The Young Catholic: Girlhood and the Making of American Catholicism, 1836-1911
FAIN: FT-265510-19
Monica Lynn Mercado
Colgate University (Hamilton, NY 13346-1338)
Research and writing a book on the experiences of young Catholic women in the United States during the 19th century.
Breaking from histories of 19th-century U.S. Catholicism that center anti-Catholic narratives about women and girls, my book project The Young Catholic: Girlhood and the Making of American Catholicism, 1836-1911, refocuses on Catholics’ own understandings of themselves. Using a rich but overlooked set of print and manuscript sources (the vast output of a vibrant U.S. Catholic publishing industry and the convent school pedagogies, book clubs, and reading retreats that grew up around it) I illustrate the formation of a Catholic cultural identity and argue for the special role of young women as makers of class and status for their upwardly mobile, second- and third-generation Catholic families. Given a recent resurgence of interest in the world of the convent school, and contributing to the rich historiography of U.S. Catholic laywomen, this project gives voice to the girls shaped in religious institutions, whose futures were expected to shape the Roman Catholic Church in America.
Associated Products
"Summer Camp: American Religion and Recreation in the Great Outdoors" (Blog Post)Title: "Summer Camp: American Religion and Recreation in the Great Outdoors"
Author: Monica L. Mercado
Abstract: Summer seems like the obvious time to contemplate the long history of American religion outdoors, and to think through the intersection of religious institutions with the natural world at a site familiar to many of us: summer sleep-away camp. In the early twentieth century, Catholic writers and educators urged their fellow laymen and women build new recreational possibilities for children that were both American and Catholic. While the potential of summer camps to reform and revitalize the Catholic boy was often the center of these conversations, Catholic girls and young women were also invited to participate in a range of new summer activities, and often made them their own.
Date: 07/25/2019
Primary URL:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2019/07/summer-camp-american-religion-and-recreation-in-the-great-outdoors/Blog Title: "Summer Camp: American Religion and Recreation in the Great Outdoors"
Website: Anxious Bench / Patheos.com
"Playing Catholic: Sister-Writers and Plays for Young Women in the Convent School” (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: "Playing Catholic: Sister-Writers and Plays for Young Women in the Convent School”
Author: Monica L. Mercado
Abstract: The 1857 New York edition of the popular Ursuline Manual discouraged novel reading and plays as a “stumbling-block to [young women’s] piety,” yet in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a significant literary output, in the forms of short fiction and drama, were created by American teaching sisters for their female pupils. The origins of this paper lie in a seemingly simple question: how can the study of Catholic women religious help us research nineteenth century American Catholic childhoods? While scholars of Catholicism and education in U.S. have often focused on the “bible wars” of the 1830s and 1840s, as a historian of women and girls I have turned my gaze away from the fraught public school and towards the convent school and Catholic bookstore, sites where middle-class American Catholicism was made and re-made during a century of vast growth. If a growing mass market for English-language devotional books changed the way that nineteenth-century American Catholic laypeople thought about their place in a Catholic world full of saints and Sacred Hearts, sacraments and miracles, further analysis of the pages in which devotional materials were advertised makes clear that young Catholic readers encountered more than simply spiritual guidance on the page, but also texts that could forge multiple identities: fiction and nonfiction, magazines, reading guides, and children’s literature. Based on convent school plays (published by the Catholic Publication Society and other New York firms) this paper explores the impact of the “sister-writer” and her oeuvre, performed and read in female academies during the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Date: 06/25/2019
Primary URL:
https://cushwa.nd.edu/events/chwr2019/Conference Name: Triennial Conference on the History of Women Religious