Secret Habits: Catholic Literacy Education for Women in the Early Nineteenth Century by Carol Mattingly (review)

Over the past two decades the experience of Catholic nuns has moved from being “on the margins” of U.S. women’s history to becoming more integrated into the mainstream. Secret Habits by Carol Mattingly is a sign that this process continues to gain momentum. Mattingly, professor emerita of English at the University of Louisville, is a specialist in nineteenth-century women’s rhetoric. In her new book she re-examines Catholic female education through the lens of literacy. That is, the author uses convent schools in the Early Republic as a case study to test some accepted assumptions about the history of literacy in America, in particular, what she calls “the Protestant literacy myth” (2). Mattingly defines “literacy” in the “traditional sense of reading and writing” and focuses principally on the decades before 1840 because of the “scant available information about women’s literacy in this period” (ix). As her title indicates, Mattingly spotlights what she styles “secret habits,” the neglected contributions of nuns to female literacy in the era. The double meaning of the title hints at her thesis—referring at once to the distinctive religious “habits” worn by different orders of women religious, but also to the “habits” of literacy that nuns developed among themselves and fostered among the girls they instructed. These habits were, perhaps, less “secret” in the sense of being hidden than in being overlooked, ignored, or forgotten by other historians of literacy.

Mattingly organizes her argument convincingly in five topical chapters. Chapter one examines typical schoolbooks and demonstrates how literacy in early America was tied to religious instruction. Her second chapter reviews the contributions of New England female “proprietor schools.” Here she shows how pioneer educators like Catharine Beecher and Mary Lyon portrayed convent schools as both a menace that non-Catholic parents should avoid patronizing and a model that Protestants should emulate in establishing their own institutions. Chapters three and four discuss curriculum and pedagogy in convent academies, most of which before midcentury were in the South. Mattingly compares literacy training as conducted by U.S.-based congregations, like the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph and the Sisters of Loretto, with that offered by European-based communities, such as the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet and the Society of the Sacred Heart. Her last chapter explores the “paradox of good works”—while nuns in antebellum America became frequent targets of hostility because of their convent schools, they nevertheless gained acceptance for themselves and their church by their selfless devotion to caring for orphans, instructing the deaf, and nursing both victims of epidemics and wounded soldiers on Civil War battlefields.

At the same time, Mattingly is not uncritical of her subjects, noting that, except for African-American congregations like the Oblate Sisters of Providence, most nuns accepted the racial norms of antebellum America and made only limited efforts at literacy education, as opposed to catechetical instruction, of slaves or free blacks. Supplementing Mattingly’s five chapters of text are two detailed chronologies—one listing both convent schools and their better-known non-Catholic competitors established prior to 1840, and the other identifying the communities of women religious founded in America prior to the same date. She also includes two helpful appendixes highlighting representative rules and daily schedules, respectively, found in typical Catholic female academies of the era.

Mattingly’s study relies on primary research conducted in six different convent archives housed in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, as well as the archives of St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore and the University of Notre Dame. Moreover, she has mastered and frequently draws on the growing published literature in the history of Catholic education and of women religious. Indeed, the chief significance of this book lies less in the originality of the research, much of which is known to students of American Catholic history, than in the synthesis and reconceptualization...