Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York's Welfare System, 1830-1920 (review)

With this ambitious and provocative study, Maureen Fitzgerald contributes substantively to the burgeoning field of scholarship acknowledging the seminal roles women religious have played historically in the formation of American culture and society. Focusing primarily on the work of the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Charity, and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in nineteenth-century New York City, Fitzgerald situates her sophisticated chronicle of the evolution of city welfare policy within a complex nexus of both inter- and intra- gender, religious, class, and ethnic interactions, tensions, and stereotypes.

Fitzgerald posits a struggle for cultural hegemony in the emerging welfare state, initially manifest in the opposing positions which Protestant, native-born, elite women and Irish Catholic nuns adopted respectively. Protestant women eschewed outdoor relief or direct subsidies to the poor and advocated removing poor immigrant children from their natural parents and placing them out permanently in American Protestant families, both to preclude the perpetuation of a permanent dependent class and to ensure the inculcation of proper American republican values in immigrant progeny. The sisters preferred to preserve the immigrant family's integrity and parental involvement—and, not incidentally, Irish Catholic culture—by institutionalizing the children temporarily and returning them to their parents as circumstances warranted. As her narrative unfolds, Fitzgerald deftly incorporates other variables—including the increasing intervention of male bureaucrats, politicians, and the Roman Catholic male hierarchy in welfare initiatives over time; new assaults on non-Protestant cultural traditions as new political alliances based on class coalesce and supersede traditional alliances based on religious and ethnic loyalties; the proliferation of public and private agencies to regulate welfare institutions; and the triumph of "scientific charity" which prizes education, professionalism, and investigation over normative standards of charity and justice. Fitzgerald's analysis of the impact of historic conditions in Ireland on the nascent Irish American community consciousness and her perceptive discussion of both Protestant and Irish Catholic conceptualizations of female sexuality, appropriate gender roles, and model female behavior particularly distinguish themselves.

However, some aspects of this engaging study prove problematic. Fitzgerald's reference to sisters' "ability to make vows of obedience to other women, not to men" (p. 39) and repeated assertions that "most [convents] were not subject to the bishops in the dioceses in which they worked" (p. 38), and "women religious were now to have a place in the hierarchy below bishops" (p. 47) exaggerate an autonomy from episcopal authority that the sisters themselves would neither have asserted nor presumed. Indeed, the Rule of 1812 of the Sisters of Charity in Emmitsburg, Maryland, explicitly stipulated the following under Article III, On Obedience: "The Sisters of Charity shall pay honor and obedience to their institute, to the most Reverend Archbishops and Bishops in whose respective dioceses they may be established. They shall obey also the Superior General of their society and those whom he [emphasis added] may delegate to direct or visit them, to the Mother, and in her absence to her Assistant Sister. . . ." Fizgerald's several references to "the convent [as] a preferable means to articulate religious and political commitment" (p. 11), to nuns' "reluctance to claim that power as such, especially in public and to the larger community. . . ," and "their unwillingness to spar publicly with Catholic men or Protestant native-borns. . ." (p. 42) distort the very nature of the nineteenth-century disengagement of women religious from worldly contestations of power, public roles, and public voices. Nevertheless, this important study succeeds not only in telling the stories of women religious, but also in ". . . fundamentally critiquing and rethinking the premises of an American women's history that has rendered their work invisible or inconsequential" (p. 3).