First Draft--Or At Least What I've Got So Far

Okay, so it isn't complete, but this is what I've got so far. It's a little difficult when I keep finding really cool stuff that I want to use. And I'm afraid that I'm scatterbrained. Be assured, this paper has kept me up nights. As I finish drafting parts of the paper, I'll post them here. I've included my rough outline in the beginning of this, so you and I will both know whereabouts I'm heading. Things will change, they always do, but for now I'm trying to stick to this as much as possible.

Word count: 1849





Outline for Conference Paper

I. Introduction
Thesis: The Catholic inmates of the Ursuline Convent on Mt. Benedict were perceived as threats to the Protestant woman’s role in society. The way that they lived and their role in the community was closer to that of the New Woman of the latter part of the nineteenth century and early twentieth, than the True Woman.

a. A brief history of the Charleston, MA Ursuline Convent

II. Main
a. The True Woman
i. Role of the Protestant woman in society
ii. Respectability and gentility
iii. How do various characters hold up to the ideal of True Womanhood?
b. The New Woman
i. Role of Nuns in the Community
1. Teachers
2. Caregivers of poor
ii. Nuns’ lives
1. Not under the influence of father, brother, or husband
2. Did not raise families
3. Lived in a “mysterious” single-sex community
4. Supported themselves
c. Protestantism vs. Catholicism
i. Paranoid Protestant Politics
ii. Catholics as the “Other”
d. About the riot
i. Possible reasons for the riot
ii. Fall-out of the riot—“attack on defenseless women”

III. Conclusion














Introduction:
The burning of the Charleston Ursuline Convent in August of 1834 has generally been considered by historians to be result of anti-Catholic nativism, class conflict, and hard economic times. However, in recent times, a new interpretation has begun to arise; the idea that the destruction of the convent as an attempt to safeguard common societal values (Kenneally 15). The values in question were in regards to the traditional roles of women in the early nineteenth century America. The Catholic inmates of the Ursuline Convent on Mt. Benedict were perceived as threats to the Protestant woman’s role in society. The way that they lived and their role in the community was closer to that of the New Woman that emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early twentieth, than the True Woman of the domestic sphere.

The Ursulines and Their Convent:
The rise and fall of the Boston Ursuline community took place during the 1820s and 1830s, which was roughly the same span of time that a new ideology was taking hold in antebellum America (Cohen 1996 153). This ideology (really not really new, just given a louder voice) has been termed in modern times to be the Cult of True Womanhood. It was in this time period that Catholics—a distrusted minority in the overwhelmingly Protestant nation—had been immigrating to America, and consequently, their faith followed them. New churches and institutions were constantly being established to keep up with the increasing volume of Catholic believers. One sign of this expansion was the establishment of girls’ schools. They offered a fairly solid education for young girls, usually the daughters of middle to upper-class Protestants (Cohen 1996 155).
Of these teaching orders, the Ursulines were the largest. In September of 1820, the Ursuline order opened a convent/day school in Boston, with over one hundred students attending. Unfortunately, the cramped living quarters were inadequate to the support of all the nuns. At least four nuns (including the original Superior) died by 1824. The following year, a new Bishop took over Boston, Benedict Joseph Fenwick. He noticed the inadequate living conditions and commissioned a new convent to be built a few miles away in the rural town of Charleston. This was the location of the Ursuline convent and boarding school on Mt. Benedict (named for the Bishop) that would be ransacked and burned to the ground less than ten years after it was built (Cohen 1996 156).
At around nine o’clock in the evening of August 11th, 1834, a mob of lower-class workers began to gather and call for the destruction of the convent. The one town policeman was left to the charge of crowd control, but one man against fifty is an impossible task (Billington 15). The mob had gathered because a nun, Elizabeth Harrison, had escaped some time earlier but had been prevailed upon to return to the convent for a few weeks. It was agreed that if she still wanted to leave after her time was up, that she would be honorably discharged and let to go her own way. Allegedly, fearing detainment, before she returned she told her Protestant friends to make a stir if she did not emerge within the allotted time. Rumors that she was being held in a secret dungeon below the convent began to circulate.
As the mob became more unruly, the Superior Mary Edmond St. George, tried to reason with the mob, failing that she threatened them which only inflamed them further. Not even the students could talk the mob out of their intent. As fifty or sixty men stormed the convent, the nuns and students who ranged in age from six to fourteen, escaped out the back door while the convent was looted and set afire (Billington 16). The next night, another mob returned to the scene of the crime and set fire to anything that they had missed the night before, and was stopped from destroying a Catholic church only by a regiment of guards assigned to protect the home of one Edward Cutter (Billington 17).
The matter, of course, was complicated in 1835 with the publication of Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent. Reed was a young, impoverished Protestant country girl who had few prospects. She had been forced to give up her education in order to care for her mother who died of consumption, and later she had to take care of her father, who was by then an old man. The novel, part of the “escaped nun” sub-genre of the captivity narratives, is a warning against what would happen should the domestic order be upset.

True Womanhood:
In Barbara Welter’s groundbreaking essay “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860” she defines the four categories of the concept of true womanhood: purity, submissiveness, piety, and domesticity (152). The ideal Protestant woman would live up to these qualities, for she was the pillar of virtue in the home, and it was her duty to maintain the home-front. The men were busy building a nation, but it was the woman, submissive to her father, brother, or husband, who held the nation together. She was the paragon of virtue, the homemaker, the raiser of children, and the one active in her religious faith community. Her place was entirely in the domestic sphere. Reed’s Six Months in a Convent took those social mores and turned them upside-down. Not for any feminist purposes, but instead as an example of what would happen if women stepped outside of their proper sphere.
It can be argued that none of the women in the narrative could be considered as true women. True women were expected to stay out of the public sphere. 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. We will return to this later in regards to the nuns.
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 4250. 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 to 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.
Even so, the Ursuline Convent itself was a genteel place. It catered to the middle class and the wealthy, teaching the girls to be respectable. The daily routines, and even the dress of the students was designed to mold spoiled young ladies into respectable, virtuous, industrious, and genteel young women. It taught them how to get by in life without every indulgence (Cohen 427).