Sisters’ History Is Women’s History: The American Context

The history of women religious (nuns, sisters, etc.) traditionally has been notable for three characteristics.¹ First, vowed women themselves mostly wrote it. Second, it usually focused on individual communities, and even individual women, often “foundresses.” And third, it was written mainly for “insider” audiences, generally members of a religious order, former students of its schools, or those considering becoming members; at the very least, readership was presumed to be Catholic. As the historian Barbara Misner—herself a sister—once put it, this work was “characterized chiefly by a desire to edify and inspire, and there is often more hagiography than apologetics. (One might suspect there were vocation directors behind the projects.)”² The four books under consideration here are representative of a newer and more welcome trend: scholarship that transcends individual congregations, that is written by trained scholars who increasingly are themselves not sisters, and that demonstrates at least some awareness of the larger historiographic contexts of social and women’s history.

Both Anne Butler’s Across God’s Frontiers and Margaret McGuinness’s Called to Serve are intended as comprehensive histories of American sisters and are grounded in extensive familiarity with both archival sources and secondary literature. Kathleen Cummings writes more inclusively about Progressive-era Catholic women in New Women of the Old Faith, but with substantial focus upon sisters in that period. Carole Rogers’s Habits of Faith, meanwhile, is an updated edition of her 1996 Poverty, Chastity, and Change, and is based upon extensive oral history interviews with dozens of women.³ These books together reflect some of the depth and variety of work on sisters that is being conducted today: work that remains all-too-unfamiliar to most historians of women and of religion, even Catholicism.

McGuinness’s short book is hardly an exhaustive exploration of her subject, but it provides a good introduction, particularly for those unfamiliar with the contributions of nuns to American history. As she notes in her introduction, the focus is on ministry, and more on what sisters do than on who or what they are (9). Some of its principal strengths are that it covers the sweep of American history, includes discussion of contemplative as well as active sisters (those engaged in such works as teaching, nursing, and social work), and offers examples from a wide range of communities and experiences. McGuinness writes well, and her work is highly readable and accessible to those who are neither professional historians nor experts in the area.

Butler’s book has an intentionally narrower geographic and temporal scope than McGuinness’s, but its longer length permits more exploratory depth. Its style tends to the flowery and, occasionally, to the overly romantic, but it is readable and, like McGuinness’s work, contains a great deal of information that no doubt will be new to most of its readers. She provides a helpful glossary of specialized terms that will be particularly useful to non-specialists, and her broader expertise in the field of Western history is evident in her appreciation of the movable frontier and of the context in which at least some of her sisters operated.

Cummings’s book is most explicit in contextualizing the subject within the fields of women’s and gender history, and most fully locates its subjects within their theoretical and...