The Forgotten Contribution of the Teaching Sisters: A Historiographical Essay on the Educational Work of Catholic Women Religious in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Chapter 2. Evolution of scholarly interest in the educational work of women religious

Chapter 2 Evolution of scholarly interest in the educational work of women religious A tale of historical neglect and marginalization Historians from Europe, Australia and the Americas have observed that the involvement of women religious in education has hardly been studied hitherto.14 Elizabeth Smyth in 2006 called them “a marginalized cohort of educators”.15 In a status quaestionis of educational historiography in Europe Marie-Madeleine Compère noted that the teaching profession is usually associated with the lay woman teacher.16 That disproportionate attention is paid to lay educators appears clearly from Isabelle Havelange’s evaluation of the bibliography regarding the history of education in France which is published annually in a separate issue of the journal Histoire de l’Éducation: in 1995, the studies about religious teachers (both women and men) made up only 13% of all publications about school personnel.17 In his assessment of the history of education at the end of the second millennium, Jurgen Herbst noted that scholars traditionally tend to focus on public education and largely ignore private schooling.18 Since the sisters worked to a large extent in the private sector, their work has automatically fallen outside the scope of most of the research which has been conducted. Our literature review confirms that the educational contribution of women religious has received only limited scholarly attention so far. Not a single journal issue has been devoted to this subject and specific conferences about women religious and education seem to be very scarce. Excluding a French conference on teaching sisters of the 16th to 20th centuries which took place as long ago as 1980,19 we are aware only of the symposium on religious communities and education which was held at the University of Laval in Quebec in 2004, and even this conference was not exclusively devoted to the contribution of the female orders.20 14 the forgotten contribution of the teaching sisters Biographical dictionaries of educationists rarely cover women religious. A famous biographical compendium which briefly describes the lives and work of more than 500 Americans, Canadians and Europeans who have played significant roles in shaping the modern western traditions of education, contains a single entry about a sister!21 The study of women teachers focuses largely on the lay woman teacher. The two most important collective studies on the history of women teachers do not contain a single contribution on teaching sisters;22 group biographies about women teachers tend to ignore women religious,23 and, as was already pointed out in the introduction, historical studies on the feminization of the teaching staff usually do not deal with the massive influx of women religious teachers, but focus on the increase in lay women teachers in public schools.24 Since women religious are almost consistently ignored when a particular aspect of women teachers is studied, the literature on their contribution to education is only a fraction of that which exists on lay women teachers and the state of research is far less advanced.25 The limited scholarly attention to sisters in the field of the history of education is not an isolated phenomenon, but part of the long-standing neglect of women religious by historians. Caitriona Clear put it clearly in her book about women religious in 19th century Ireland: “Nuns have suffered the fate of historical marginalisation”.26 The discovery of women religious as a historical ‘subject’ In 1985 a reviewer of Claude Langlois’s study Le catholicisme au féminin pointed out that the author had succeeded magnificently in ‘inventing’ and ‘transforming ’ the ‘good sisters’ into a subject for scientific investigation.27 The work was indeed exceptional for its size and the depth of its scholarship, and it did certainly lift the study of women religious to a much higher level. However, to label this work as the birth certificate of the scientific study of Catholic women religious would be a step too far. Whereas the historiography of religious institutes was originally the work of industrious members of the religious orders themselves, it became a more scholarly enterprise around 1950 when much of the historical research was carried out by university-educated members of religious institutes and by professional historians not directly associated with such institutes. In the 1970s scholarly interest in both the institutes and the women evolution of scholarly interest in the educational work of women religious 15 religious grew considerably, partly as a consequence of developments in...