‘Good teacher’ or ‘good religious’? the professional identity of catholic women religious in nineteenth-century England and Wales

Abstract

Roman Catholic women's congregations are an enigma of nineteenth-century social history. Over ten thousand women involved in these congregations have been rendered invisible in history. Despite their exclusion from historical texts, these women featured prominently in negotiating the boundaries of religious life, sometimes to their collective benefit, sometimes not. Prescriptive literature gave one model of womanhood, married life, with a second model, single life, clearly an inauspicious alternative. Women religious provided a different model and created a religious, occupational and professional identity that varied from the prescriptive literature of the day. Their religious identity had as its goal their own ‘perfection’ and the salvation of others. Their occupational identity as ‘nun’ often encompassed a wide variety of tasks, but by the end of the century, the professional identity of nun as teacher or nurse was firmly in place.