female sexual desire.⁸ More attention, however, must be paid to how these discussions of female sexuality also reflected concerns over women's roles within the family. These stories tapped into anxieties over the future of the nation at a time when the market revolution, urban growth, and changes in familial roles challenged prevailing ideas of femininity, domestic life, and patriarchal control. Anti-Catholic autobiographies and novels published in the mid-nineteenth century operated along the same continuum as other discourses on the family, specifically on the role of mothers in shielding daughters and providing moral guidance, found in prostitution reform literature and in advice, health, and sexuality manuals. Not surprisingly, many of the authors who wrote these anti-Catholic exposés emerged from the same Protestant reform movement as those who sought to rescue prostitutes, instill health and diet regimens...