Contested Identities: Catholic Religious Women in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales (review)

Carmen M. Mangion's book completes the work begun by Mary Peckham Magray's The Transforming Power of the Nuns and Susan Mumm's Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers (both 1998). We now have a clear and comprehensive picture of how Anglican and Roman Catholic women's orders functioned in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, who joined them and why, and what social contributions they made. This is important information for scholars of religion, gender, and society.

Like Magray and Mumm, Mangion argues that vowed religious women were active community members embodying a third option—besides marriage and spinsterhood—for Victorian women. Her focus on simple-vowed, active congregations, rather than complex-vowed, cloistered orders, allows her to make this argument. (Mangion helpfully distinguishes between the two groups, a welcome clarification for those of us who use the terms "nun" and "sister" interchangeably, or who use "order" as a synonym for "congregation.") The book thus aims to reshape our understanding of Victorian women's and religious history. Mangion provides ample information to support her claim that, contrary to the stereotype of docility and obedience, vowed religious women participated in a range of activism from performing domestic chores in their convents to teaching, nursing, and philanthropy in the outside world. Mangion also argues for their autonomy in church affairs; they did not always do what the bishops told them to do. Perhaps the most striking example of their agency is their refusing to conform to the societal pressure that they marry.

Mangion's work is similar in structure and content to both Magray's and Mumm's. She provides a great deal of information about the realities of daily life for the nineteenth-century women who joined religious congregations, with specific reference to individual congregations and details about the transition from the novitiate to postulancy to professed sisterhood, including the entrance ceremonies of each. She also describes, as much as possible, the social status and ethnic background of these women (about half of all nuns in England and Wales were Irish-born). Building on the work of Susan O'Brien, she shows the influence of French congregations on vowed religious life in England, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, when some orders fleeing the turmoil in France established houses in England. Nevertheless, she downplays their influence: arguing that French-born sisters were eventually a small minority, at least in four French-founded congregations, she makes the case that the revival of sisterhoods in England and Wales was a native phenomenon rather than an extension of Continental religious life. (The appendices confirm what reading the book suggests, which is that Wales was not a significant piece of the puzzle.) Throughout, Mangion's clear prose and meticulous footnotes make the book a pleasure to read. Each chapter's conclusion reminds the reader of the main points. The book's conclusion performs the same function, although by this point the argument is so clear that one wishes for a conclusion that advances the argument or explains its implications in the larger context of women's history and/or religious history.

The strength of Mangion's argument and the magnitude of her research make clear the need for more analysis in some areas. Mangion notes the paucity of sources on some topics, like how well Mothers Superior balanced competing demands to nurture and exert authority, or why convents were closed; but she could be more skeptical of the sources she has. She accepts without question, for example, effusive praise of some Mothers Superior without considering that a congregation might present an exceptionally, even unrealistically, positive view of its leader. Mangion details the ways in which constitutions, rituals, and places helped form a corporate identity that provided the basis for these women's authority; she might have probed further how biography played a similar role.

Mangion frequently compares the virtues vowed religious women were...