Contributors
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Catholic Nuns and the Invention of Social Work:The Sisters of the Santa Maria Institute of Cincinnati, Ohio, 1897 through the 1920s
In 1897 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sisters of Charity Justina Segale and Blandina Segale founded the Santa Maria Institute, which resembled social settlements non-Catholic women established. Blending ethnic and religious traditions with skills obtained as members of a Catholic religious order, the sisters innovated cooperation with secular philanthropies. Although nuns have received little attention as leaders in the development of social welfare, Justina and Blandina invented a role for themselves in social work, shaping aid to the poor, especially women. But their integration into the new social welfare bureaucracy, like that of non-Catholic laywomen, came at the cost of female autonomy.
M. Christine Anderson is assistant professor of history at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio. As a non-Catholic, her understanding of community service and leadership among Catholic women religious has been enriched by working in Xavier University's urban service learning program with sisters from several orders at the Peaslee Neighborhood Center. The center operates a few blocks from the site of the original Santa Maria Institute. Anderson's current research focuses on relationships among orphanages and with different social communities in nineteenth-century Cincinnati. <andersmc@xavier.xu.edu>
Notes
1. Justina Segale's eleven-volume journal records Santa Maria activities, 1897– 1929, labeled J1 through J11, Santa Maria Institute Papers (hereafter SMI Papers), Sisters of Charity Archives (hereafter SCA), Mount Saint Joseph, Ohio. An edited version was published in the institute's magazine, Veritas (later Santa Maria) in 1929. For a published history, see Anna C. Minogue, The Story of the Santa Maria Institute (Cincinnati: Santa Maria Institute, 1922).
2. Margaret McGuinness, "Body and Soul: Catholic Social Settlements and Immigration," U.S. Catholic Historian 13 (summer 1995): 63–75. John O'Grady, a leader in the modernization of American Catholic charities, labeled the Santa Maria "the first Catholic settlement in the United States," but also acknowledged that the sisters were "doing nothing new for a religious." John O'Grady, Catholic Charities in the United States: History and Problems (1930; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1971), 289–90. For an analysis placing nuns in the context of settlements, see Suellen Hoy, "Caring for Chicago's Women and Girls: The Sisters of the Good Shepherd, 1859–1911," Journal of Urban History 23 (March 1997): 260–94.
3. Jo Ann Kay McNamara argues that nineteenth-century nuns "invented themselves," creating roles in caring for women, children, the sick, and the poor. Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 622–23.
4. Justina Segale, J9, 13 February 1922, 37, SMI Papers.
5. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, "On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History," American Quarterly 45 (March 1993): 107–8; and Margaret Susan Thompson, "The Treatment of Women in American Catholic Historiography" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Washington, D.C., April 1990), 5–7.
6. Suellen Hoy, "The Journey Out: The Recruitment and Emigration of Irish Religious Women to the United States, 1812–1914," Journal of Women's History 6/7 (winter/spring 1995): 64–98, esp. 65, 83–84. See also Joseph G. Mannard, "'A Kind of Noah's Ark': The Vocations of Women Religious in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1790–1860," and Florence Deacon, "'I said I wouldn't be a woman, but wanted to be a sister': Vocation Stories of Nineteenth-Century Women Religious" (both papers presented at the Conference on the History of Women Religious, Chicago, Ill., June 1998). For biographical information on the sisters, see Mariana Annette Romano, "Constructing the American Catholic: Sister Justina's Veritas and Cincinnati's Italian Problem" (master's thesis, Sarah Lawrence College, 1996), 1–5; and "1897–1922: Silver Jubilee of the Santa Maria Institute," pamphlet, and untitled clipping, Catholic Telegraph, 29 September 1950, both in Box 1, SMI Papers.
7. Blandina Segale, At the End of the Santa Fe Trail (Columbus, Ohio: Columbian Press, 1932), 322, 7.
8. Helen Barolini, ed., The Dream Book: Anthology of Writings by Italian Women (New York...
