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Widows in Convents of the Early Republic: The Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1790-1860 Joseph Mannard I n 1843, the Georgetown Sisters of the Visitation in the District of Columbia welcomed into their monastery Mrs. Eulalia M. Keating, a 41-year-old-widow with three children and an aged father in her charge. Keating had grown up privileged . Born in Delaware, she was descended from Irish nobility whose lands had been confiscated by the English. Her father had been named a Knight of St. Louis for services rendered to the King of France. While the wife of a Philadelphia physician, Eulalia Keating, like thousands of socially prominent women in the antebellum North, engaged in humanitarian work among the urban underprivileged. Similar to Elizabeth Bayley Seton some two generations earlier, Mrs. Keating participated in “works of piety and charity” that “commanded the love and respect of all who knew her,” and which foreshadowed her calling to convent life. Following the death of her husband, Keating entered Georgetown. Three years later in 1846, she was among the band of nuns who planted a new Visitation colony in Frederick, Maryland. After a decade’s service as the directress of the Frederick Academy of the Visitation, Keating returned to her house of profession and in 1858 was elected Georgetown’s superior. She remained there until her death in 1874 at seventy-two years of age.1 The example of Eulalia Keating, and that of the better-known Elizabeth Seton, reminds us that not all the members of Catholic convents in the Early Republic entered religious life as celibate virgins. Although virginity and celibacy were the expected state for most convent candidates, some women joined at a different stage of their life course—widows who had experienced marriage and often motherhood before taking the veil of religion. If all nuns were called to practice a “maternity of 111 A version of this paper was presented at the Seventh Triennial Conference on the History of Women Religious, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, June 24-27, 2007. The author is grateful for the helpful comments and suggestions offered by Chris Anderson, Sr. Regina Bechtle, Anne Butler, Sr. Dolores Liptak, Sr. Betty Ann McNeil, Sr. Judith Metz, and Sandra Pryor. 1. “Sr. M. Joseph Keating,” Brief Accounts of the Deceased Sisters, Vol. I, 85-86; Membership (permanent and temporary) Collection (typescript), Box 1.1, File 1.1, Archives of Georgetown Visitation Convent, Washington, D.C. (hereafter AGVC). the spirit” in a life of prayer, teaching the young, caring for orphans, or nursing the sick, a select few had first experienced a “maternity of the flesh.”2 One purpose of this study is to call attention to widows in convents, a category of nuns whom historians of women religious have generally overlooked. A second purpose is to use the study of widows as way to identify a previously unsuspected connection between some religious sisterhoods and other female voluntary associations organized in the Early Republic. A final purpose is to suggest the role played by some early religious communities in the “origins of women activism” in nineteenth-century American society. Although the lives and contributions of a few extraordinary widows—most famously Elizabeth Seton—have been studied extensively and their stories have become well known, widows in convents as a group have not been analyzed.3 The 112 U.S. Catholic Historian 2. See Joseph G. Mannard, “’Maternity of the Spirit’: Nuns and Domesticity in Antebellum America,” U. S. Catholic Historian 5 (Summer/Fall 1986): 305-24. The term “nun” is used throughout this essay in its popular sense to describe any woman religious. See the glossary in George C. Stewart Jr., Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 1994), 572-78. 3. The first biography of Seton Life of Mrs. Eliza A. Seton was penned by Rev. Charles I. White and appeared in 1853 only three decades after her death. In addition to being the first native-born American canonized as a saint, Elizabeth Seton has an entry in Notable American Women: A Biographical Mother Elizabeth Seton. Courtesy, Archives Daughters of Charity, Emittsburg, MD. reasons for this neglect seem clear...

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