“Our Dear Houses Are Here, There + Every Where”: The Convent Revolution in Antebellum America

This article proposes the concept of a “convent revolution” as a framework for integrating the experience of Roman Catholic sisterhoods into mainstream U.S. history. I argue that four major indicators point to the decades from 1830 to 1860 as the “takeoff” of the convent revolution: 1) American Catholic female religious communities and membership grew at unprecedented rates in this period. 2) Whereas in the years 1790 to 1830 over ninety percent of convent foundations were native in origin, nearly three quarters of new foundations made after 1830 were foreign in origin. 3) In these decades, religious sisterhoods both expanded existing educational works at record rates and introduced numerous new ministries in health and social services. 4) The American public registered heightened awareness of the presence of convents and nuns in their midst, resulting in both negative and positive consequences for the communities of women religious and the larger American Catholic community. These elements of the convent revolution offer striking evidence of not only the profound growth and change experienced by religious sisterhoods but also their substantial role in shaping the American Catholic Church and the larger society and culture in nineteenth-century America.