Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920 by Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith (review)

BOOK REVIEWS355 questions about American geography, I was honored and pleased to assist. He showed me how to write in order to obtain authorization; then, with that permission , I was able to borrow his typescript years before the Calendar came out in print. The Guide is complete. It even covers Vatican documents not in the so-caUed Secret Vatican Archives [ASV] . (This main body of papal documents may be "separate," but it has not been "secret" for a long time.) An example would be the Archives of Out-of-the-Ordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs. Are not all "Vatican" documents to be found in the ASV? No, as the Guide rightly shows. The Guide is generous in listing several of my pubUcations. (This is not the first time I have seen my middle name without the s\) In another section the Guide cites an article of mine in the Catholic Historical Review as an example of a pubUcation "without reference to Roman sources" (pp. 43 and 51). That statement led me to taUy up the references; forty of the article's footnotes cite Roman sources. This blunder, however, is not typical of the Guide, which is commendable for its accuracy. (Cardinal Paul Poupard wrote a presentation for the Guide;when he was in the office of the papal Secretary of State in late 1959 or early I960 just before the centennial of the CivU War—Pius LX's documents were not yet avaUable—he gave his assurance that there was no unpubUshed dossier relating to the Confederate States of America. So I dropped the southern confederation from my research plans.) As the title says, the Guide goes to 1922.A few decades ago archives foUowed the 100-year rule, whereby researchers could see only 100-year-old documents. Nowadays some nations have laws which require governments to make avaUable recent papers. The papal custom of opening entire pontificates means that in the changes affecting archives aU over the world the papacy has opened its records up through the pontificate of Benedict XV—which ended in 1922. A handsome stiff cover protects the book. The editors comment freely on the researchers. Who wUl edit the book in which the researchers comment on the editors? Charles Edwards O'Neill, SJ. New Orleans Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture andAmerican Life, 18361920 . By Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith. (Chapel HiU: The University of North Carolina Press. 1999. Pp. xüi, 327. $49.95 clothbound; $19.95 paperback .) In exarnining "the intersection of gender, religion and power" (p. Lx) in America, Carol Coburn and Martha Smith put CathoUc sisters at the center of American history and women's history. WhUe sisters were conforming to nineteenth -century gender ideology and meeting the educational and social-service 356BOOK REVIEWS needs of America's immigrant population, they were also creating "an unprecedented female power base that enabled independent activity, limited patriarchal interference and control, and significantly shaped American Catholic culture and public life" (pp. 7-8). Drawing on recent scholarship which shows how Protestant women used religion, gender, and power to create many organizations and associations, they apply similar theories and constructs to the study of CathoUc sisters, using the Sisters of St.Joseph of Carondelet (C.S.J.s) as a case study. After a discussion of the French origins of the C.S.J.S. and the post-Reformation development of active communities of women religious, Spirited Lives recounts how the C.S.J.s came to St. Louis in 1838, adapted their constitutions and customs to American culture, and continued the expansion of gender roles begun in post-Reformation Europe. By the 1850's they were serving in academies , hospitals, orphanages, and parish schools from Canada to Mississippi and as far east as Virginia. As with other congregations, their rapid growth brought conflict with the church hierarchy over issues of central governance, and they spUt into two provinces of sisters allied with the mother house at Carondelet, Missouri, and five diocesan communities under the direct control of bishops. Convent culture allowed women to combine traditional gender and religious ideology in creative ways to move beyond them. As a powerful, trained labor force, sisters met...