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Reviewed by:
  • Across God's Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920 by Anne M. Butler
  • Barbra Mann Wall (bio)
Across God's Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920. By Anne M. Butler. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. 448. Cloth, $45.00.)

In Across God's Frontiers, Anne M. Butler analyzes the prominent role of Catholic sisters in the development of Catholic educational, social, and medical institutions in the American West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Known for her work in this region, Butler argues for a distinction of "place," a "West" that was different from other parts of the United States according to the perceptions of her subjects. Although most of the sisters originated in the East, when the sisters confronted the West's distinct history of conquest, race and ethnic relations, landscape, and weather challenges, they had to change their ideas about work and even monastic life itself. The book shows how gender and religion functioned in different Wests: the midwestern states and those of the Southwest, Far West, Pacific Northwest, the Spanish borderlands, and the West of Native Americans. Butler effectively argues that, as sisters' lives and labor reshaped the West, the West also transformed the sisters.

Making use of newly discovered documents from forty-three different religious congregations of women, Butler weaves together a fascinating story of the sisters' foundations, their travels, their work and finances, and the contests with bishops and among themselves over who would control their congregations and institutions. Butler argues that Catholic sisters should be included in any narrative of women and religion in the American West. Working outside marriage and family roles, they lived in community with one another and were active in carving specific religious and institutional spaces for themselves and their church. In the process, they served as cultural conduits in exchanges with Native Americans, European immigrants, Mexican Americans, bishops, and other settlers with whom they came in contact.

Aside from flexibility, a keen sense of humor helped the sisters, most of whom were young immigrants from Ireland, Canada, Germany, Italy, Mexico, England, and France, to cope with their many challenges. Religious life served as a means of power and authority, an opportunity for higher [End Page 139] education and meaningful service, and as a way for women to become involved in international travel. The sisters often perpetuated dominant ideas about race and class, and while some questioned the patriarchy of the Catholic Church, many did not. Their faith, their lives as single women, and their specific theology informed their ideas and set them apart from secular women in the West.

Butler brings to life sisters' letters and journals that reveal eloquent descriptions of landscapes, people, and poverty. To illustrate the ways sisters coped with physical adversities as they traversed rugged mountains and steep gullies and journeyed through blizzards and soaking rains, Butler depicts the trek of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet from St. Louis, Missouri, to Arizona in 1870. After they unloaded their wagon in a trip up a mountain, the sisters had to scratch and claw over stones and bushes as they climbed four thousand feet among the cries and bawling of draft animals and drivers to a place one sister labeled the "Abomination of Desolation" (52). Sisters were also present during "decidedly western natural disasters," like the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word whose Galveston orphanage was demolished in the hurricane in 1900 but who nonetheless managed to keep serving the wounded at their hospital (62). The Sisters of the Holy Family were in San Francisco in 1906 when the earthquake hit. As they recorded their experiences during these events, sisters became "cultural journalists" (69). Not all could cope with the challenges, and not all missions were successful.

To illustrate the variety of sisters' labor, Butler analyzes the work of Mother Alfred Moes and the Sisters of St. Francis in Rochester, Minnesota, who partnered with the Protestant Mayo Brothers to establish the Mayo Clinic and St. Mary's Hospital. Because sisters received no support from the Catholic Church, western sisterhoods funded their own institutions by carving out new niches in home care...

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