The Forgotten Contribution of the Teaching Sisters: A Historiographical Essay on the Educational Work of Catholic Women Religious in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Chapter 3. Overview and assessment of the literature

Chapter 3 Overview and assessment of the literature Contribution to schooling Women religious played a fundamental role in the schooling of girls of both the masses and the elite during the 19th and 20th centuries. In a study of the first decade of the Society of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis (1827-late 1830s), Nikola Baumgarten declared the teaching orders to be ‘the pioneers of truly universal schooling’, offering education open to girls and young women of all social, ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds.47 According to her, the fact that the Sacred Heart sisters provided the only educational opportunities for black, orphaned, and poor girls in St. Louis for nearly a decade shows that the Catholic teaching orders realized the principle of universal education long before the public schools. Micheline Dumont described the contribution of women religious to schooling in Quebec as follows: “Elles ont conçu et organisé l’instruction secondaire et supérieure pour les filles; elles ont développé l’enseignement de la musique; elles ont organisé progressivement les principaux programmes de formation professionnelle spécifiquement destinés aux filles: école normale, écoles d’infirmières, écoles de secrétariat ou de métiers féminins, écoles professionnelles de musique; elles ont instauré et organisé l’enseignement ménager, le systématisant jusqu’à la création de deux facultés universitaires; elles ont inauguré et développé l’enseignement destiné aux clientèles dites exceptionnelles (délinquance, surdité, cécité, défience mentale, etc.); elles ont réussi à maintenir, pour les filles, des programmes d’études identiques à ceux des garçons, contre la volonté des principales autorités éducatives. Au bout du compte, force est de reconnaître que les religeuses ont été les principales responsables du développement des avenues éducatives pour les filles au Québec …”.48 This list gives a clear indication of the immense extent of the educational work of Catholic women religious, but we 20 the forgotten contribution of the teaching sisters are still very far removed from a complete mapping of the precise role which they played, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in the different educational domains in the various countries throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Apart from a valuable article by Claude Langlois in which a modest effort was made to assess the immense contribution of the female congregations to education in 19th century France,49 most studies merely give a panoramic overview of the wide spectrum of educational activities of the female teaching orders in a particular city,50 region51 , country,52 or language area.53 Some attention, however, has been paid to the role played by women religious in particular areas of education. According to Raymond Grew and Patrick Harrigan , the educational work of women religious possibly accelerated the spread of kindergartens in 19th century France.54 When the teaching nun became a familiar figure, parents were more readily inclined to consign their pre-school children to pious care. In his excellent study on the rise and development of institutions for early childhood education in France, Jean-Noël Luc showed that the female religious orders played a fundamental part in establishing and staffing the so-called salles d’asile, i.e. institutions which were intended to care for and to educate the very young children of the rural and urban poor while their parents worked.55 Whereas this kind of charitable enterprise originated in a lay and often Protestant milieu during the July Monarchy (1830-1848) the involvement of the orders grew substantially, and at the end of the 1870s, on the eve of the creation of a national system of écoles maternelles by the republican government, about 75% of the salles d’asile were run by Catholic women religious. More than ten years ago Luc noticed that more research was needed on the contribution of individual congregations to early childhood education, and even today case studies of congregations involved in the care of pre-school children are still extremely rare.56 Several scholars have reassessed the contribution of women religious to primary education in France. In a broad quantitative study on the growth of elementary education from 1821 to 1906, Raymond Grew and Patrick Harrigan demonstrated that universal primary education was achieved largely through the male and female teaching orders.57 The educational legislation issued by the republican authorities in the early 1880s (the ‘Ferry Laws’) did not create a system of primary schooling out of nothing; it merely regularized, secularized, and improved it...