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

In this well-produced book, complete with illustrations and statistical tables, Carmen M. Mangion provides a memorable survey of Catholic women religious in nineteenth-century England and Wales. By 1800, twenty-four religious communities resided in England. All, except Mary Ward’s Institute of Mary in York, had migrated from the European continent and were in solemn vows. Shrinkage rather than expansion overtook them. All was changed when the 1829 Emancipation Act repealed the repressive penal laws against the practices of Catholicism and allowed simple-vowed, active orders of women religious to found agencies of social welfare, education, and health care: the Faithful Companions of Jesus in 1830, the Sisters of Mercy in 1839. Thereafter a steady flow of religious women’s orders contributed to the accelerating activities of the Catholic Church. The restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850 treated England and Wales as one unit; and simple-vowed communities of women religious spread into the expanding dioceses, providing a chain of educational and care-providing institutions.

In choosing to scrutinize the identity of women religious whose philanthropic and evangelical activities took them outside their convents, Mangion exposes hidden reasons why Catholicism spread so rapidly in a country suspicious of and hostile to the Catholic faith. Mangion sets her narrative against the larger transformation of English society and the increasing participation of women in public life. She tests the layers of class, gender, and ethnicity that shaped the identities of women who became members of the new “active” orders using a prosopological method that analyzes relationships and connections between groups of individuals.

As vocations to religious life strengthened new foundations, the need to develop a corporate identity produced an all-embracing structure with a centralized administration, a female authority figurehead, and a mother house. Thus the idea of a congregation with its distinctive values and spirituality provided status and security, but also self-effacement and meekness. Mangion deals sensitively with the issue of class. The appeal of nineteenth-century convent life widened the base of entrants to religious life: increasingly women of limited means embraced that life, but class background, formal education or lack of it, and practical skills influenced the positions women held within their chosen congregations. The laysisters were expected to work as pious and devout domestic servants and often were set apart from the choir sisters who entered with dowries. Many congregations of religious women upheld the class system of separation within the convent spaces. Class was more problematic than ethnicity in Victorian convent culture, and Mangion wisely confines her scrutiny to England and Wales. There were working-class congregations that encouraged and accepted women without dowries, and as the nineteenth century drew to a close, professional qualifications proved as necessary as dowries. The obstacles that women religious— and laywomen—encountered in achieving professional recognition in Victorian England is well documented elsewhere. Mangion’s exploration of the tensions that accompanied the blending of professional with religious identity exposes the challenges experienced by religious women within and outside their convents.

Contested Identities is a well-written, thoughtful study with an excellent bibliography; Mangion provides fresh angles on how the simple-vowed religious women contributed impressively to English Catholic life.