The Courtship of John Rooney and Katharine Cusack, 1887-93: Obligations and Marriage Ideals in Irish-American New England

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, clergy and representatives of the Boston archdiocese repeatedly expressed their dismay with what they perceived as an overwhelming number of unmarried Irish-American Catholic adults. In 1901, Rev. Fr. Thomas Scully of St. Mary's Church in Cambridge proposed a "Bachelor Tax" of twenty-five dollars a year on all unmarried men between ages twenty-five and thirty-five, in addition to a fifty-dollar one-time fee for single men over thirty-five. "After that age," the Boston Globe reported, "they will be exempt from the tax, as the priest claims no woman would care to marry them then."¹

The Boston Pilot, the archdiocesan newspaper, went further, focusing on parent-child relations and marriage. According to the fictitious middle-class female moralists of the Pilot's "In the Family Sitting Room" column, the devotion of adult Irish-American children to their parents and a concern with property accumulation wrongly kept them at home with mother long after they should have married. They described one hypothetical and typical family thus:

But when the mother's ambitions of community competence had been achieved they had all apparently been wedded to the routine. It is hardly in nature that the man should not break away some day; but the daughters, with wills weakened for want of exercise and personal responsibility; children in all things but their occupations—what remains for them? Does the property by which they will live, by and by, when they all past [sic] labor[,] represent the best investment? Is a life that has missed the common womanly joys, even if it has also escaped the common sorrows, the happiest in retrospect?²

Such complaints indicate that, although church representatives believed that marriage satisfied natural male and female desires to marry and establish households, many young Irish-American men and women of Boston apparently did not view marriage as a necessity. Indeed, they ranked it behind acquiring property and homes for their parents. Boston clergy understood these attitudes as little more than keeping up with the neighbors. The strength of adult childrens' tolerance for or acceptance of prolonged adolescence prompted the clergy and their allies in print to shame younger Irish Americans into accepting the virtues of wedded bliss and domesticity.

The Pilot's attitudes toward Irish-American households reflected the archdiocese's larger effort to encourage marriage as a means to changing gender roles and raising class aspirations.³ As Colleen McDonnell's study of American Catholic manhood reveals, local clergy—as a means to ensure the continued stability of the institutional church—deliberately inculcated in Irish-American men an association between manhood and notions of male household leadership, frugality, and increased religiosity. This undertaking involved changing the mindsets of both Irish Catholic men and women, transforming them into "true Catholic" men and women. "True Catholic" men would leave behind the world of the working-class saloon, with its resemblance to sex-segregated Irish culture, and see the ostensibly middle-class home as a place of refuge and responsibility. As Irish culture did not proscribe women's labor, the local church representatives faced a real challenge in its dealings with both men and women.⁴

American Catholic authorities, like native-born white American Protestants, feared bachelors and spinsters as harbingers of instability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁵ Yet unlike other Americans' negative reactions to the perceived dip in the marriage rate that accompanied the movement of young people from the countryside to the cities, such Catholic periodicals as the Pilot directed their fears specifically to an audience of Irish descent. In fact, whether Irish factors played the primary role in Irish-American marriage patterns is unclear. Historical literature on the American Irish treats their late age-at-marriage or avoidance of the institution as a uniquely Irish phenomenon.⁶ Yet the Irish in urban America delayed their weddings in similar fashion to other immigrant groups or native-born whites living in cities.⁷ This suggests that their...