Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America by Cassandra L. Yacovazzi (review)

Escaped Nuns by Cassandra Yacovazzi is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the subject of anti-Catholicism in America. A revised version of her PhD dissertation completed at the University of Missouri in 2015, it offers the first book-length study of “the campaign against convents in antebellum America.”

As suggested by the book’s subtitle, Yacovazzi argues that hostility to convents had as much to do with cultural anxieties about true womanhood as it did with sectarian differences between Catholics and non-Catholics. Yacovazzi clearly states her thesis in the book’s introduction and presents various iterations in subsequent pages: the “campaign against convents would play a crucial role in the battles to defend proper womanhood, republican government, and American identity” (xxii). By taking anti-convent sentiment seriously, the author demonstrates how and why so many American Protestants saw nuns and convents as dire threats to their notions of family, church, and state.

Yacovazzi writes engagingly and tells her story well. She organizes her book by thematic chapters placed within a broad chronological framework from the 1830s through the 1850s. Chapter one examines the impact of the publication of Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures (1836), the most infamous “escaped nun” tale in American history. Chapter two moves backward two years to examine the burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and to trace “the birth of the convent narrative” (26). There follow chapters linking domestic tropes evident in anti-convent writings to those found in the literature of abolitionism, education reform, urban reform, and anti-Mormonism, respectively. The alleged horrors of the convent are compared to the exploitation of women in the plantation, the brothel, and plural marriage, and contrasted with the preparation for true womanhood found in the Protestant female seminary and public school. The final chapter focuses on the rise and fall of campaigns to inspect and abolish convents by Know-Nothing state legislatures in both Massachusetts and Maryland in the mid-1850s. Also included are almost twenty illustrations that both enhance the author’s argument and the pages of this handsomely-produced volume.

The chief value of this book is less in the originality of its thesis—many scholars have offered a version of it, most notably Jenny Franchot in Roads to Rome (1994). Rather, Yacovazzi’s main contribution is the thoroughness and depth to which she documents her argument. Yacovazzi has made an exhaustive study of the print culture of anti-convent sentiment in America. By tracing the domestic thread woven into the fabric of each of these otherwise dissimilar movements, she reveals their shared fears and anxieties about the family in a rapidly changing republic.

Yacovazzi ends her otherwise excellent book with an epilogue that briefly surveys the image of the nun in America popular culture from the Civil War to the present. Such a sweeping analysis in twenty pages, however, seems superficial as compared to the depth and rigor of the previous seven chapters. Yacovazzi also concludes with a highly questionable point. “Although the campaign against convents was short-lived,” she contends, “the image of the nun forged in the antebellum era has had a lasting legacy, rendering nuns un-American, and as H.L. Mencken put it in 1956, ‘only half a woman’ if indeed wholly human” (160). While this image may accurately reflect the views of the authors, educators, ministers, legislators, and rioters found in her nativist sources, it can hardly be attributed to all, or perhaps a majority, of the American Protestant community, which tolerated, and even respected, nuns within their midst, then and at present.

Here and in the chapter on convent schools, Yacovazzi drives her thesis too hard. If American Protestants shared a consensus about the threat of nuns to true womanhood and of convents to domesticity, as Yacovazzi argues, then how to explain the continued popularity of convent schools with middle-class and elite...