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The Pure American Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Marie Anne Pagliarini
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Extract

In the years between 1830 and 1860, anti-Catholicism in America became unprecedentedly virulent. In 1834, the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, was burned to the ground by an angry mob, touched off in large part by the anti-Catholic sermons of Lyman Beecher and rumors of convent abuses spread by Rebecca Reed. The following years saw several attempts by State governments to legislate against convents as well as numerous incidents of violence. In 1839, thousands of people in Baltimore rioted for three days and threatened to destroy a Carmelite convent. Five years later, rioting mobs in Philadelphia killed thirteen people and left blocks of Catholic homes and two Catholic churches smoldering in ruins. And, throughout the 1850's, a political party called the Know-Nothings convulsed the nation with its violent hostility toward Catholics. The worst incidents occurred in St. Louis, where ten people were killed in 1854, and in Louisville, where twenty were killed in 1855. The Know-Nothings diminished in popularity only with the turmoil of the Civil War.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , Winter 1999 , pp. 97 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1999

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References

Notes

I would like to thank Catherine L. Albanese for her helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

1. Lyman Beecher (1775-1863) was a famous revivalist preacher in Boston and later the president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. On Sunday, August 10, 1834, Beecher delivered impassioned anti-Catholic sermons in three Boston churches. Beecher's sermon, “Plea for the West,” was later issued as the book A Plea for the West (Cincinnati: Truman and Smith, 1835; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1977).

Rebecca Reed was raised as a Protestant but converted to Catholicism. She entered the Ursuline convent in 1831 as either a postulant or a student and remained for several months before leaving and circulating rumors of alleged convent abuses. Her allegations against the Ursuline Community were published after the 1834 convent burning in the book Six Months in a Convent (Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Co.; New York: Leavitt, Lord, and Co., 1835). This work became a huge bestseller, selling ten thousand copies in the first week and approximately two hundred thousand within a month.

For works on the burning of the Ursuline convent, see Cohen, Daniel A., “Miss Reed and the Superiors: The Contradictions of Convent Life in Antebellum America,” Journal of Social History 30, no. 1 (Fall 1996): 149-84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Franchot, Jenny, Roads to Korne: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 135-54Google Scholar; Hamilton, Jeanne, O.S.U., “The Nunnery as Menace: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834,” U.S. Catholic Historian 14, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 35–65 Google Scholar; Lewis, James R., “‘Mind-Forged Manacles’: Anti-Catholic Convent Narratives in the Context of the American Captivity Tale Tradition,” Mid-America 72, no. 3 (October 1990): 149-67Google Scholar; and Whitney, Louise Goddard, The Burning of the Convent (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969)Google Scholar. Within a week of the Ursuline convent burning, two new anti-Catholic newspapers began publication: Downfall of Babylon (Philadelphia) and the American Protestant Vindicator (New York).

2. See Billington, Ray Allen, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 53–84, 345-79, 407-36Google Scholar; Mannard, Joseph, “The 1839 Baltimore Nunnery Riot: An Episode in Jacksonian Nativism and Social Violence,” Maryland Historian 11, no. 1 (1980): 13–27 Google Scholar; Mulkern, John R., “Scandal behind the Convent Walls: The Know-Nothing Committee of 1855,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 11, no. 1 (1983): 22–34 Google Scholar; Schwartz, Michael, The Persistent Prejudice: Anti-Catholicism in America (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, 1984), 38–60 Google Scholar; and Leonard, Ira M. and Parmet, Robert D., American Nativism, 1830-1860 (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), 27–38.Google Scholar

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3. Works addressing English anti-Catholicism, which was an important root of antebellum anti-Catholicism, are Allitt, Patrick, Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 17–25 Google Scholar; Arnstein, Walter L., Protestant Versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Bernstein, Susan David, Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Paz, D. G., Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar (see esp. chaps. 2 and 9); and Schwartz, , The Persistent Prejudice, 15–24.Google Scholar A work focusing on nineteenth-century English views of Catholic nuns is Casteras, Susan P., “Virgin Vows: The Early Victorian Artists' Portrayal of Nuns and Novices,” Victorian Studies 24, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 157-84.Google Scholar For works on early American anti-Catholicism, see Billington, , The Protestant Crusade, 1–31 Google Scholar; Brown, Thomas More, “The Image of the Beast: Anti-Papal Rhetoric in Colonial America,” in Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History, ed. Curry, Richard O. and Brown, Thomas M. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972): 1–20 Google Scholar; Cogliano, Francis D., No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westview, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Schwartz, , The Persistent Prejudice, 24–38.Google Scholar Stephen Haliczer's Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) is a fascinating account of Spanish anti-Catholic attitudes toward auricular confession, which had a great deal in common with antebellum American attitudes.

4. Billington, Ray Allen, “Tentative Bibliography of Anti-Catholic Propaganda in the United States (1800-1860),” Catholic Historical Review 18, no. 4 (January 1933): 492–513.Google Scholar

5. For works that address the relationship between social anxiety and concerns with sexual issues, see Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 203-14Google Scholar; Brown, Karen McCarthy, “Fundamentalism and the Control of Women,” in Fundamentalism and Gender, ed. Hawley, John Stratton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 175-99Google Scholar; Davis, David Brion, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860: A Study in Social Values (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957), 147-78Google Scholar; D'Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle B., Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988)Google Scholar; Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973), 93–112 Google Scholar; Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), 114-28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foster, Lawrence, Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Griffin, Estelle M., “Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America: Behavior, Ideology, and Politics,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (December 1982): 196–205.Google Scholar

6. Franchot, , Roads to Rome, xvii.Google Scholar

7. Franchot writes: “The Protestant American encounter with the estranged world of Catholicism provoked a characteristically conflicted response of repulsion and longing, a fear of corruption and a hunger for communion” (ibid., xxiii).

8. See Bennett, David, “Women and the Nativist Movement,” in “Remember the Ladies”: New Perspectives on Women in American History, ed. George, Carol V. (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1975): 71–90 Google Scholar; Cohen, “Miss Reed and the Superiors”; Davis, David Brion, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47, no. 2 (September 1960): 205-24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, David Brion, “Some Ideological Functions of Prejudice in Ante-Bellum America,” American Quarterly 15, no. 2, pt. 1 (Summer 1963): 115-25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gardella, Peter, Innocent Ecstasy: How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Griffin, Susan M., “Awful Disclosures: Women's Evidence in the Escaped Nun's Tale,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 111 (1996): 93–107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Griffin, Susan M., “ ‘The Dark Stranger’: Sensationalism and Anti-Catholicism in Sarah Josepha Hale's Traits of American Life ,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 14, no. 1 (1997): 13–24 Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965)Google Scholar, chap. 1; Porterfield, Amanda, Feminine Spirituality in America: From Sarah Edwards to Martha Graham (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Reynolds, David S., Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 180-87Google Scholar; Reynolds, David S., Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 64–65 Google Scholar; Welter, Barbara, “From Maria Monk to Paul Blanshard: A Century of Protestant Anti-Catholicism,” in Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America, ed. Bellah, Robert N. and Greenspahn, Frederick E. (New York: Crossroad, 1987): 43–71.Google Scholar

9. Hogan, William, Popery! As It Was and As It Is; Also, Auricular Confession; and Popish Nunneries (Hartford, Conn.: Silas Andrus and Son, 1853), 246.Google Scholar Hogan was an ex-priest and a prolific anti-Catholic author.

10. For information on the phenomenal sales of antebellum anti-Catholic works, see Billington, The Protestant Crusade; Griffin, “Awful Disclosures,” 93; Mott, Frank Luther, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947).Google Scholar

11. Welter, Barbara, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2, pt. 1 (Summer 1966): 151-74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar While this article emphasizes the way that anti-Catholic authors opposed Catholicism to the “Cult of True Womanhood” Catholics themselves espoused an ideology of women that mirrored the Protestant ideal. See Becker, Penny Edgell, “ ‘Rational Amusement and Sound Instruction’: Constructing the True Catholic Woman in the Ave Maria, 1865-1889,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 8, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 55–90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kenneally, James J., The History of American Catholic Women (New York: Crossroad, 1990)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Kenneally, James J., “Eve, Mary, and the Historians,” in Women in American Religion, ed. James, Janet Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Kennelly, Karen, ed., American Catholic Women: A Historical Exploration (New York: Macmillan, 1989)Google Scholar, chap. 1; and McDannell, Colleen, The Christian Home in Victorian America: 1840-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

For works on the “cult of domesticity” and the antebellum gender and sexual ideology in general, see: Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life; Clark, Clifford E. Jr., “Domestic Architecture as an Index to Social History: The Romantic Revival and the Cult of Domesticity in America, 1840-1870,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8, no. 1 (Summer 1976): 33–56 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cott, Nancy F., “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850,” Signs 4, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 219-36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McDannell, The Christian Home; Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll and Rosenberg, Charles, “The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 60 (September 1973): 332-56CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985)Google Scholar; Sellers, , The Market Revolution, 236-68Google Scholar; Van De Wetering, Maxine, “The Popular Concept of ‘Home’ in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American Studies 18, no. 1 (April 1984): 5–28 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Welter, Barbara, “The Feminization of American Religion: 1800-1860,” in Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. Hartman, Mary S. and Banner, Lois (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 137-57Google Scholar; and Woloch, Nancy, Women and the American Experience: A Concise History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 67–78.Google Scholar Woloch's bibliographical essay is an excellent source for references on nineteenth-century women.

12. See Cott, “Passionlessness”; Freedman, “Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America,” 196-215; Rosenberg, Charles E., “Sexuality, Class and Role in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly 25, no. 2 (May 1973): 131-53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Walters, Ronald G., Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974).Google Scholar A work that explores the cultural and economic factors related to the antebellum gender and sexual ideology is Sellers, The Market Revolution, esp. 237-68.

13. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality vol. 1, trans. Hurley, Robert (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 77–131.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., 140, and see esp. 44-49, 105-7. For an excellent discussion of Foucault's conception of power, see Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed., with an afterword by and an interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 126-204. See also Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Gordon, Colin (New York: Pantheon, 1980)Google Scholar; and Foucault, Michel, “Power and Sex: An Interview,” Telos 32 (Summer 1977): 152-61.Google Scholar

15. A work that explores the ideology of the True Man is Sellers, The Market Revolution, 237-68.

16. Billington, , The Protestant Crusade, 108.Google Scholar

17. Billington, Ray Allen, “Maria Monk and Her Influence,” Catholic Historical Review 22 (October 1937): 283-96.Google Scholar Some of the most successful convent novels were written by males. Charles Frothingham authored Convent's Doom (1854), which sold forty thousand copies in ten days, and Six Hours in a Convent (1854), which went through eight editions in two years. George Bourne's Lorette is listed as one of Frank Luther Mott's “Best Sellers” of 1833, and Isaac Kelso's Danger in the Dark (1854) went through thirty-one editions in one year.

18. For a study of a southern female author's anti-Catholic views, see Elizabeth Moss's treatment of Evans, Augusta in Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 157-63.Google Scholar

19. Beecher, Edward, The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, and Protestantism Defended, in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1855; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1977), 150, 152.Google Scholar

20. Pitrat, John Claudius, Paul and Julia; or, The Political Mysteries, Hypocrisy, and Cruelty of the Leaders of the Church of Rome (Boston: Edward W. Hinks, 1855), 83.Google Scholar Pitrat, an ex-priest, dedicated Paul and Julia to “the American Protestants.”

21. Scipio de Ricci, Female Convents: Secrets of Nunneries Disclosed, with an introduction by Thomas Roscoe (New York: R. Appleton, 1834), xiv, xi. Scipio de Ricci was an eighteenth-century Roman Catholic bishop whose manuscripts, edited by Roscoe, were widely quoted in antebellum anti-Catholic literature.

22. The Rector of Oldenwold, The Cloven Foot, or Popery Aiming at Political Supremacy in the United States (Boston: A. Wentworth, 1855), 294.

23. Pitrat, , Paul and Julia, 102, 144.Google Scholar

24. Rogers, John, Anti-Popery, or Popery Unreasonable, Unscriptural and Novel (New York: D. Fanshaw, 1841), 246, 274.Google Scholar

25. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (N.p.: Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1860; repr., New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Riverside Press, 1889), 467.

26. Beecher, , The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, 148 Google Scholar; The Rector of Oldenwold, The Cloven Foot, 295.

27. Beecher, , The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, 153-54.Google Scholar

28. Bourne, George, The American Text-Book of Popery: Being an Authentic Compend of the Bulls, Canons and Decretals of the Roman Hierarchy (Philadelphia: Griffith and Simon, 1847), 323.Google Scholar Bourne, a Protestant clergyman, was a member of the New York Protestant Association and one of the founders of the Protestant Reformation Society (1836). Bourne was also the editor of The American Protestant Vindicator (New York), an anti-Catholic newspaper.

29. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Agnes of Sorrento (N.p.: Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1862; repr., St. Claire Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1970), 195-96.

30. Beecher, , The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, 201.Google Scholar

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32. The Rector of Oldenwold, The Cloven Foot, 297, 299; Culbertson, Rosamond, Rosamond, or a Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of an American Female, under the Popish Priests in the Island of Cuba, with a Full Disclosure of Her Manners and Customs, Written by Herself (Pittsburgh: John Sharp, 1848), 9.Google Scholar Culbertson's work was sponsored by Samuel B. Smith, editor of the anti-Catholic newspaper Downfall of Babylon (Philadelphia), where it was first published serially. When Rosamond was published in book form, it was so successful that a second edition had to be issued within weeks.

33. Hogan, Popery!, 591, 245.

34. Susan David Bernstein argues that representations of the Catholic confessor's abusive power offers a “screen discourse, an uncontroversial vehicle for a more mundane ‘awful disclosure,’ that is, the unsanctioned subject of the sexual disempowerment of women prevalent in Victorian culture” (Confessional Subjects, 60).

35. Carroll, Anna Ella, The Star of the West; or, National Men and National Measures, 2d ed. (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1857), 363-64Google Scholar (Carroll was associated with the Brotherhood of the Anti-Alien Order, a nativist group); Bunkley, Josephine M., The Testimony of an Escaped Novice (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), 140.Google Scholar

36. Beecher, , The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, 151.Google Scholar

37. Jules Michelet, Le Pretre, La Femme, La Familie (1845), published in America as Spiritual Direction and Auricular Confession (Philadelphia: James A. Campbell, 1845), 135. For information on the international popularity of Michelet, see Haliczer, , Sexuality in the Confessional, 194-95.Google Scholar

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40. Hogan, , Popery!, 254.Google Scholar

41. Jenny Franchot cites this phenomenon as evidence of the Protestant attraction, albeit unconscious, to the religion of Catholicism: “The wide-spread conviction of Catholicism's spellbinding properties suggests the discomfort yet usefulness of the felt attraction; the passivity of enchantment was psychologically safer than the activity of desire.” Franchot, , Roads to Rome, 110.Google Scholar

42. Dowling, John, The History of Romanism, Front the Earliest Corruptions of Christianity to the Present Time (New York: Edward Walker, 1853), 521 Google Scholar (Dowling was a Protestant clergyman in Philadelphia); Hogan, Popery!, 301.

43. Hogan, , Popery!, 542.Google Scholar

44. The Rector of Oldenwold, The Cloven Foot, 301; Hogan, , Popery!, 290 Google Scholar (emphasis in original).

45. Michelet, , Spiritual Direction, vii–viii.Google Scholar

46. Quoted in Hogan, , Popery!, 528.Google Scholar

47. Hogan, , Popery!, 541, 290.Google Scholar

48. Pitrat, , Paul and Julia, 269.Google Scholar

49. The Rector of Oldenwold expressed the opinion of many anti-Catholic authors when he wrote that “the same testimony is given by all who succeed in effecting an escape from the jaws of this mother church. Death itself is preferable to an imprisonment in one of these Popish dungeons, where priest and penance alike are present” (The Cloven Foot, 312).

50. Carroll, , The Star of the West, 370 Google Scholar (emphasis in original).

51. Hogan, , Popery!, 130.Google Scholar

52. The Rector of Oldenwold, The Cloven Foot, 324. For an extensive treatment of anticonvent literature, see Joseph G. Mannard, “Veiled Threats to American Institutions: The Image of the Convent in Anti-Catholic Literature” (M.A. thesis, University of South Florida, 1979). Two authors that discuss anticonvent literature in terms of captivity narratives are Lewis, “Mind-Forged Manacles,” and Franchot, Roads to Rome, 112-34. Franchot demonstrates how the attack on convents in antebellum America “intricately voiced Protestant perplexities over the ongoing construction of the ‘cult of domesticity’” (120). Susan M. Griffin has recently published two important articles on anticonvent literature. “Awful Disclosures” argues that cultural anxieties regarding the feminization of religion were revealed in antebellum anticonvent narratives. “The Dark Stranger'” highlights the way that Sarah Josepha Hale's domestic fiction intersected with the genre of sensational anticonvent literature.

53. Martha Butt Sherwood, The Nun, first American edition from the London edition (Princeton, N.J.: Moore Baker, 1834), 15. The publication of Sherwood's novel was a significant influence in the 1834 Ursuline convent burning (Lewis, “Mind-Forged Manacles,” 155).

54. Tonna, Lewis Hippolytus Joseph, Nuns and Nunneries; Sketches Compiled Entirely from Romish Authorities (London: Seeleys, 1852), 17.Google Scholar Tonna's book was widely circulated in the United States in the 1850's.

55. Dwight, Theodore, Open Convents; or Nunneries and Popish Seminaries Dangerous to the Morals, and Degrading to the Character of a Republican Community (New York: Van Nostrand and Dwight, 1836), 114 Google Scholar; Monk, Maria, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (New York: Howe & Bates, 1836; repr., with an introduction by Ray Allen Billington, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1962).Google Scholar Dwight was a Protestant clergyman and the son of Yale University president Timothy Dwight (1752-1817). Theodore Dwight was one of the clergymen involved in the writing and publication of Monk's Awful Disclosures (Billington, “Maria Monk and Her Influence,” 268).

56. Dwight, , Open Convents, 114 Google Scholar; Monk, , Awful Disclosures, 175, 82.Google Scholar

57. In “Women and the Nativist Movement,” David Bennett argues that women functioned as “symbolic victims of male rage” in this type of literature: reading accounts of sexual violence and torture provided a release for the frustration and anxiety that men experienced as a result of the highly competitive antebellum economic environment (80).

58. Monk, , Awful Disclosures, 203 Google Scholar; see also 14, 111-20, 186, 196-210.

59. Cross, Andrew Boyd, Priest's Prisons for Women (Baltimore: Sherwood, 1854), 32.Google Scholar This work first appeared as a series of letters in the Baltimore Clipper. Cross was a Presbyterian minister who, with the Reverend Robert J. Breckinridge, published Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, one of the most vehement anti-Catholic Journals in the nation.

60. Harry Hazel [Justen Jones], The Nun of St. Ursula, or the Burning of the Convent: A Romance of Mount Benedict (Boston: F. Gleason, 1845), 22 (Jones was the author of a variety of popular antebellum novels); Abbott, John S. C., The Mother at Home; or, The Principles of Maternal Duty Familiarly Illustrated (London: John Mason, 1834), 167 Google Scholar; Caldicott, Thomas Ford, Hannah Corcoran: Her Conversion from Romanism (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1853), 60, 93.Google Scholar

61. Bourne, George, Lorette: The History of Louise, Daughter of a Canadian Nun: Exhibiting the Interior of Female Convents (New York: Mercein, 1833), 208, 173.Google Scholar

62. Hazel, , The Nun of St. Ursula, 22, 48.Google Scholar

63. Anonymous author, The Escaped Nun; or, Disclosures of Convent Life; and the Confessions of a Sister of Charity (New York: De Witt and Davenport, 1855), 343; Sherwood, The Nun.

64. Louise's mother, Therese, had been seduced by and bore the child of two different priests, who then forced her to join a convent.

65. Larned, L. Mrs., The American Nun; or the Effects of Romance (Boston: Otis, Broaders, 1836), 11, 122.Google Scholar

66. Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 162-67.

67. Bourne, , Lorette, 58 Google Scholar; Monk, , Awful Disclosures, 358 Google Scholar; Dwight, , Open Convents, 120 Google Scholar; Hogan, , Poperyl, 247.Google Scholar See also Roscoe, “Introduction,” in de Ricci, Female Convents, ix.

68. Roscoe, “Introduction,” in de Ricci, Female Convents, xxi; Theresa Rebecca Reed, Six Months in a Convent and Supplement, with an introduction by the Committee of Publication (Boston: Russell, Odiorne and Metcalf, 1835), 7; Bunkley, Testimony, 319.

69. Cohen, “Miss Reed and the Superiors,” 171.

70. This Protestant perception of nuns was, in many ways, inaccurate, as most nineteenth-century nuns devoted themselves to a life of Service and charity. For information on nineteenth-century nuns, see Ewens, Mary, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Arno Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Thompson, Margaret Susan, “Women and American Catholicism, 1789-1989,” in Perspectives on the Catholic Church in America, 1789-1989, ed. Geiger, Virginia and Viccio, Stephen (Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1989), 123-42Google Scholar; Thompson, Margaret Susan, “Discovering Foremothers: Sisters, Society, and the American Catholic Experience,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5, nos. 3 and 4 (1986): 273-90Google Scholar; Thompson, Margaret Susan, “Women, Feminism, and the New Religious History: Catholic Sisters as a Case Study,” in Belief and Behavior: Essays in the New Religious History, ed. VanderMeer, Phillip and Swierenga, Robert (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 136-63.Google Scholar

Moreover, while anti-Catholic authors opposed the convent System to the “Cult of True Womanhood,” nineteenth-century Catholic nuns were, in fact, expected to conform to its ideals. See Brewer, Eileen Mary, Nuns and the Education of American Catholic Women, 1860-1920 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Coburn, Carol K. and Smith, Martha, C.S.J., “Creating Community and Identity: Exploring Religious and Gender Ideology in the Lives of American Women Religious, 1836-1920,” U.S. Catholic Historian 14, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 91–108 Google Scholar; Cohen, “Miss Reed and the Superiors”; and Joseph G. Mannard, “Maternity … of the Spirit: Nuns and Domesticity in Antebellum America,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5, nos. 3 and 4 (Summer/Fall 1986): 305-24.

71. Billington, , The Protestant Crusade, 413-16Google Scholar; Mulkern, “Scandal be- hind the Convent Walls.”

72. Lewis, “Mind-Forged Manacles,” 154; Mannard, “The 1839 Baltimore Nunnery Riot,” 15.

73. See McGlen, Nancy E. and O'Connor, Karen, Women's Rights: The Struggle for Equality in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Praeger, 1983)Google Scholar; and Melder, Keith E., Beginnings of Sisterhood: The American Woman's Rights Movement, 1800-1850 (New York: Schocken, 1977).Google Scholar

74. In “Women and the Nativist Movement,” David Bennett interprets the nativist movement itself, including anti-Catholicism in particular, as a product of the male desire for stability and permanence in a time of social change (74). For a fascinating exploration of the antebellum male psychology, see Carnes, Mark C., Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 153 Google Scholar, who contends that gender anxieties were a major factor in the popularity of fraternal Orders in nineteenth-century America.

75. On clerical and feminine “disestablishment,” see Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 17–79.Google Scholar

76. Reynolds, , Beneath the American Renaissance, 211-24.Google Scholar

77. Foucault, , History of Sexuality, 48 Google Scholar; Hogan, , Popery!, 591.Google Scholar