The Journey Out: The Recruitment and Emigration of Irish Religious Women to the United States, 1812-1914

Abstract

������ //TTXo you think I shall ever be good enough for you to send me \J away? an Irish girl asked Sister Mary Eustace Eaton, a Sister of Charity and moderator of the Children of Mary Sodality at Our Lady's Hospice, Harold's Cross, in Dublin. For thirty-eight years, 1868 to 1906, Sister Mary Eustace had heard the same question hundreds of pure hearted young girls who, upon receiving the sodality's medal and blue ribbon, pledged to turn from worldly pleasures to give themselves to God.1 Most of these Children of Mary were in their early teens and came the homes of Dublin's working class. As they grew older and expressed a desire to become nuns, Sister Mary Eustace successfully placed them in convents outside Ireland—ones willing to accept a young woman with little or no dowry.2 These were located largely in foreign, English-speaking countries to which millions of Irish had fled after the Great Famine (1845-1851). By 1905 Sister Mary Eustace had found places for approximately 700 women Harold's Cross, several of whom later bore the name Sister Mary Eustace. About 400 of these Children of Mary became nuns in the United States.3 Sister Mary Eustace's work at Harold's Cross is only one example of what had become by 1900 an almost routine pattern of migration—young Irish women going out to the New World as nuns (professed Sisters, novices, postulants, or aspirants). The pattern began in the spring of 1812 when three Ursuline nuns traveled Cork to New York, where they estabhshed the first foundation of Irish women in the United States. Although they remained only three years, they initiated a practice that would become commonplace by the end of the nineteenth century. They also represented the first wave of Irish emigrant women who would come to the United States at the invitation of bishops and priests, often Irish, to establish new convents.4 The first wave lasted 1812 to 1881. It consisted of the estabhshment of sixteen foundations that did endure, ending with the arrival in 1881 of a small group of Presentation Sisters Fermoy, County Cork, in Watervhet, New York. But a second wave, which began in earnest during the late 1860s (and overlapped the first wave during the 1870s),