Final Draft

Amanda Ewoldt
Dr. Logan
LIT 6009
24 April 2009

True Womanhood and Anti-Catholicism in R. Reed’s
Six Months in a Convent
In August of 1834, a mob of working class men from Charleston, Massachusetts, attacked and burned an Ursuline Convent on Mt. Benedict. The mob was at least forty to fifty men strong, all participants wearing disguises. The Mother Superior attempted to reason with the mob, and failing that, to threaten them with a supposed army of twenty thousand Irishman under the command of the Bishop in Boston. When reason and threats failed, the inhabitants of the Convent—roughly a dozen sisters and sixty girls from the ages of six to fourteen—were forced to flee to a nearby refuge while the mob ransacked and burned the Ursuline Convent to the ground (Billington 16). The overarching question of the matter is why would this happen? It seems inconceivable that a mob of men would go so far as to attack an institution made up of women and children.
The answer is not as complicated as one would think. Anti-Catholic and nativist sentiments mixed with the societal mores of the traditional Protestant woman like high-grade pool cleaner and glycerin: explosively. This paper will explore both anti-Catholicism, true womanhood, and Rebecca Reed’s novel to explain not just what happened but why.
One of America’s ugly but defining characteristics is paranoia and obsession with conspiracy theories. There have been quite a few: anti-Masonry, anti-Communist, and anti-Catholicism are a few of the bigger ones. Catholicism was a threat to the Protestant peace of mind; unlike the Protestants who exist in splintered sects, the Catholic Church presents a cohesive front. Further, the Catholics’ powerbase was not located in America—every church was part of a tall hierarchy that could be traced back to the Pope in Rome—at least for then. In Reed’s novel, Bishop Benedict “thought that America rightfully belonged to the Pope, and that his Holiness would take up his residence here at some future day” (Reed 130). Understandably, this made people nervous, as it seemed to go against the fundamental principles of freedom and individuality that America was founded on (Hofstadter 80) and there was a fear that Europe and Rome were trying to take over the government by stealth.
In fact, for years the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism was looked on as a life or death issue. There was a myth of an imminent Catholic war reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition that persisted into the twentieth century (Hofstadter 83). In the narrative, the Bishop speaks of getting a letter from the Pope himself, congratulating him for “his success in establishing the true religion in the United States, and made him offers of money to advance the interest of the Catholic Church and more firmly establish it in America” (Reed 115-16). To conspiracy theorists who believed that Rome was trying to take over the government, this might have been alarming.
Antebellum American had an obsession with sexual purity, “[a]nti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan” (Hofstadter 83). Indeed “[c]entral to anti-Catholic literature was the articulation of the nature and role of the True Woman” (Pagliarini 99). Common in convent tales such as Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures (though noticeably missing from Six Months in a Convent) is the descriptions of horrors and debauchery that happens behind closed doors, where the priests use convents as brothels. Protestants considered celibacy and rejection of marriage and family to be unnatural—not just for women but also for men. “None but he that is unmarried” says the Bishop, “careth for things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: but he that is married careth for the things that are of this world, how he may please his wife” (Reed 116-17). That passage could be construed as an insult—Catholic priests dedicated their lives to God be remaining celibate and unmarried, whereas their Protestant counterparts were married.
This violation of the “‘laws of nature,’ laws that God implemented for the propagation of the species” (Pagliarini 100). This kind of unnaturalness disturbed the social order, especially for the pure and domestic ideal of the true woman. Protestants were worried that under the guidance of male Catholic confessors that true women would discover hidden passions and become everything that the ideal woman was not supposed to be sexually (Pagliarini 107). Perhaps this is one of the reasons that convents generally reeked of impurity, cruelty, vice, corruption, and were unnatural things that injured the reputation of the communities they were in (Kenneally 16).
True Womanhood is a relatively new term, coined in 1966 by Barbara Welter in her groundbreaking essay “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820—1860.” True womanhood was defined by four major characteristics: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity (152). The ideal Protestant woman’s place in society was home and hearth. She left the public sphere to her husband while she raised the children and kept the home. She was naturally religious; religion gave her peace of mind, dignity, and did not take her away from her domestic sphere (153). For the true woman, purity was just as important as piety, for women without it were considered to be fallen women (Welter 154). Submissiveness to men was considered to be the natural, God-appointed order of the universe (159). It can be argued that Reed’s Six Months in a Convent reflects what could happen in a world where women are not under the immediate control of men—the destruction that comes from women having the agency to act and rule in the place of men. Certainly the Mother Superior is reported to have been an intimidating and domineering woman (Cohen 1996, 157).
The final quality is domesticity. The true Protestant woman knew her place in society was that of a wife and a mother, “Very rarely a ‘woman of genius’ was absolved from the necessity of marriage, being so extraordinary that she did not need the security or status of being a wife” (170). These instances were rare, as mentioned before. Marriage was generally considered a cure for a girl who was flighty or difficult—the idea being that a firm hand and responsibility would settle her down.
It can be argued that neither Rebecca Reed nor Superior St. George in the narrative could be considered as true women. True women were expected to stay out of the public sphere. Indeed, even the one woman, Sister Mary Magdalene, who is the closest to true womanhood as any of them, could not be considered a true woman. As mentioned above, the “cult of true womanhood” is a modern construct—back in the day true women were judged by respectability and gentility, not necessarily the same things. In the nineteenth century, respectability referred to a person’s moral or religious conduct (Cohen 424). Whether or not a man or woman had money was not the issue; it was in their moral deportment. Indeed, respectability for a woman was piety, submission to her male betters, purity before marriage and absolute faithfulness afterward, and the desire and ability to keep a home and raise a family. A respectable, domestic woman knew her place in society and stayed in her sphere. Gentility was connected with good manners and style of living (Cohen 424).
Domesticity was something of a problem in this definition of the ideal woman. Not every woman had a suitor with prospects who was determined to sweep her away. Thousands of young, unmarried women worked in the public sphere for their living, in the factories (Cohen 425). This was not actively encouraged. Women’s participation in any facet of the public sphere was considered to be questionable. It was men who were supposed to be the breadwinners, engaged in the public eye. One place that women were encouraged to work outside the home was the church. Activity in a church community was domestic, as religion came more naturally to women than it did to men (Welter 153). This is an interesting view that looked good in theory, but threatened men when put to practice. Becoming a nun gave a woman a good deal more agency than she would have had as a married woman. If the convent had a school attached she could teach, she was dedicated to God and the community, and thus could blur the lines of the separate spheres of domesticity and public.
Still, in anti-Catholic literature such as Six Months in a Convent, “the convent thus appeared as a dangerous threat to the values of the pure American woman…the convent system undermined the foundation of the family. Through its seduction and incarceration of the single woman, the convent imperiled the system of marriage” (Pagliarini 115). Because the Catholic woman turned away from her roles as wife and mother to pursue her own spiritual fulfillment, she was seen as grossly lacking in selflessness. She challenged the normal view that woman was a weak and needed a man to look after her by remaining independent (Pagliarini 116). Society would consider the truest, most virtuous woman would be considered sullied and “damaged goods” if she entered a convent, no matter if she had done anything wrong or not.
In the aftermath of the destruction of the Ursuline convent, both Rebecca Reed and Mother Superior Mary Edmond St. George’s female respectability came into question. According to the tenets of domesticity, the true woman would keep herself away from scandal, and not take part in it publicly (Cohen 425). Thus, it caused some consternation on both sides when both Reed and St. George engaged in a she said/she said public spat. In order to maintain the image of Reed’s innocence and victimization, her publishers had to add a disclaimer to the prefatory material:
We wish it to be distinctly understood that the publication is not made at the instigation, or on the responsibility of the author. On the contrary, she has very reluctantly yielded to the force of circumstances and the dictates of duty, which, in the opinion of her friends and the friends of truth, have left no other course proper to be pursued; and has placed her manuscript at her disposal. If then there is an error of judgment in giving this work publicity, it belongs to the friends of Miss R., and too many of our most sedate and respectable citizens who have advised with them, and not to herself. (Introduction 13)
This is an interesting play. Not only are they reinforcing her respectability by implying that she bowed to the will of her male superiors in allowing her account to be published, but that she herself expressed a worry about engaging in an unwomanly public scandal. Also, this passage makes clear that her character is unimpeachable, because her friends and community who support her are respectable as well—they would hardly leap to the defense of a fallen, sullied woman.
Reed herself is conscious of this very fine line that she and her supporters are walking. In a letter to the editor of The Courier on January 6th, 1835, she writes: “Much as I am averse to allowing my name to come before the public, in any manner, I cannot, in justice to myself, remain silent when such a gross calumny has been put forth” (Introduction 29). Still, the fact that she does respond to attacks on her character in print, rather than allowing a male friend of hers to do so on her behalf, is suggestive that she was not the meek lamb she was made out to be. Yet her supporters are adamant:
“Miss Reed avoided any publicity that would lead to an excitement against the church. For nearly three years before the destruction of the convent, she had been living in the bosom of her own family, an exemplary member of the Episcopal Church, industriously applying herself…to acquiring and giving instructions to young ladies in music and needlework” (27-8).
She is a good girl, by their accounts. Not a “commonplace chit of a girl” according to Ray Allen Billington (Billington 10).
Whether or not the novel Six Months in a Convent can be held directly responsible for the agitation that led to the destruction of the convent is still up for speculation. Certainly, Reed’s narrative and paranoia that there were plans to kidnap her and take her off to Canada to keep her from speaking out against the horrors of convent life were generally held as truth rather than a possible fiction, “it would not do to have such reports go abroad as these persons carry; that Agnes must be taken care of; that they had better send her to Canada, and that a carriage could cross the line in two or three days…it would not do for the Protestants to get hold of those things and make another ‘fuss’” (Reed 163). Her story seemed to be further corroborated when another nun, Elizabeth Harrison, truly did escape from the convent in a state of mental distress from overwork (Billington 10).
Superior Mary Edmund St. George’s own respectability was called into question as well. A stout, middle-aged woman of medium height, Madame St. George was an intimidating woman with a quick temper and a regal demeanor (Cohen 1996, 157). She was “of quick step and vivacity” haughty and extremely self-assured, described as queenly (Kenneally 17). She is portrayed in the narrative first as a kindly woman, and later becomes a fearsome being in the eyes of Reed and a few other inmates, namely Mary Francis. Mary Francis “feared the Superior as she did a serpent” (Reed 110). Reed herself came to be terrified of the Superior: “I was so frightened by the threats and manner of the Superior, that I sobbed aloud, and blood gushed from my nose and mouth” (144). Until recently, most scholarship has focused on the burning of the convent as an expression of unstable politics, class warfare, and anti-Catholic sentiments, but in 1979, James Kenneally looked at the situation in a different way.
The Superior of the Convent was the very embodiment of the two things that people of the time feared and disliked: a Catholic woman who rejected the traditional roles of women in Protestant America. Women like her frightened men who believed than any change in the status quo would result in the disruption of society (Pagliarini 117). The catalyst that started the riot was that one of the nuns had escaped earlier but had been prevailed upon to return to the convent for a few weeks to finish up her duties. When the appointed time of Harrison’s release came and went and no one had seen her, the people got restless and prepared to destroy the convent if there was not a prompt investigation. To the rioters, they were not destroying a convent but protecting femininity (Kenneally 16-17). St. George’s behavior did nothing to calm the rioters—far from playing the weak damsel in distress, she responded to the crowd in a “manly” fashion. One of the men sent to check on Harrison, Fitch Cutter, admitted that if she had been less feisty and appealed to the crowd’s better natures that perhaps the incident might never have escalated (Kenneally 19). Whether that would have worked can be debated—mob mentality tends to be subversive to reason.
Six Months in a Convent is a part of a long line of anti-Catholic alarmist propaganda. It played into the antebellum America’s worst fears—the takeover and influence of Catholicism on the status quo of society, and the threat of the convents on true womanhood. Protestant Americans did not want women to go beyond their boundaries of house and home into the convent—to sanction such things, they believed, would destroy the social order and cast the young country into chaos at the best, and invite takeovers from the foreign Other of the Catholic Church.




Works Cited:
Cohen, Daniel A. “The Respectability of Rebecca Reed: Genteel Womanhood
and Sectarian Conflict in Antebellum America.” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 419-461. 9 February 2009. www.jstor.org.
Billington, Ray Allen. “The Burning of the Charlestown Convent.” The New
England Quarterly, 10.1 (Mar., 1937) 4-24. www.jstor.org
Reed, Rebecca Theresa. Six Months in a Convent. Boston: Russell, Odiorne &
Metcalf, 1835.
Pagliarini, Marie Ann. “The Pure American Woman and the Wicked Catholic
Priest: and Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America.” Religion and American Culture, 9.1 (Winter, 1999), 97-128. www.jstor.org
Kenneally, James J. “The Burning of the Ursuline Convent: A Different View.”
Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, 90.1 (1979), 15-21. www.jstor.org
Hofstadter, Richard. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Harper’s
Magazine, (Nov., 1964), 77-86. www.googlescholar.com
Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820—1860.” American
Quarterly, 18.2 (Summer, 1966), 151—174. www.jstor.org