Abstract
This article traces the educational mission of three Catholic convent boarding schools from the late eighteenth century until the 1920s, highlighting striking similarities in Catholic female education across different temporal and geographical contexts. Using institutional records, community annals and student roll books, this article considers how the priorities and structure of female education can shed light on implicit assumptions held by Catholic woman about the nature of girlhood and the purpose of education. It aims at a fuller understanding of the pedagogical model shared by these boarding schools and provides evidence of a strong cultural continuity in the ideals of Catholic girlhood across time. In doing so, it contributes to a perennial debate within the history of childhood on the historical narrativisation of continuity.
Just outside York’s medieval centre at the Micklegate Bar, a bell tolls every fifteen minutes from the tower of St. Mary’s Bar Convent. Constructed by Harry Hindley (1701–71), a Catholic clock maker and scientist who moved to York in 1731, the pendulum bell was purchased by women living at the Bar Convent sometime in the 1760s. Initially attached to the rear of the convent house in 1769, it was moved to its present location at the front of the building in 1789. 1 The improvements to the exterior facade and the aural significance of the bells are suggestive of the rising fortunes and renewed confidence projected by the Bar Convent as the recusancy period drew to a close. 2 The ritual of the bells is suggestive of the many long-standing traditions of conventual living which constituted a distinctively Catholic environment for pupils enrolled in the convent boarding school. The Bar Convent was, and is, a spiritual and historical home to the Congregation of Jesus, an order of Catholic religious women founded by Englishwoman Mary Ward in 1609 and modelled on the Jesuit Society of Jesus. 3 As part of the counter-reformation, Ward and her ‘Institute of English Ladies’ can claim a key place in the history of female religious communities, the formation of English Catholic identity and the spiritual and philanthropic direction of Catholicism post-Reformation. 4 The Bar Convent also educated a generation of Irish women who went on to have a formative influence on female education in Ireland, America and throughout the British empire, it is this aspect of the Bar Convent legacy on which I wish to focus. 5
Recent studies of Catholic religious orders have highlighted the transnational or global dimension of recruitment and expansion during the nineteenth century. 6 Characterised as part of a Catholic spiritual empire, the contributions of Irishwomen have been recognised for their pivotal role in expanding the Church’s social outreach in areas of teaching, nursing and catechising. 7 As historians have appreciated, religious vocation could be an attractive path for Irishwomen providing a respectable alternative to marriage, a degree of autonomy and a means for emigration and travel. 8 While traditionally historians of education emphasised the importance of British and Continental influences on Irish convent schools, more recent work establishes the presence and authority of Irish women in religious foundations in England, Scotland and farther afield. 9 Carly Kehoe, Carmen Mangion and Barbara Walsh have complicated the association of national identity with particular orders, suggesting a much more dynamic and circular pattern of emigration and exchange across the British Isles. 10 The nineteenth century saw a marked expansion in Catholic female religious orders and nuns were central to the provision of female education in Ireland, particularly for girls. 11 This article pivots attention from Irishwomens’ role in the church’s institutional development towards the experience of Catholic education, and the wider construction of childhood implicit in the educational and religious values espoused in the convent school. If Irishwomen were as demographically significant and mobile as existing studies suggest, then the Irish form of Catholic female education had a disproportionately influential role in the construction and appearance of Catholic girlhood globally.
This article traces the educational offerings and shared networks of three Catholic convent boarding schools from the late eighteenth century until the 1920s, highlighting striking similarities in Catholic female education across very different temporal and geographical contexts. This research originally set out to explore how Catholic female education was transformed by the politics of migration and the transplantation of a boarding school model from England to Ireland and then to the United States. The archival records of these institutions, however, pointed to an enormous degree of continuity in the pedagogical vision of the order and the values of Catholic girlhood. Using institutional records, community annals and student roll books, this article considers how the priorities and structure of female education can shed light on implicit assumptions held by Catholic woman about the nature of childhood, girlhood and education. It aims at a fuller understanding of the pedagogical model shared by these boarding schools and provides evidence of strong cultural continuity in the ideals of Catholic girlhood across time and location. In doing so, it contributes to a perennial debate within the history of childhood on the historical narrativisation of continuity.
Since the 1960s, a central theme in the history of childhood has been the question of change and continuity in the chronology and historicity of childhood as a cultural category. Following Phillipe Ariés foundational work, the field was occupied with proving, successfully, that childhood did indeed exist in the pre-modern period. 12 Subsequent scholarship debated the extent to which children were ‘valued’ within a culture and the quality of sentimental attachment between parent and child. In doing so, new fault lines appeared between scholars who claimed that the intense emotional bonds of the nuclear child-centred family emerged gradually during the eighteenth century or those who saw parent–child relations as relatively immune to radical change, insisting instead on a degree of continuity in the sentimental attachment of the family unit across pre-modern and modern periods. 13 A central aspect of this debate is an awareness of continuity in parenting practices that persist across generations and are often entirely unaffected by the rate of prescriptive change in childcare advice literature. 14 While on one hand popular culture sources can indicate quick responses to political and social upheaval, more individualised sources, like autobiographies, suggest common tropes of childhood which exist across the world. For example, Mary O’Dowd and June Purvis’s recent collection of essays suggests a surprising degree of commonality in global concerns about education and girlhood during the nineteenth century. 15 Given the robust development of the history of Irish childhood in the last decade, we are in a much stronger position to begin asking why there appears to be a degree of unanimity across cultures in the appearance of education and the discourses supporting education for girls. Perhaps, we are now in a better position to move beyond the awareness that broad continuities exist and begin to interrogate what distinct and precise cultural phenomenon facilitated the longevity of certain ideas and traditions. What cultural and social factors enable an educational institution to maintain a distinctive identity and culture across time and geographies?
Feminist histories of education have typically focused on the emancipatory potential of educational provision for women, while also noting the inadequacy of the nineteenth-century female curriculum. 16 Women’s history has been narrativised as a series of progressive waves, with a focus on moments of supposedly transformative political and social change which mark a kind of universal departure from pre-existing norms. 17 This thinking informed my approach to the educational history of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary; I expected to find that the order’s educational provisions would change and modernise in accordance with changes in the surrounding cultural environment. Instead, the archival records suggest a unified vision of Catholic girlhood which underwent limited revision from the late eighteenth century until the 1920s. The following sections examine three features of conventual education that were formative to the shared culture of female education and contributed to the educational mission of each of the three schools. Firstly, by looking at the networks of people involved in these schools, we gain a focused insight into how the exchange of personnel would have ensured a continuity in teaching style and administration. Secondly, I look closely at the pedagogical texts which novices read in preparation for their teaching roles. A selection of these texts illustrate a common view of femininity and consequently girlhood rooted in a Catholic theological tradition. The final section uses the schools’ tuition rates as a marker of social class and considers how social exclusivity helped these religious orders to maintain their autonomy as educators. This research examines the aforementioned St. Mary’s Bar Convent York, England (1686), the Loreto Abbey Motherhouse, Rathfarnham, Dublin (1822), and the first Loreto foundation in the United States, St. Mary’s Convent, Joliet, Illinois (1881). Tracing the meaningful and tangential connections between these communities, the exchange of people, ideas and finances across these three sites provides evidence of a shared social milieu and a Catholic tradition of female education which I suspect may be replicated in a more comprehensive study of other religious orders and their educational institutions.
The Movement of People and Ideas: The Convent School
The Catholic convent school, as it evolved during the long nineteenth century, was a space of rich intellectual and cosmopolitan sociability. 18 As one of the few British Catholic schools for girls to operate during the recusancy period, the Bar Convent’s boarding school attracted the daughters of Northern English, Scottish and Irish Catholic gentry families. A veritable factory of cosmopolitanism, by the end of the eighteenth century the Bar Convent had a regular contingent of Irish girls making the journey to York to receive a genteel education. There were 184 pupils from Ireland recorded in the student roll books from 1710 to 1871. 19 Of these Irish pupils, we know the home places of 120 girls. Fifty-one per cent of the pupils came from Dublin and seventeen per cent from Galway. There were fourteen girls from Co. Louth and an additional seven girls from Co. Cork. Waterford, Wicklow, Kildare and Kilkenny each sent three or four girls, usually sisters. The overall pattern then is largely Dublin-centred, drawing girls from the central eastern seaboard, with a significant cohort from Galway (see Table 1). The pattern of Irish attendance at the school maps quite neatly onto the political position of Catholics in the British Isles during the period. The highest enrolment of Irish students at the convent was in 1780, after the first Catholic Relief Act when civil restrictions on the practice of Catholicism were eased. Overall enrolment peaked in 1795 with 106 pupils enrolled in the boarding school. Across the nineteenth century, student numbers hovered around eighty pupils per year. 20 Irish girls joined a diverse student body upon their enrolment in York. Students from as far as Antigua, Australia, Canada, Chile, Cuba, India, Italy, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Spain, Trinidad and the United States attended from 1760 to 1870. 21 An influx of French nuns and Catholic refugees in the aftermath of the French Revolution during the 1790s increased the continental tint of the school, bringing new markers of politesse and a high quality of French language instruction to York. 22
Bar Convent Student home places.
Source: Henry James Coleridge, St. Mary’s Convent, Micklegate Bar, York (1686–1887). London, 1887.
An intellectually rigorous education was a hallmark of the community at the Bar Convent. The founder Mary Ward (1585–1645), and her successor Francis Bedingfield (1616–1704) who established the house in York, adapted the Jesuit’s programme of study, the Ratio Studiorum to provide instruction in theology, Latin, French, Spanish and music. From the records of the young ladies’ bills, we also find charges for dancing, drawing, music and voice lessons. These extras, or the accomplishments, as they were called, were a hallmark of elite female education and signalled the possession of social virtue and polish. 23 Needlework and fancy work, one utilitarian and one ornamental, were similarly offered and formed a material exhibit of womanly accomplishment. The accomplishments were a necessary aspect of female education, as they formed a ‘ticket of admission to fashionable company’, they also ‘increase a young lady’s chance of a prize in the matrimonial lottery’, according to Maria Edgeworth. 24 In the second half of the eighteenth century, geography, sacred and profane history, arithmetic and accounting were available to pupils. 25
The influence of the Bar Convent on the subsequent foundation of the Irish Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM) is personified in the figure of Frances Mary Teresa Ball. Born to a successful Dublin merchant family, nine-year-old Frances was sent to the Bar Convent to join her two older sisters in 1803. 26 Ball spent five years in York. According to her biographers, Ball concluded her studies without any thought of a religious vocation. She returned to Dublin after the death of her father in 1808 and became friends with Archbishop of Dublin Daniel Murray during her bereavement. 27 While attending a Dublin ball at the age of eighteen, Ball reportedly had a conversion experience and realised she was called to religious life. 28 Frances waited until she was twenty-one to return to York. The plan was for her to learn all that she could about the running of Bar Convent during her noviciate and return to Ireland to establish an Irish branch. After a further six years in York, Ball returned to Ireland with two postulants on the 10 August 1821. 29 In November 1822, the sisters took over the former home of the Protestant Archbishop of Cashel in Rathfarnham and established the Motherhouse of the IBVM. 30 The York connection did not end with Ball’s return to Ireland, her niece also attended the Bar Convent, professed a vocation and was resident in York during the 1850s. The aunt and niece maintained a correspondence, keeping each other abreast of family news, friends and teaching at their respective schools. 31
The IBVM, known as the Loreto (or Loretto in Canada) order, expanded rapidly in Ireland.
32
Their first international mission was to India in 1841 with the foundation of a convent and school in Calcutta, followed by Chandenagore (1842) and Serampore (1844). Additional communities were founded in Mauritius, Gibraltar, Canada, Cadiz and Manchester during Ball’s lifetime. Rathfarnham Dublin was the spiritual centre of these missions and Ball’s extensive correspondence networks reflect her desire to maintain a unified educational ethos, encouraging Loreto communities across the world to utilise similar pedagogy, discipline and academic procedures. This was enacted through continuous and detailed correspondence with sisters and communities all over the world. The international remit of the IBVM provided Ball with the ability to recruit women who could fill a particular need in the school. Ball wrote to the IBVM convent in Munich in 1843 requesting A novice of twenty years of age, from a respectable family, who can teach German well, and who has a desire to consecrate herself to the service of God […]The dowry is of little importance compared with the facility in writing her native language well.
33
In 1847, at the request of the Toronto bishop, Mother Superior Ball sent Mother Teresa Dease to Toronto, Canada, to establish the first North American community. Thirty years later, in 1881, a similar request from a bishop brought the Irish Loreto nuns to Joliet, Illinois, to work in a parish school and establish the order’s first foundation in the United States. In 1880, a local Joliet newspaper reported that the ‘Ladies of Loretto’ from Toronto, Canada, had plans to erect an academy and a convent adjacent to Saint Patrick’s parish. 35 Located about 50 km southwest of Chicago, in the 1880s, Joliet was a booming industrial town with a substantial Irish population. Originally platted in 1833, Joliet’s early settlement was begun by a small number of Protestant settler families, but its real growth was credited to Irish workers building the Illinois and Michigan Canal. This ‘Celtic invasion’ began in 1836 and continued until the canal was completed in 1848. The ‘canal Irish’ were described with stereotypical behaviours of brawling and excessive drinking, but by 1874, George Woodruff, a local historian, described a much different scenario. The Irish had accumulated money from their labour, bought land, began farming, started businesses and became model citizens active in voting and local politics. 36
The Chicago diocese established St. Patrick’s Parish Joliet in 1838 and Father John Francis Plunkett was sent to Joliet to provide pastoral care for workers on the canal. St. Mary’s was established in 1868, and a series of three Irish priests managed the parish for the next ten years. The Irishness of the Loreto order eased their transition into Joliet, indeed their Irish connection likely brought about the initial invitation to come to St. Patrick’s. Mother Superior Dease came personally to Joliet to view the sisters’ accommodation in 1880, accompanied by three Irishwomen, Gonzaga Gallivan, who became mother superior of the new foundation, Dosithea Gibney and Lidwine Doyle. After a week’s visit, Dease left and sent four more sisters Agnes McKenna, Bethilde McBrady, Angela Lynn and Amelia Hurley. 37 For the first year, the Joliet foundation was under the Irish generalate, meaning that they were under the direction of Mother Xaveria Fallon in Rathfarnham. After that, their administration was transferred to Dease in Toronto. 38 The women that established the new convent thus had experienced their noviciate and early formation in Dublin or Toronto. Several knew Ball personally and worked with her for years, including Teresa Dease and Gonzaga Gallivan. Thus, our modelling of these convents as American or Canadian masks to a degree the shared social and cultural networks of the nuns that inhabited them. These women shared a common experience of an Irish Catholic educational and religious formation. The frequent exchange of correspondence and persons between convents ensured a continuity of mission and practice. Nuns who were so to speak ‘on the ground’ in Joliet did not have free reign to improvise curriculum decisions or pedagogical methods. The order’s centralised structure ensured that any change had to be approved by the governing mother house. 39
Pedagogy for a Catholic Girlhood
The mission and pedagogy of these institutions illustrates a similar understanding and vision of femininity and girlhood. While there was no formal teacher training or certification for sisters during this period, aspirants to the IBVM underwent a period of extensive education upon their entrance to religious life which included instruction and experience in teaching. Upon entry to the Bar Convent or the Loreto order, a novice typically spent two years or longer under the close supervision of the Novice Mistress who had charge of the spiritual and educational formation of her charges. 40 If the novice brought a sufficient financial dowry, she was deemed a choir sister and would spend time in the community’s schools, observing how to teach and manage a classroom. 41 Many novices were already familiar with the Loreto style of education. A quarter of boarding school pupils at Rathfarnham went on to profess a vocation in a religious order. 42 Thus their pedagogical training had begun while they were still students in the classroom.
The continuity of thought regarding Catholic female education can be illustrated by the longevity of a seventeenth-century text titled Instructions for the Education of a Daughter, written by Archbishop François de Salignac de La Mothe- Fénelon. His treatise on girls’ education, first published in 1687, went through several English editions in the eighteenth century. It was first published in Dublin by P. Wilson in 1753 and appeared in pamphlet form alongside Mary Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in 1788. It was reprinted again by the Catholic Truth Society in 1841. 43 Demand for the work continued into the twentieth century and it was reprinted again in New York in 1900, and in Paris in 1913. 44 Fenelon’s work was widely circulated among female religious orders. The text was liberal for its time in recognising the need for an individualised programme of education for students. Fénelon’s stance on female education was based on the recognition that girls would eventually have ‘a husband to keep happy, and children to educate well’. 45 Fénelon accorded great importance to a woman’s role within the home and her ability to cultivate good by raising virtuous children. However, the attributes of an ideal wife and mother were not innate. Fénelon argued that young girls were prone towards idleness and vanity, traits which were even more apparent among the upper classes. 46 He stated, ‘this languor and idleness, joined to ignorance, gives rise to pernicious sensibility, and a desire for public amusements. It also excites an indiscreet and insatiable curiosity’. 47 This curiosity was made more dangerous by girls’ innate vanity and desire to please. 48 To counter these natural urges, discipline and virtue had to be encouraged and exemplified through formal education.
Teachers were tasked with modelling appropriate feminine behaviour for their pupils. The rules for the prefect of schools at the Bar Convent issued in the seventeenth century, and retained in the nineteenth, encouraged teachers to be models of ‘true and solid virtues, especially of charity, purity of intention, union with God in prayer, and a sincere zeal of souls for the greater honour and glory of the Divine majesty’. 49 Teachers were instructed to avoid boasting and haughtiness, to be modest and grave, and not show favouritism towards any pupil. They were directed to ‘know that it is their duty not only to instruct their scholars in all those arts which become young girls, but also, and that more especially, to inform them in virtue and Christian manners’. 50 There was also a sensitivity to the individual propensities of their students, teachers were encouraged to take into account the ‘wit and docibleness [sic]’ of their pupils. 51 Teachers were told not to administer disciplinary measures or ‘ill words’ themselves but to notify the prefect of schools or the Mother Superior.
Official disciplinary techniques emphasised a non-confrontational approach rather than outright admonishment. In Rathfarnham, Ball encouraged her teachers to use a system of marks when a student misbehaved. At the end of the week, the child was reported to the Mistress of Schools. 52 In contrast to academic exams, which took place once a year, a student’s conduct, order, diligence and politeness were assessed in every class and determined good, bad or indifferent. 53 Girls were expected to be deferential to their teachers and abide by the hierarchy of the school, such as sitting in their assigned place in chapel or at mealtimes. The ideal of a modest, retiring feminine ideal was also present in the twentieth century. A former student Jean Cahill, graduate of the Loreto Englewood, Chicago, in 1936, recounted some of the ways that she experienced religious formation. ‘Our exit from the room was always backwards, as we dipped our hand in Holy Water. When we met a nun we would curtsy, when we met a priest our curtsy was extremely deep. Thus did we exhibit respect’. 54
At the Loreto Rathfarnham, the list of subjects on offer closely resembled that of Ball’s own education in York. ‘English, French, Italian and Spanish Languages Grammatically, History; Geography, the Use of the Globes, Heraldry, Writing, Arithmetic; every kind of useful and Ornamental Needle-work, Painting on Velvet, Satin and Wood’. 55 Lessons in music including instruction on the harp, pianoforte or vocal music were offered at an additional £3.3.0, per year. Drawing and dancing lessons were available for £1.10.6. 56 In Joliet, the boarding school offered a very similar curriculum to that available at Rathfarnham forty years previously, although there was perhaps a slight hint of change in the 1910s, when typing and shorthand classes were included, suggestive of new opportunities for women in secretarial and office work. In 1882, the Joliet community celebrated the success of pupil Mary McGuire, a senior in the academy, who successfully gained a teaching license from Will County. Shortly after she travelled to Toronto to enter the Loreto noviciate. 57
The importance of imparting Catholic doctrine and spiritual devotion to the pupils was a central mission of the order and a key attraction for parents. At the Bar Convent, girls were quizzed on catechetical questions about Christian doctrine every Friday, they attended daily mass when possible and said daily prayers with the sisters.
58
Pupils effectively lived in the same cloistered environment as the nuns, their days punctuated by a similar schedule of religious rituals. In Rathfarnham, Ball replicated the practice of daily mass and weekly religious examinations. It was typical for the mother superior to quiz the senior class herself at the end of each week. She also established a student sodality, a devotional society typically dedicated to the patronage of a particular saint or charitable cause. Ball had become a member of the Children of Mary Sodality while a student at the Bar Convent.
59
She encouraged all of her schools to use the regulations of the sodality as an effective means of positive discipline and encouragement We find order in schools is observed by giving a premium for good conduct [,]one for application to studies.[…] The silver medals are purchased in Paris. A certificate, signed by the priest who admits a child as associated to the congregation, procures for said child when grown up admission at the court of every Catholic monarch.’
60
Recitations, theatrical performances and musical concerts were another integral aspect of conventual education. Yearly exhibitions hosted by the boarding schools were reported on in Irish newspapers and attended by local elite. 66 These elaborately planned rituals emphasised the uniqueness of the institution and the achievements of its pupils, past and present. They were also a convenient way of displaying pupils improved feminine deportment, genteel accent and graceful carriage. Student plays at Christmas and special feast days had titles like the ‘Athenian Captive’, ‘The Orphans of Moscow’, ‘The Charms of Virtue’ and ‘Pride and Vanity’. 67 The plays were a useful tool for training in elocution, ensuring that girls learned correct diction and phrasing. The practice of yearly exhibitions continued in Joliet in the 1880s as formal commencements. These were held at the end of the school year and the whole school attended including former pupils. Originally held in St. Mary’s school hall, in 1888, they were moved to the Rialto Opera House, which added an additional ceremony and opulence to the occasion and giving the girls a genuine stage from which to launch their dramatic debuts (see Figure 1). 68 In 1905, the programme featured a series of piano, vocal and harp solos, followed by ‘Nemesius-A Roman Play’. The programme included an international flair with a Spanish dance, but closed with a traditional school hymn, Ave Maria Loretto sung by ‘Miss May McGuire and chorus assisted by former graduates’. 69 The ongoing involvement of alumni in the boarding schools contributed to the creation and maintenance of school traditions. An active alumni group, as well as patterns of generational family attendance, likely exercised a conservative influence on the schools, as alumni wanted to ensure that Loreto pupils received the same education and experiences that they themselves had enjoyed.
(a and b) The Rialto Opera House, now known as the Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet, Illinois, circa 1930s. Source: The Rialto Square Theatre, used with permission.
Social Class and Educational Aspiration
The status of these schools as prestigious and exclusive academies can be attributed partially to the class backgrounds of their pupils and teachers. Tuition rates work as a useful proxy for gauging social class among pupils, and the detail provided in account books of the convent provide some indication of student origins, familial networks and generational patterns. By the 1780s, the student rolls in York reflect the rising fortunes of the middle classes and of merchant families operating in the British empire. The extended French family, originally from Ireland, established themselves as sugar traders in the West Indies and as wine exporters in Madeira, Portugal. They sent eight of their daughters to York between 1772 and 1784. 70 At the Bar Convent in the 1830s, the cost of tuition was £30 for girls under 10 years and £36 for older girls. The Corballis family from Dublin sent four of their daughters to York. Margaret and Elisabeth enrolled together in 1815, and younger siblings Emily and Anna Maria travelled to York together in 1820. In their first year, Margaret and Elizabeth’s tuition bill amounted to £60.17.29, with an additional £39 disbursed to cover extras; drawing, dancing and musical lessons. Other extras included white frocks and slips for their school uniforms along with combs, brushes, gloves and earrings to ensure they were suitably attired. The need for schooling materials suggests they also maintained an active epistolary habit; £5 was disbursed for them to purchase paper, pens, books and ‘materials for work’. 71 From the accounts, there is little to suggest that the young ladies abided by the same measures of self-imposed poverty that the nuns vowed to keep. The Corballis were given £2.6.6 for tea, medicine, money for charity and miscellaneous spending. 72 It appears from the student rolls that they paid their tuition in two instalments in May and November; £125 and £141, respectively, were spent after two years, for the two elder girls. 73 The Corballis girls spent more on extras than many of their classmates, but they were not unusually spendthrift. Clearly the cost of a good education was conceived of in broad terms and there was an expectation that willing parents would be capable of covering the costs of extras.
The financial bill books provide a tantalising record of pupils spending habits and the kinds of goods and activities that marked this kind of privileged girlhood. The nuns kept a record of each student’s purchases and cash advances and added these expenses to the students’ bill at the end of the year. The practice of disbursing funds on credit allowed girls some experience in managing their finances and keeping track of their own accounts; an essential skill for a future lady of the house. Mary O’Connor, a student from Dublin, entered the school in 1811 and paid extra for music lessons, instrument rental and dancing. She spent £1.1 on curling hair, a beaver bonnet, ribbon tape, and laces, hinting at the improvements in her clothing and appearance. Her board cost £12, and she spent £13 on extras throughout the year, it is unclear why her board was so much cheaper than other pupils. 74 One Miss McCarthy spent £3 on sugar, tea and spending money. Excursions into York city and its greater environs are hinted at when Francis Chadwick of Drogheda received money to hire a coach. An additional cost of boarding school was occasional medical care, one of the Lynch sisters had to have a tooth extracted in 1815 and paid £2.4.6 for the procedure; the cost included the necessary tea and wine to recuperate afterward. 75
At Rathfarnham, annual fees were £40 for students over the age of twelve years and £35 for younger girls. In addition, boarders paid two guineas for washing and were instructed to bring their own sheets, napkins, towels and silverware to use or else pay three guineas to borrow them from the school. 76 To put these rates in perspective, the average annual tuition paid by Catholic children for primary school in Ireland in 1825 was £1.32. Even in the cities of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford, where tuitions were inflated by the cost of living, tuition averaged £2.56 annually. 77 Thus, Irish Loreto school fees were sufficiently high to preserve social exclusivity but within the reach of merchants, professionals and some large farmers. However, the barrier of requisite tuition fees was not the only means for ensuring a socially select student body. Ball’s correspondence with Mother Francis Murphy of the Loreto school in Navan reveals the practice of vetting of pupils from unsuitable backgrounds. Ball stated, ‘The bishop again expressed a strong desire to defer the admission of plain and vulgar subjects notwithstanding they might have good fortunes…’ 78 Ball similarly closed a school on the north side of Dublin when it did not attract enough of the ‘right’ quality of student. 79
In York, Dublin and Joliet, it was the boarding school function of the convent that produced a regular source of income for the community in turn providing subsistence and support for other charitable missions. The boarders tuition, in addition to the dowries and inheritances which a woman brought with her upon entrance to an order, subsidised the provision of a free school for primary level pupils. 80 The financial resources which these communities acquired and controlled were fundamental to their autonomy, allowing them to make many decisions without the prior approval of diocesan clergy, although of course the negotiation of rights and responsibilities were a delicately choreographed negotiation between the nuns and their local hierarchy. 81 The difficulty of negotiating financial matters and maintaining the order’s autonomy is documented in the annals of the Loreto community in Joliet, Illinois. In Joliet, the Loreto sisters arrived to take over teaching responsibilities for a free primary school in the basement of St. Patrick’s in 1880. 82 Their socially differentiated model of education was maintained and they opened a paid academy shortly after their arrival, though they enrolled only eight day girls. The nuns went into debt during their first winter to buy clothes and blankets to maintain them through an unusually cold Midwestern winter. Father Patrick Dunne, the priest at St. Patrick’s who had invited them into his school, realised that the women did not have the financial resources at their disposal that he supposed. He expressed disappointment and complained to Archbishop Feehan of Chicago that he did not have the resources to provide for them. The Archbishop intervened and in 1881 the sisters moved from St. Patrick’s to St. Mary’s parish in Joliet, though they still sent teachers to staff St. Patrick’s school. 83 Two years after their near eviction, they had the full support of St. Mary’s parish and constructed St. Mary’s Academy on the central main street of Joliet town. At the height of their foundation in 1913, forty-five Loreto sisters were living and working in Joliet, managing the teaching of four parish schools; St. Mary’s, St. Patrick’s, Scared Heart and St. Bernard’s as well as their own St. Mary’s Academy. In 1919, the Loreto sisters abruptly departed from their convent in Joliet and returned to their motherhouse in Canada. 84 The circumstances of their departure are not entirely clear, although it seems to have been a dispute over the use of lay women in the parish schools. Since the educational needs of Joliet out striped the womanpower of the order, they hired lay woman to staff their schools. This did not fit with the vision for Catholic education espoused by the incoming parish priest. 85 The story of the Irish Loreto in Joliet was not entirely concluded in 1918, Loreto sisters returned to St. Raymond’s Cathedral Joliet in 1982 to assist with the school, though this time they were American, not Irish. 86
Conclusion
The shared religious culture of Catholicism was the primary means for maintaining such enormous institutional congruity across different continents and centuries. The hierarchical organisation of the religious order, the overlapping social networks across and between communities and a formalised programme of spiritual and religious formation for postulants meant that most IBVM teachers had experienced, as well as learned, a shared vision for Catholic girlhood. The initial boarding school set up by Ball in Rathfarnham was based directly on the model of education offered by the Bar Convent, a socially differentiated curriculum offered by a small coterie of elite women to aristocratic and gentry girls. Reflecting wider changes in class structure, during the mid-nineteenth century, foundations in Ireland expanded their remit to include the daughters of the socially aspirant middle classes. In North America, the Irish Loreto set up a similar type of socially differentiated schools which channelled students by the amount of tuition their families could afford. 87 Throughout these transformations, there remained a reputation for respectable Catholicism, a degree of exclusivity and high educational and social expectations. I would argue that institutions like the Bar Convent, York and Rathfarnham Convent, Dublin, enjoyed such a favourable reputation and status precisely because their model of education did not change with the times. Parents found it reassuring that their daughters could experience an education that inculcated politesse, etiquette and high-status subjects that were simply not a part of a national school curriculum. The practice of the Catholic faith among the parents of students also suggests a reason for the attachment to a traditional model of female education; the catechetical dimension of the schooling experience was valued as much by parents as it was by the teachers.
Attendance at a Catholic boarding school was a period of intensive religious and intellectual formation designed to usher pupils into womanhood with the social graces and virtuous habits expected in a genteel and respectable milieu. The morality and feminine virtues associated with this education were centred on the Catholic theological tradition. The constancy of doctrinal and papal authority provided a bulwark against radical change or alternative formulations of women’s roles in church and society.
88
Only after the Second Vatican Council (1962) did the role of women in the church, as well as wider political movements like feminism, fundamentally shift the content and aim of Catholic female education.
89
In 1948, a student newspaper published by students at the Loreto Englewood school in Chicago boasted of the election of a Loreto Queen at their annual exhibition, A true lady of Loretto displays the essential marks of character[,] such as devotion to Mary who is a Model for her ladylike deportment; politeness, courtesy, sociability, friendliness, reliability, and a real attention to study. This year, Helen Barton[…]Prefect of the Senior Sodality, received the most votes.
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Footnotes
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to acknowledge that this research was supported by the University of Notre Dame, Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, Mother Theodore Guerin Research Travel Grant and the Irish Research Council.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.