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Reviewed by:
  • Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850–1920 by Anne M. Butler
  • Patricia O’Connell Killen
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. xxi, 424. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-8078-3565-4.)

In a 1990 essay, Ferenc M. Szasz explored why, in narratives of the American West, religious figures failed to achieve the status of classic western characters, remaining at best regional heroes and heroines, and more often, being entirely absent.1 Anne Butler’s accomplishment is to have removed the cloak of invisibility from Roman Catholic female religious who, in her words, “vanished from collective memory and printed records of western life” (p. 19). Butler establishes these women as significant historical actors alongside the Indians, immigrants, settlers, soldiers, pioneers, cowboys, and entrepreneurs who populate narratives of the American West. In so doing, she raises important questions about the interaction of Catholics with the physical and cultural geography of the region, and the ways in which that interaction contributed to the emergence of an “American” Catholic people.

Butler tells the story of the more than 10,000 sisters and nuns who traveled, lived, and worked in the trans-Mississippi West during the seventy years of most aggressive Euro-American settlement. Employing records from several religious communities, she sketches the lives of women, mostly young, who were attracted to ministry in the West for many reasons—the prospects for travel, educational opportunity, the potential for significant and meaningful work, and (with their sisters) a degree of self-determination less conceivable in Europe and the eastern United States. Butler shows how these women shared, succumbed to, and transcended the fears, deprivation, and disappointments common to other immigrants to the region. She details the difficulties endured by the women in travel, communication across vast distances, grinding poverty, conflicts with local ecclesiastical and public officials, and the region’s fluctuating economy and migrating populations that had consequences for their ministries. Butler displays the sisters’ determination, ingenuity, and courage in erecting schools, hospitals, orphanages, and social services of many kinds.

If women religious began by viewing themselves and their work through conventional race, class, and gender assumptions of their time, long service in western ministries, especially among Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans, undercut these assumptions for many. Butler’s chapter on ethnic intersections [End Page 382] stands out for its nuanced analysis of the sisters’ negotiations of unequal cultural, ethnic, and power relations. This chapter and the one on St. Katharine Drexel, an heiress to the Drexel banking fortune and founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, whose work focused on Native American education, also show the sisters’ growing awareness of social injustice, a reality with which many grappled daily.

Butler’s volume provides initial answers to questions about how sisters’ encounters with peoples in the West—and their experiences of and in the region— shaped their consciousness, religiosity, and self-understanding. Begging for further development is the question of how the sisters’ “outsider status” functioned: to inform their insights into western issues, to garner them access to people and situations from which otherwise they would have been excluded, and to fuel their own theological reflection. Comparison of the experiences of sisters from other regions with those of sisters in the West would contribute to understanding how much of the story told by Butler is distinctively “western” and how much is broadly American. Also intriguing would be lifespan studies of a select group of the women religious for whom the West provided a stage for exercise of significant leadership, if it did not, through circumstances, call out those latent gifts. The questions that remain unanswered in Butler’s volume and the avenues for further research that they suggest evidence the success of this ambitious and important work.

Patricia O’Connell Killen
Gonzaga University

Footnotes

1. Ferenc M. Szasz, “The Clergy and the Myth of the American West,” Church History, 59 (1990), 497–506.

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