New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era

1. Chiefly among Women: The Old Faith, the New Woman, and the Creation of a Usable Past

c h a p t e r o n e Chiefly among Women the old faith, the new woman, and the creation of a usable past In 1875, ‘‘An American Woman’’ published an article in the Catholic World that represented an outraged response to a comment made by William Gladstone, the former (and future) prime minister of Great Britain. Speaking of the growth of the Catholic Church in England, Gladstone had observed that ‘‘the conquests have been chiefly, as might have been expected, among women.’’ Across the Atlantic, ‘‘An American Woman’’ bristled at the insult, interpreting Gladstone’s comment as ‘‘an indirect and ungraceful way of saying that the Catholic Church brings conviction more readily to weaker than to stronger intellects, and that because the ‘conquests’ are ‘chiefly among women,’ the progress of the church among the people is not substantial, general or permanent.’’∞ ‘‘An American Woman’’ was the pseudonym of Margaret Buchanan Sullivan , an Irish-born Roman Catholic then in the early stages of a successful career as a journalist. An ardent Irish nationalist, Sullivan was poised to disagree with Gladstone on just about any subject, but she found his assumptions about Catholicism and women particularly agitating.≤ Marveling at the thoughtlessness that enabled him and other ‘‘well-read men’’ to misinterpret the place of women within the church, Sullivan turned Gladstone ’s insult on its head: nineteen centuries on, she argued, the Catholic Church was flourishing precisely because it had appealed so successfully to women. To support her case, Sullivan ‘‘o√ered in evidence’’ a litany of examples of accomplished women who professed the Catholic faith, ranging from the first-century apostle Thecla of Iconium, to the sixteenthcentury French foundress Jane de Chantal, to the nineteenth-century 18 Chiefly among Women American nun Elizabeth Ann Seton. Noting that ‘‘religion alone supplied their motive,’’ Sullivan asked whether any woman in ‘‘profane history’’ could equal the accomplishments of these and other daughters of Catholicism . For if the church owed its success to its women, the inverse was also true: only under church auspices could women develop their ‘‘heroic characteristics ’’ to the fullest potential.≥ There are many reasons why ‘‘Chiefly among Women’’ should have been altogether forgotten. It was an early work of Sullivan’s, it was written anonymously, and it considered women in an age when female subjects rarely surfaced in Catholic publications. But far from fading into obscurity, ‘‘Chiefly among Women’’ would repeatedly receive new leases on life. Over the next four decades, it was cited, quoted, and reprinted, with the author’s identity revealed at some point along the way. Jesuit George Tyrrell, for example, referred at length to ‘‘Chiefly among Women’’ in his 1897 essay ‘‘The Old Faith and the New Woman,’’ which appeared in the American Catholic Quarterly Review. The ‘‘Old Faith’’ was Roman Catholicism, and Tyrrell, an Irish-born theologian, was one of many late nineteenth-century Catholic intellectuals who struggled to reconcile this ancient religion with modern rationality.∂ Tyrrell’s ruminations on the Old Faith and the New Woman suggest that there was a significant gender dimension to what R. Scott Appleby has described as Catholic modernists’ ‘‘thoroughgoing commitment to preserving theological continuity with the fullness of the Catholic tradition as it had unfolded in history.’’∑ In contrast to the Old Faith, then a venerable nineteen centuries old, the New Woman was of far newer vintage, having arrived only recently on the American scene. Novelist Henry James had coined the phrase ‘‘New Woman’’ to describe wealthy widows living abroad. According to James, what made them ‘‘new’’ was their freedom from male control. In a variation on that theme, the American version of the New Woman derived both her newness and her freedom through her break with traditional domestic roles. By attending college, earning her own living, working in a settlement house, or otherwise participating in activities outside women’s ‘‘sphere,’’ she challenged the ideology of domesticity that had prevailed since the mid-nineteenth century. Financially independent from either a father or a husband, the New Woman ‘‘stood for self-development as contrasted to self-sacrifice or submergence within the family.’’∏ Catholic writers routinely castigated the New Woman as the antithesis Chiefly among Women 19 of the Catholic True Woman. Tyrrell criticized the New Woman’s silly style of dress, her selfish disregard for family, and her pursuit of equality in marriage. Other Catholic writers...