Female Congregations Research Articles

"A Base and Unmanly Conspiracy": Catholicism and the Hogan Schism in the Gendered Religious Marketplace of Philadelphia

When the Catholic priest William Hogan was charged with the attempted rape and assault of parishioner Mary Connell in 1821, the ensuing trial fed a debate about gender and religion in the early national era. Fears about gender disruption had already been at the heart of the so-called Hogan Schism. St. Mary's Church in Philadelphia, like many other Catholic and Protestant congregations, felt the market strains of the Second Great Awakening, as followers pushed for more authority in their churches. Hogan had accommodated this desire, crafting a republican message and charismatic persona that appealed to male and female congregants alike. In doing so, he inflamed a long standing fight for power between the church hierarchy and elected trustees. As competing churchmen fought for adherents they found that women's efforts on their behalf were central to their struggle. Hogan would resent the bishop's seeming deployment of a female agent to bring him down. Yet Hogan himself had relied on this same woman, Mary Connell, to advance his cause. In addition, Hogan, a noted dandy, saw his very manhood interrogated from several quarters amidst these disputes. His seeming charm over female parishioners opened difficult questions about the nature of masculinity within a church that demanded celibacy of its clergy. In the long term, the schism and trial encouraged damaging criticism of Catholicism that would inform antebellum strains of nativism. Hogan himself would exploit this potential by portraying women as one of the primary victims of the unchecked power vested in priests. In both literal and metaphorical fashion, the Hogan Schism proved an "unmanly" dispute.

Race Issues and Conflict in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Religious Life: The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family

Introduction The recent plethora of studies on female religious congregations in the United States reveals countless occasions when vowed religious women suffered degradations and humiliations at the hands of a patriarchal church. Indeed, gender discrimination has so affected female religious communities that it is not an exaggeration to say that it has been a central element that has touched the history of each vowed religious community, almost without exception. For African-American female religious congregations, however, gender issues, although important, have played a secondary role to those of race. There are three communities of African-American sisters. The oldest are the Oblates of Providence, founded in 1828 in Baltimore. Next in longevity are the Sisters of the Holy Family, who list 1842 as their year of origin. The youngest are the Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, founded in Georgia in 1916, but since 1924 centered in Harlem, New York City. All three congregations have distinct histories and unique charisms that differentiate them from each other. At the same time, they have much in common as a result of their African-American racial identity. Race is the distinguishing characteristic that has set them apart from other female religious congregations and has defined their place in American church and secular history. The racial prejudices of white Catholics, including those of the clergy and other female religious communities, forced these three black communities to develop strategies for negotiating with the dominant white power structure. This essay will address one of these communities, the New Orleans-based Sisters of the Holy Family. It will attempt to show how the three Holy Family cofounders negotiated with white church leaders in transforming their community from a society of pious women to a church-sanctioned, vowed religious congregation, when it seemed that the social mores of the time made such a transformation impossible. In

Sex, War, and Community Service: The Battle for San Francisco's Jewish Community Center

Sex, War, and Community ServiceThe Battle for San Francisco's Jewish Community Center Mary Ann Irwin (bio) In 1954 San Francisco's Jewish Community Center (JCC) published a history of its first seventy-seven years. The slim volume also marked the one hundredth anniversary of the community center movement in the United States. Louis Blumenthal, the history's author as well as the JCC's executive director, began the tale in 1877, when the organization was founded as the Young Men's Hebrew Association (YMHA). Subsequent pages detail the YMHA's slow evolution from social club, to athletic fraternity, to "town hall for Jewish communal organizations." Blumenthal admits that the YMHA's course had not been smooth. Indeed, the association had failed—twice. Success came at last in 1920 when, "at the request of the Emanu-El Sisterhood," a Jewish women's organization, the YMHA took over Sisterhood's community service functions. As a YMHA newsletter later explained, taking over the activities of the Emanu-El Sisterhood was "part of a plan" by which the YMHA had become San Francisco's Jewish Community Center.1 A fascinating story lies just beneath the surface of this simple recital. Local histories obscure a whirlwind of class-, ethnic-, and gender-based rivalries as Jewish agencies battled for the right to become the city's one and only community center. This essay considers the gendered dimensions of this conflict, as well-established women's groups struggled to repel the advances of the perennially unsuccessful YMHA. This story is not simply an isolated instance of institutional rivalry in a Western town. The transfer of what Blumenthal calls "leisure-time activities" from Sisterhood to the YMHA mirrors a much larger story that was taking place nationwide. As community leaders phased out settlement houses in the 1920s and 1930s, their places were taken by community centers, neighborhood institutions whose facilities and programs often mirrored those of their predecessors in all save one crucial element—female leadership. The victims of "shifting political winds," according to historian Judith Ann Trolander, settlements [End Page 36] lost their community functions and, with them, their access to community funding. The fiercest winds came at the onset of World War I, when European immigration to the United States fell off sharply, and continued into the 1920s, when Congress placed severe restrictions on immigration. The shift to centralized fund-raising also damaged the settlements. During World War I private donors were overwhelmed by the fiercely competitive war-bond campaigns of rival groups. To limit the assault on their pocketbooks, civic leaders opted for centralization under Community Chests, the 1920s version of charity organization societies. Centralized funding, in turn, put pressure on settlements and other woman-led entities. As demand for immigrant services fell, so did appropriations to settlement houses. At the same time, however, urban Americans had learned the value of the houses themselves. As communal spaces settlements had proven their worth as sites for delivery of various social goods and services, from lectures on public health, to children's after school programs, to evening activities for working adults. A growing share of Community Chest budgets was allocated to the new spaces known as community centers. In the process authority for designing and delivering community services shifted from women to men.2 Women's service organizations were also undone by an antifeminist backlash, a reaction that increased in intensity after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919. Beyond that backlash was a growing belief that American women's work as "municipal housekeepers" came at the expense of American men. Some historians link this sense of eroding masculine authority to the birth of the Boy Scouts of America, the organized play movement, and the country's growing enthusiasm for team sports and the manly art of boxing. Religious spokesmen of every stripe campaigned to bring men back into the fold and, at the same time, to regain control of programs begun by female congregants. The final blow to many woman-run settlements came with World War I, which captured the attention of America's progressive leaders and turned them from social reform (long the province of organized women) to preparing men for war (traditionally...

Anticlericals and Bonnes Soeurs: The Rhetoric of the 1901 Law of Associations

This article explores the conflict between the Catholic Church and the Republican state in the context of the 1901 Law of Associations and its application to female religious communities. While militant anticlericalism dominated parliamentary rhetoric, a majority of municipal councils expressed pragmatic support for female congregations. Provincials hoped to retain the inexpensive educational and health services provided by the bonnes soeurs. A variety of sources are analyzed: committee reports from the Chamber of Deputies, debates of municipal councils located in the Bouches-du-Rhone and the Aveyron, and the activities of two southern religious communities. The pervasive presence of the sisters was the result of a century-long transformation of Catholicism in which women played a central role. However, the rhetoric of anticlerical republicans remained fixed, repeating the negative prerevolutionary images of the cloistered nun. Furthermore, the republican state could not fully replace the services of the bonnes soeurs, particularly in health care. The 1901 Law of Associations and its implementation revealed both the power of republican anticlericalism and its limitations when confronting a reinvigorated, female-centered Catholicism.

Jesuits, Nahuas, and the Good Death Society in Mexico City, 1710-1767

Jesuits, Nahuas, and the Good Death Society in Mexico City, 1710-1767

Sex and the Elderly:

Two persistent myths about aging are that sex is for the young and religion is for the old. Contrary to these popular beliefs, adults do not necessarily turn to religion as they age nor do they lose sexual interest or cease to be sexually active. This paper examines sex. gender and sexuality of the elderly in relation to religious beliefs and church/synagogue participation. Five megatrends related to sex and aging and their implications for the churchlsynagogue are discussed: (1) from youth to adult congregations- the demographic imperatives; (2) from male to female congregations; (3) from married to single; (4) from eitherlor to multiple choice; and (5) from exclusive to inclusive.

Priorities in Religious Life—An Alternative View

Once the primacy of the existential witness provided by the quality of community life is firmly established, the community can undertake, either corporately or individually, any of the works of mercy. Material services have their place, but this is very definitely a secondary one. What people DO by way of work, projects, etc., is irrelevant to the apostolic dimension of religious life. This apostolate, as I have tried to stress in various ways, is exercised in and through the quality of common life. Any specific works of social benefit that members undertake, either individually or collectively, are entirely secondary.‘Any of the works of mercy’, ‘material services’, ‘works of social benefit’; how many Dominicans, how many other religious, will recognise their work in those descriptions? Is this the kind of choice between community life and work that they are offered? How does it come about that such a false choice is both approved and supported? How is it that the break-down situation, which is what the ‘choice’ between community life and work is, can be seen as offering relevance and a future to Dominican, and other, communities? (In what follows I shall write mainly from what I believe to be a Dominican point of view. I doubt if any one writer can cope with a topic as broad as ‘religious life’; I am even less convinced that a male is going to provide the solutions for either female congregations or joint ‘communes’).

The problems of the female religious congregations: some force- lines for sociological research

Le matériel qui a servi de base à cet article provient d'une recherche menée auprès d'une congrégation de religieuses. Nous avons tenté d'établir une comparaison entre la manière dont les religieuses envisagent leur tâche d'éducation et de service socio-médical et les normes et attitudes vis-à-vis du travail telles que les difinit 'le monde'. Nous avons constaté d'importantes diffgrences. Le second point qui pose problème et que nous tentons de décrire est la manière d'envisager l'éducation et le service socio-médical dans une optique d'apostolat. Historiquement on a assisté à l'intérieur même de ces oeuvres à une évolution dans la relation religieuse—client (élève, malade etc.), celle-ci passant de relation apostolique à relation de service; persister à considérer ce travail comme 'apostolique' revient à créer, selon nous, des conflits psychologiques chez les religieuses. En troisième lieu, des conflits peuvent découler du fait que les mêmes personnes, après avoir travaillé ensemble, rentrent vivre ensemble. Le quatrième domaine qui pose sans doute pas mal de problèmes, et donc des possibilités de recherche approfondie, est celui de l'identité religieuse des congrégations. Enfin, dernier point soulevé ici, la position d'infériorité de la femme dans l'Eglise, qui a d'énormes répercussions sur la problematique des congréga tions. Il est nécessaire d'en tenir compte dans une recherche sociologique portant sur des congrégations.