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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America by Cassandra L. Yacovazzi Emily Suzanne Clark (bio) Cassandra L. Yacovazzi, Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 232 pages. In Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America, historian Cassandra Yacovazzi takes the 1836 bestseller Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal and tells a story that spans from the antebellum period to the twenty-first century. Building on the work of Tracy Fessenden, Jenny Franchot, Nancy Lusignan Schultz, and others, Yacovazzi explores the religious, political, social, cultural, and at times physical, attacks against convents in the antebellum period. "The image of the veiled nun appeared as the inversion of the true woman," she argues early in the book, and furthermore, that image was "needed to sustain the nation" (xxii). The antebellum period was a time of change, from immigration and nativism to gender roles and family structures to elation and anxiety about the westward expansion of the republic. It was important for the nation to have pious, submissive, pure American women to become wives and mothers. Nuns existed outside this mold and thus outside what it meant to be a true woman. A short introduction reviews anti-Catholicism in America and the book's central questions. The first chapter introduces Awful Disclosures, Maria Monk herself, the Protestant ministers who took advantage of her, and the early reception of the book. A key point of the book is presented here: "What one journal referred to as 'Maria Monkism' mattered more than Maria Monk" (25). The following chapters unpack the burning of the Mount [End Page 163] Benedict convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, consider the relationship between anti-slavery and anti-convent novels, examine how the convent and its demonized specter shaped discourse on public schools, place anti-convent writings alongside increasing concerns about the antebellum city's hidden perils, compare how anxiety of female sexual deviance worked in anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism, and offer a close reading of the Massachusetts Nunnery Committee and the Know Nothing Party. A twenty-page epilogue includes a short history of how women religious have been viewed and imagined from the Civil War to the 2008 film Doubt. Sadly, as the epilogue and the whole book show, stereotypes of the nun loom large in American cultural history. The book makes a crucial historiographical intervention to American history. As Yacovazzi explains in the epilogue, the broader American public does not understand women religious. They rarely grace our popular culture (and when they do, it is often problematic) and historians typically overlook them in textbooks and even works on American religious history. If "Catholics are surprisingly absent from [tellings of] U.S. history," as Robert Orsi claims, then even more absent are the stories and experiences of women religious.1 Escaped Nuns works hard to help remedy this. In this process, Yacovazzi shows the reader how the campaign against nuns helps illuminate a number of themes and events in American history. Through her examination of "Maria Monkism" and the way American Protestants cast Catholic nuns as a dangerous other, Yacovazzi illustrates the damage wrought by the campaign against convents in the antebellum period and even today. Clocking in at 160 pages before notes, Escaped Nuns could have been expanded. Yacovazzi did extensive research on the reception of anti-convent writings, and offering some background about these periodicals, especially in terms of reach and readership, could have been useful for readers. Including American Catholicism's acceptance and support of slavery could have helped contextualize the chapter on anti-slavery campaigns. Engaging more with works on religious intolerance in America, beyond anti-Catholicism, might have sharpened some of Yacovazzi's analysis of "othering." However, the book's length is one of its strengths. Each chapter is an ideal size for the undergraduate classroom, and each chapter demonstrates how "Maria Monkism" rendered Awful Disclosures more powerful than any ordinary book. Succinctness and clarity are difficult to achieve and adding more context could have disrupted the book's efficient construction. [End Page 164] Escaped Nuns is a necessary book...