Embodied Ideals and Realities: Irish Nuns and Irish Womanhood, 1930s-1960s

YvonneMcKenna

Introduction

I - I , religious life was not justthe most important model of womanhood beyond married mother-hood, but a significant exception to it. After independence wasachieved in and following on a pattern set in the nineteenthcentury, as the population declined, the number of Irish womenentering Catholic religious convents continued to rise, reaching itspeak in the mid-s. And yet, religious life represented an anom-aly. Whether due to a depressed economy, gender-specific legisla-tion, or underlying socio-religious assumptions, the state that wasshaped in the wake of Irish independence worked hard to maintaina distinction between the private (female) and the public (male)sphere. Women were regarded first and foremost as wives andmothers, and their primary place within the family and the homewas demonstrated in and given statutory approval by the constitu-tion. Religious life, however, served to disrupt this binary: nuns werevalued precisely for their celibacy and the work they did.

In this essay, and in the context of circulating discourses aroundwomanhood current during the period, the apparent paradox whichallowed women to eschew marriage and motherhood yet occupy

1

Embodied Ideals

and Realities: Irish Nuns

and Irish Womanhood,

s–s1

. I would like to acknowledge funding, in the form of a post-doctoralresearch fellowship, received from the Government of Ireland IrishResearch Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

positions of status and respect within Irish society will be explored.In entering religious life, women were expected to cut themselves offfrom the secular world and their secular selves, adopting a new iden-tity as religious in its stead. But what implications did this have forgendered subjectivity? Did entering allow or, indeed, demand thatreligious occupy “Irish womanhood” differently? If so, was it in waysthat benefited them as women? Crucially, did the religious challengeor subvert Irish notions of womanhood? Despite the number of Irishwomen who entered religious life, especially in the decades followingindependence, we know, in fact, very little about their personal lives.Without doubt, nuns’ oral narratives shed light on a group of Irishwomen whose personal experiences have thus far been neglected. Inaddition, however, they enable an exploration of the category “Irishwomanhood” during a particularly important period of Irish history,one of national—and gendered—identity formation.

Situating the Accounts

The twenty women religious, upon whose oral testimonies this paperis based, were born in Ireland between the s and the s,entered “active” (that is, not enclosed) Catholic religious congrega-tions between the s and the s, and have lived as religious inIreland, England, and elsewhere since.2 The interviews, which tookplace in the late s, explored their whole life histories and there-fore spanned several decades. This essay, however, is concernedspecifically with about three and half decades of their collective lives:from the s to the mid-s. It was during these decades that thewomen grew up, made the decision to enter religious life, and livedwithin it under the particular system of government that prevailedbefore Vatican II brought about such momentous change as to ren-der convent life utterly altered by the end of the century.3

Éire-Ireland 40: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 05 Abbreviated Title2

. Broadly speaking, the twenty women were from the middle andlower-middle class, predominantly rural, backgrounds. Between them, theyentered five congregations, none of which were Irish. Four were primarilyteaching orders, and one was a nursing order. All names, including those ofthe congregations, are pseudonyms.

. Vatican II is the name given to the Second Vatican Council meet-ings that took place over three sessions between and . The aim

These same decades represent a pivotal period in Irish history aswell. Following rebellion and war with Britain, independence fortwenty-six of the thirty-two counties of Ireland was only achieved in. It was followed directly by a civil war that lasted until .Not least because of the difficult and violent transfer of power, thedecades following independence were crucial in terms of nationbuilding and national identity formation. Religion and genderplayed important roles in these related processes with very real con-sequences for the women and men of Ireland, including the womenof this study whose decisions about what life path to follow weremade in the context of a society that held particular, and particularlywell-policed, notions concerning permissible behavior for women.The forms of womanhood deemed acceptable or desirable over theperiod—and which were promoted as such by church and state—provide a context in which to set the women’s accounts and againstwhich to assess the impact of entering religious life.

Discourses of Irish Womanhood, Acceptable Life Paths

Catholicism had played a vital role in the struggle for Irish inde-pendence and the construction of a national identity in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It remained an importantsignifier of national identity after independence was achieved andwas equally important as an organizing structure in the society thatwas shaped in its wake. Numerically, Catholics dominated the pop-ulation of Southern Ireland.4 When independence was achieved,. percent of the population was Catholic. By the s, the pro-portion had risen to percent (Whyte, :).

Éire-Ireland 40: 3 & 4 Fall/Win 05 Abbreviated Title 3

of Vatican II was to consider and clarify the Catholic Church’s positionwith respect to a changed and changing world, which it did through thepublication of sixteen promulgations on a range of subjects. One of theVatican II documents, Perfectae Caritatis (), aimed specifically at theappropriate renewal of religious life. The impact of Vatican II was nothingshort of revolutionary, and the repercussions it had on religious life can befelt to this day.

. “Southern Ireland” refers to the Free State, later the Republic ofIreland.

Far from returning to “business as usual,” the Catholic Church’sreaction to Irish independence was to “up the ante.” Hug suggeststhat immorality replaced England as Ireland’s “enemy” and, quot-ing O’Callaghan, described the church’s response to this as “almosthysterical Puritanism” (Hug, :). After independence, theCatholic Church developed an almost obsessive concern with whatit perceived to be declining moral standards in Ireland. In additionto mobilizing the masses toward greater levels of religious obser-vance and devotional practice (see, for example, Donnelly, )—to which the faithful responded enthusiastically—the churchinvolved itself in several campaigns directed against what it believedto be the importation of immoral anti-Christian and foreignlifestyles, and against which it posited its own “specifically” Irishmodel of morality (though, of course, there was nothing especiallyor intrinsically Irish about this). In particular, the church was con-cerned with the dubious behavior and comportment of youngwomen. Fearing the fate of women who resided outside the custodyand sanctity of marriage, the church promoted married motherhoodas the ideal state for women and seized upon the figure of the Vir-gin Mary as a model for them to emulate. The church’s interpreta-tion of Mary fitted perfectly their ideal: she was self-sacrificing anddevoted to her family, a stoical figure who bore her suffering withsilent dignity. Significantly, their Mary was intimately associatedwith motherhood and entirely unconnected to sex or sexuality.

The Catholic Church’s views on the ideal Irish woman were notat odds with the population at large, predominantly “committedand practicing” Catholics themselves (Whyte, :). While mem-bers of the general public were not as vociferous as the church incampaigning around issues of morality, they tended not to publiclyquestion its authority or monopoly on the subject either. Dissentoccurred, of course, but usually in private to avoid what could bebrutal consequences. Those who became pregnant outside mar-riage, for example, received no welfare, were stigmatized by illegiti-macy laws (as were their children), and were often excluded by ajudgmental society (Beale, :–). Indeed, local communitiescould prove more effective than legislation at ostracizing individualsfor behavior deemed inappropriate.

Importantly, the church’s views on womanhood coalesced with


those of the state. Postindependence, Ireland was economicallydepressed, socially conservative, and religiously devout, which insynthesis gave rise to an idealization of married, desexualized, at-home, motherhood. In the decades following independence anddespite the role they played in achieving it, limitations were placedupon women’s ability both to claim a public role for themselves andas workers. Equal citizenship was challenged by legislation thatassumed women’s principal place within the home and sought toprotect it. Several examples might be used to illustrate this point,from the Civil Service Amendment Act to the Marriage Bar of and the Conditions of Employment act two years later (Valiulis,a, b, ).The state’s conception of women exclusively interms of married motherhood and the domestic space found expres-sion in the constitution. Not only did it formally recognize woman’s“life within the home,” but the terms “woman” and “mother” wereused interchangeably, suggesting no distinction was made betweenthe two (Bunreacht na hÉireann, :).

This is not to say, of course, that women in independent Irelandwere completely denied, or allowed themselves to be denied, anypublic role whatsoever but rather to draw attention to that fact that,although they were not literally chased back into the home follow-ing independence, opportunities for women outside it were limited.Some women (and some men) challenged constructions of woman-hood publicly: using their vote, through membership of both housesof the Oireachtas (Irish parliament), and by organizing politically ona range of issues affecting women (see, for example, Beaumont, ; Clear, ; Connolly, ). They also challenged itprivately, in the form of leaving Ireland (Rossiter, ). Ironically,exactly at the time the church and state were promoting marriedmotherhood, economic and social realities – which themselvesresulted in rising emigration and falling marriage rates – intervenedto make married motherhood a less likely reality for many women.

Arguably the most important model of womanhood outside mar-ried motherhood was religious life. Certainly, it was the only form ofwomanhood the Catholic Church publicly espoused (Walter,:). Significantly, it was one the state benefited from also.Active religious congregations as we now know them first appearedin Ireland toward the end of the eighteenth century. Mirroring


growth elsewhere in Europe, their number increased substantially inthe nineteenth century. By the turn of that century, there were ,

nuns in Ireland, representing a sixfold increase on (Fahey,:). By , when numbers reached their highest point, therewere over , nuns in Ireland (Beale, :). With the excep-tion of wives and mothers, the religious formed the most numerousand identifiable group of women in Ireland, and their buildings andinstitutions were dotted across the villages, towns, and cities ofIreland.

Moreover, the religious were a revered and accepted part of Irishsociety. They dominated and controlled women’s health and educa-tion as well as taking care of the elderly, the insane, and the “fallen.”Due to the position and importance of Catholicism in Irish societyand the predominance of religious in the provision of education andhealth, not to mention redemption, religious congregations wereintimately associated with the embourgeoisement of Irish society inthe nineteenth century, and respectability and class mobility in thetwentieth. Though their number reached its peak in , the num-ber of religious in Ireland declined following this date and has beenin decline since (Inglis, :).

Although quite different lifestyle paths, married motherhood andthe religious life had important similarities–at least as the CatholicChurch and society viewed them. Dominant discourses of Irishwomanhood tended to idealize traits such as demureness, piety, self-sacrifice, and devotion to others (Inglis, :), qualities intrin-sic both to the archetypal Irish mother and the nun. Though theyembodied womanhood differently, there was no apparent contra-diction between religious life and married motherhood. Each wasconsidered a fitting expression of Irish womanhood, the VirginMary as much an example for aspirant religious as she was for hope-ful brides. Mothers and nuns were defined by the institutions towhich they belonged—not only asexualized but depersonalized aswell. As iconic figures of Irish womanhood (and this they both were,and have proved enduring) neither the mother nor the nun leftmuch space for the individual within.5


. It hardly needs to be mentioned, of course, that concepts of wom-anhood such as caring, devotion, and self-sacrifice, which were at the heart

Of course, married motherhood and religious life were not theonly models of womanhood available to women in Ireland. Depend-ing on their resources, women might stay on in education, becometrained and qualified, and enter the job market. Denied theseopportunities, they might have been able to secure other sorts ofwork or leave Ireland seeking opportunities elsewhere. They couldopt neither to marry nor enter religious life, although it must benoted that spinsters had very little status in Irish society. It was thesemodels of womanhood, however, that were exalted by the church,the state, and in society and, as such, represented the hegemonicnotions of womanhood that existed during the period in which thewomen of this study grew up.

Certainly, it was also only these two paths that the women of thisstudy gave any serious consideration to themselves. Spinsterhoodtended to be regarded as an unfortunate situation foisted upon awoman rather than one she might willingly choose for herself. Onewoman in this study, Joan, commented succinctly how her cousin, apriest, had advised her: “Get married. Or be a nun. Don’t be an oldmaid. They don’t make good women.” On the other hand, employ-ment tended to be seen as a temporary state – a precursor to mar-riage or religious life – rather than an endgame in itself. Kate,another participant in this study, said, “[At the time,] you eitherwanted to get married or you didn’t. And [religious life] was a job,a position if you like. It was an alternative way of spending your life.”The message the women had received as they were growing up wasthat women were legitimated by the institutions to which theybelonged. Although women were valued for taking on certain kindsof work before marriage, especially teaching and nursing, ultimately,power, prestige, and respect, however complex, resided in the insti-tutions of the family (land, property, children) or religious life. Out-side this, lay the marginality and “misery” (Byrne, :) ofspinsterhood or the deviance and depravity of the “fallen woman.”


of idealized notions of womanhood in Ireland, were not unique to it. Sim-ilar notions were to be found in Victorian Britain and America, as well asin postwar Europe (Clear, ; Daly, b; Inglis, and O’Dowd,).

Choosing Religious Life

The women of this study entered religious life between and, aged between seventeen and twenty-seven years of age. Sig-nificantly, they presented their attraction to religious life as a desireto follow a different path to marriage and motherhood (McKenna,forthcoming). Catherine, for example, “felt that if I wanted to goand look after all these babies and children, and wanted to traveland do all these different things, that if I was married and had chil-dren of my own, that was the end of it.” Likewise, Geraldine had “asense that being married and with children was going to interferewith the plans I had for myself.” This suggested they regarded mar-ried motherhood and religious life not just as dissimilar routes totake but oppositional ones. It highlighted also the discursivestrength of marriage as the expected life path for women. As Elainesaid, “You know, it’s natural for a man or a woman to be married.It’s their nature. And it’s natural for them to bring up a family.”

It was as they were growing up that the women became familiarwith the occupation and subject position they were expected to takeon later in life. Their mothers provided a model of marriage andmotherhood for the women and as girls helping them, they wereaware that they were being groomed for the role themselves. Mar-garet, the eldest girl in a family of nine, observed that, “the girlshelped mother and did the housework [while] the boys were free todo what they wanted!” Some of the women not only assisted theirmothers, but were required to take over the job of mothering them-selves, amongst them Margaret, “My two youngest brothers werethirteen and fourteen years younger than me so, I mean, I broughtthem up. My mother was worn out with childbearing so she used totake to her bed . . . and I ran the house. I did. I knew how to do it.”

The women also became aware of the particular expectationsassociated with Irish Catholic motherhood. Frances described largefamilies as “part of the ethos of the time” while Elaine suggested adegree of social pressure on women to have many children: “Mymother had six [children]. All around us had eight, nine and ten.And she was always disappointed because she had only six. Shealways felt bad because she didn’t have more.”

Conforming to the stereotype of the Irish mother (see, for exam-


ple, Walter, :; Inglis, :, ; O’Connor, :;Meaney, :), the women presented their own mothers asstrong, hardworking, uncomplaining, and self-sacrificing figures.Catherine’s mother, for example, was . . .

. . . great. Wonderful. She married late in life . . . and had eight chil-dren. One after the other, right up into her forties. And she was asmall, thin, little woman. And a marvelous worker. We’d a farm andshe worked inside the house and outside the house, because myfather was quite delicate. . . .She used to do half the work and she wasnever down! . . . She was so enduring. So patient . . . So sacrificing.

The presented hardship should not be regarded as mere resorting toformula. As well as its rurality, Ireland’s economic stagnation andstructural underdevelopment during the period meant that domesticconditions for married mothers were often very harsh (Daly a,b). Nor was urban dwelling necessarily easier (Ryan, :).Certainly, the reality of marriage and motherhood—something thewomen were intimately familiar with and assumed would be theirs ifthey followed that path themselves6—was very difficult for manywomen and was far removed from the image of the Virgin Mary thechurch employed as a representation of motherhood.

Of course, the women were also aware of religious life and thelives nuns led. All but one of them had attended convent school,some as boarders, so they came into contact with the religious daily.Nuns, of course, were also a familiar sight in Irish society. Notwith-standing this, however, the women could not have “known” reli-gious life in the same way they “knew” motherhood. Canon Lawand the rules surrounding enclosure excluded them, and the non-professional, private lives of nuns often remained just that. Perhapsas a consequence of this, the women did not associate the religiouswith the domestic space or the work involved therein. It was not, ofcourse, that the religious did not do domestic chores. But they werenot generally seen engaging in domestic duties, certainly to theextent that the women saw their mothers involved in such work.Moreover, it was mostly outside their domestic space that thewomen came into contact with the religious.


. Indeed, many of them had boyfriends when they entered.

This proved an important distinction between how the womenconceived of married motherhood on the one hand and religiouslife on the other. As girls and young women, they associated nunswith work, travel, and a life of spirituality whose very clothes, instark contrast to their mothers’, represented professionalism,responsibility, power, and purity. Again, in contrast to their motherswhose lives were always described in relation to the home and theresponsibilities of mothering, stories the women told about the reli-gious tended to highlight their position outside the domesticspace—within society and the public arena. The religious were seenout questing, walking, or praying with other nuns; helping the pooror engaged in other forms of social work; at work in schools andhospitals; and making flying, promotional visits home from the mis-sions. Indeed, for many the initial attraction to religious life was tothe missions (McKenna, forthcoming). Relating the fantasies theyhad about missionary life, the women tended to present themselvesas the heroine of the tale, at the center of a drama that was usuallyplayed out in the public sphere, be that the school, the hospital, orsimply the outside. One study participant, Vera, said: “I had a veryromantic idea about going on the missions, really. You know thecrazy ideas you have as a youngster, that it’s all sunshine and sittingunder palm trees and teaching little children.”

Religious Life in the Pre-Vatican II Period

Whatever their aspirations or expectations, the women of this studyquickly realized that religious life was fundamentally about becom-ing a nun. Although “active,” sisters in the pre-Vatican II periodlived under a system that imposed monastic restrictions upon themand that limited their movement outside the convent as well as theirlives and relationships within it. Presided over by the absoluteauthority of the superior, religious life was organized according to anelaborate set of rules,7 strictly enforced, which governed everyaspect of a sister’s life, from appearance and deportment to behav-


. Each congregation had its own rulebook, referred to as “the rule,” althoughthere were many similarities between them. The specific rulebooks used by thewomen of this study were consulted for the purpose of this paper, and four of themare quoted from.

ior and thought. Heavily laden timetables of work and prayer placedfurther demands on them, both physically and psychologically.

As women were not born nuns, they had to “become” them. Thetransformation from postulant to nun involved a rejection of thesecular world and their secular self. Moving into the convent, wear-ing a habit and replacing one’s baptismal name with one given orchosen in religious were all metaphorical symbols by which the sec-ular self was put to death and the women were “reborn” in religiouslife. As a process, however, it was thoroughly gendered. It demandedthat the women strive to become, through repression and denial, aparticular kind of woman based on very particular and misogynisticnotions of what women were like “in essence” and the necessity ofcontrolling them—or, more correctly, putting in place a system bywhich they controlled themselves. Significantly, women’s bodieswere central to the process of transformation.

Gendered Processes of Transformation

One of the ways the system controlled women was in the clothes itrequired them to wear. The pre-Vatican II habit was unwieldy,restrictive, and uncomfortable. Difficult to maintain, it covered thefemale body from head to foot, concealing the shape of its wearerand forbidding them any investment in femininity. Teresa recalledhaving to “strap [her]self into this thing, this terrible thing, every-day,” remarking, “It was terrible! . . . We were all bound up and tiedup! . . . Any bit of femininity was completely squashed!” Symbolicallycovering the women, the habit also physically repressed the femaleform by keeping the breasts not only hidden, but flattened: Mar-garet noted, “There was this denial of . . . your womanly body . . .In the very early days, you weren’t allowed to wear a bra . . . I mean,your breasts didn’t exist. You didn’t have breasts so there were nobras. [They] were bound.”

Clearly, there was a tension between the divine spiritual calling ofa vocation and the “inferior” female body in which it was housed.The discomfort of the habit represented the uneasy relationshipbetween the vocation and the body in which it lived, accentuating thefemale body as “wrong” and serving as a reminder that the bodywas “other” to its spiritual vocation.


Investing in physical appearance was regarded as vanity, a “natu-ral” female fault that the pre-Vatican II regime aimed to contain. AsCatherine put it:

You were taught—conditioned—not to [like yourself]. Anything todo with yourself was considered to be pride. How you looked, howyou dressed, how you walked, how you talked. If you had a rib of hairshowing. When I was a postulant I had very curly hair. And when Iwashed it, it used to fall into all waves. . . . I remember [once my] veil[was] hanging off the back of my head and getting slated for beingproud, showing off my hair, you know?

There were no mirrors in convents, hair was cut short and hidden (aswere bodily curves) and, though expected to be well turned out, thereligious were not supposed to be concerned with their appearance.

Another important means by which religious life controlled thebody was by keeping it busy – especially through work and prayer.Rulebooks stated this quite clearly. For example, “in order to avoidthe innumerable faults of which idleness is a pernicious source, each[sister] shall always be occupied at some work [or] spiritual exer-cise” (Congregation of the Sisters of St. Nadine, :, hence-forth CSSN).

The demands of their timetable was something most of thewomen commented upon, if only in passing, to describe their dailyactivities or, more pointedly, by making a retrospective judgmentabout the regime.This is not to suggest, however, that at the time theydid not invest in it. Elaine noted, “The novice mistress used to say. . .‘don’t think you’re giving Our Lord a full service if you’re not sotired that you have to drag yourself up to bed at night’. And you feltlike that. You felt very eager to do as much as you possibly could.”

Detailed instructions were also given on deportment. For example,“The head . . . should be kept straight and bent a little forward . . .The eyes should usually be cast down. . . . The lips should be neithercompressed nor too much open . . .The hands . . . should be kept stilland placed modestly” (Congregation of the Sisters of St. Mildred,:–, henceforth CSSM). If the body was taught to behave ina controlled and disciplined manner, the mind would follow suit.

The body was also controlled by keeping in check how it wasnourished, both mentally and physically. In the Christian tradition,women were regarded as mentally weaker and less rational than


men.This was reflected in religious life. As Frances put it, “The atti-tude to women religious was that they were not capable–their mindswere so limited they couldn’t appreciate the full Office [liturgicalprayers] so . . . because we were women . . . we had what was calleda ‘Little Office of Our Lady’ which was a tiny group of songs [and]little bits of scripture in Latin.”

Access to reading material was closely monitored and restricted.Indeed, nuns’ whole intellectual diet was rationed–partly becausethey were not deemed capable of digesting it but perhaps also tokeep them weak. Likewise, food. The religious were given “ade-quate” food to sustain them for the work they did but were expectedto limit their intake. As Annette recalled, “After mass you’d go downto breakfast. Now, at that time, if you had porridge, you couldn’thave bread and butter and if you had an egg, you couldn’t have mar-malade. You know, ‘twas very, very rationed.”

In addition, the women were encouraged to fast regularly andwere expected, as an act of humility, to eat food they did not like overfood they preferred. In this, as in all cases, care needs to be takendistinguishing between the rhetoric of the rulebook and the reality ofsisters’ lives. Annette herself remarked that, “if you said you likedsomething, you got the opposite [but] you could work the system ifyou wanted to.” Likewise, given the position and status of the reli-gious in Irish society and, crucially, the power they had over those intheir charge, it would be wrong to describe nuns as “weak,” whetherin their manner, their actions, their physical appearance, or theirmental state. Be that as it may, the purpose of rationing was, as onerulebook put it, to “guard against the natural inclination to satisfysensuality” (CSSN, :) and women were more intimately asso-ciated with the body and the senses than the mind and its intellect.

Margaret described being a woman as “something to be ashamedof in religious life,” not only its exterior appearance but its interiorfunctions, too. She pointed out that “in the early days,” the sisters“didn’t even have proper sanitary protection” because “it was ashameful thing to have periods . . . to need things for your body.”Once again, the tension between “good” and “bad” female is beingreproduced. Women were capable of being “good” by striving forperfection, but they were potentially and intrinsically “bad”—theirfemale bodies a constant reminder of this. Before Vatican II, the


female religious were not allowed to touch the vessel that held theBlessed Sacrament if they were menstruating. This represents thecentral tension of religious life for women: despite their vocation,their earthly female bodies were difficult to overcome. Their men-strual cycle demonstrated this and served to reduce religiouswomen to their essential “impurity.”

Of feeble mind, women’s bodies were regarded as potentiallypowerful and dangerous and were especially connected with sexual-ity and reproduction. Despite official church teaching that the reli-gious were asexual, some pre-Vatican II religious rulebooks dis-played an almost obsessive preoccupation with sexuality. Elaineeuphemistically connects the physical demands of religious life withthe purpose of those demands: “You were regulated: the way youtalked, the way you walked, and your eyes cast down and not search-ing and looking around, you know? . . . Religious life was terriblyguarded. You were secured all the time. Even if you wanted to, youcouldn’t commit it! You couldn’t do anything.”

Although she offered no explanation here, in other comments shemade about the importance of the rule in protecting women fromdeveloping or acting upon attractions to others, it was clear Elainewas talking about inappropriate sexual behavior.

Whole chapters of rulebooks were dedicated to the correctbehavior of nuns in the presence of men. Although the convent andits enclosure provided some protection, active religious came intocontact with men through work, administration, and convent man-agement, during which times they were urged to “take all precau-tion” (CSSM:). For example:

To preserve [their] virtue in all its integrity, the Sisters will, with the helpof grace, exercise the greatest vigilance over all their senses interior andexterior alike. They will never speak without witnesses with those ofthe other sex, except when and where they are allowed to do so. . . .Andas idleness leads to the loss of all the virtues but especially of chastity,they will never remain without some useful occupation. (Congregationof the Sisters of St. Marie, :–, henceforth CSSMa)

The religious had to cover their faces in public, avoid eye contactwith men, and control their thoughts through prayer. Catherinerecalled the repercussions if these rules were not properly adhered to:


If you were caught talking to a man or a priest, oh, sure! . . . It mat-tered a lot to other people. You’d be seen talking and then they’d stop[you] . . . I think they thought they were safe-guarding you, youknow? [So] you wouldn’t run off with them or something like that.

Rulebooks made clear the dangers of sexuality but constructed thewomen themselves as the problem—potential temptresses—andtended to locate danger within the women rather than the menthey met.

Religious life was not only concerned to protect against hetero-sexual relations but also to control relations between women.“Particular friendships,” as rulebooks termed them, were forbid-den “since nothing is more contrary to the chastity and unionwhich must reign in a religious house” (CSSM, :). Several—in fact, all—the women in this study mentioned the rules govern-ing relations between sisters. Frances remarked that, “gettingtogether in twos or threes . . . was absolutely frowned upon,” whileAnnette recalled that, “if anyone got very great [close] withanother sister in the community, I think she’d have been put out[or] changed to another house.” Catherine suggested that suspi-cion could be easily aroused, “[If] you talk[ed] to anybody . . .they’d think you had a particular friendship with them and they’dbe separating you.”

Religious also had to control the relationship they had with theirown body. It was as they dressed, undressed, and in bed that thewomen were least protected by surveillance and clothes, and manyrulebooks instructed the women on the correct behavior to avoidseeing or touching their own naked body. Some directed women onhow to position their bodies—hands crossed across the chest – andwhat to think of as they fell asleep. One rulebook instructed itsmembers when going to sleep to “occupy themselves with thethought of God, and of the subject of their meditation for the mor-row” (Congregation of the Sisters of St. Louise, :, hence-forth CSSL), surely to prevent minds from wandering. Despite thechurch’s official teaching that nuns were asexual, according to therulebooks, at least, the women would have had to think, though notspeak, about controlling their sexuality. In this way, rulebooksoffered a discourse of sexuality in which the existence, albeit


repressed, of heterosexuality, lesbian sexuality, and autoeroticismwere often referred to in veiled or less-veiled terminology.

The pre-Vatican II regime demanded a renegotiation of identity.As a process, however, it was thoroughly gendered, continuing tosex and gender religious in particular ways. (In fact, religious life ingeneral and congregations in particular positioned women withinthem in specific ways with respect to class and race/ethnicity also(McKenna, )). Everything about the lives of the religious–theclothes they wore, the work they did, their living arrangements,reading and prayer material–was organized according to their sex.The Catholic Church’s theology prior to Vatican II regarded humannature as inherently dangerous and evil (Fuller, :). Hence,reformation of the individual was central to the aim of religious life.Importantly, however, the Church’s interpretation of human naturewas also gendered, based not only on preconceived notions con-cerning the essential characteristics of humans but the essentialcharacteristics of men and women. Consequently, religious life wasorganized precisely to mitigate against women religious succumbingto their female nature and, especially, its bodily desires.

What was the outcome of this process? If religious life repressedand denied women an investment in femininity, what was theimpact on nuns’ gendered subjectivity? Obviously, of course, “thenun” was a gendered identity in itself. Despite their subjugation ofmuch of the cultural attributes associated with the female sex, thereligious were, in and through religious life, continuously markedout as women. Their clothes, living arrangements, work, reading,and prayer material were manifest examples of this. In fact, theycould never be anything other than women. By the same token, how-ever, while not transcending their gender, religious did embodywomanhood, as it was more generally conceived, differently. Thereligious did not get married, nor did they have children. They notonly worked in but were managers of schools, hospitals, and otherorganizations—organizations that were often large and often multi-national. Nuns’ spirituality distinguished them from the less etherealreality of married motherhood.

As exemplified in the debates surrounding and the passing intolaw of gender-specific legislation, the demands of motherhood/womanhood were such that women in post-independence Ireland


were not afforded full citizenship commensurate with that accordedIrish men (Valiulis, a). The religious foreswore their duties asmothers to devote themselves to a different life within religious min-istry. But they carried out that ministry in the “real” world. Within thecontext of a theology and a society that associated women—nega-tively—with the body and reproduction, the religious, through vari-ous technologies which included learned behavior and physical con-cealment, became less associated with those aspects of womanhood.

Religious life effectively proscribed individuality and individual-ism. Singularity of any form was frowned upon. Nuns dressed alike,had no personal possessions, and carried out a large part of theirdaily activities in common. Of course, individualism was not ahighly regarded trait in Irish society generally, especially in women.Inglis, in fact, argues that the discourse and rhetoric of self-denialwas central to Irish morality (:) and that further, quoting ÓRíordáin, it was so ingrained in the Irish body and mind as tobecome an essential part of its social character (:n). Whenasked what had attracted her to doing social work and to enteringreligious life, Josephine remarked, “I wanted to do things for otherpeople. . . . Maybe I felt I wasn’t entitled to a life of my own.”

In this respect, religious life was Irish womanhood writ large. Aspreviously suggested, religious life presented no contradiction toIrish womanhood. Indeed, it was regarded as the highest form ofwomanhood by no less an influential body than the CatholicChurch. This was where the paradox righted itself. The religiouswere able to occupy positions of power and respect through workand celibacy in a society that did not in general esteem women’swork or conjugal independence precisely because they were notseen to subvert or challenge the “proper order.” The religious car-ried out their work through male-dominated institutions, be it theCatholic Church or the Irish state itself, within which they were(theoretically, if not in reality) subordinate.

Crucially, however, women’s religious congregations were alsoarenas in which women exerted, indeed, sometimes abused, powerand control over one another as well as those in their charge. Equally,they had a status and respect in Irish society all of their own. Cer-tainly, whether due to economic realities or societal norms, religiouslife afforded nuns in the decades following independence certain


benefits not, or not easily, available outside it. Religious life gavewomen the opportunity to be educated, receive training, work, andtravel. Through it, they could pursue a life of spirituality, devoted toprayer and service to God. In addition, of course, it offered arespectable alternative life path to marriage and motherhood.

Women themselves—including the women of this study—bothinvested in and supported the kind of womanhood the CatholicChurch exalted and exulted in the form of religious life. In princi-ple, though basically misogynistic, the Catholic Church’s interpre-tation of womanhood and its veneration of consecrated womenoffered something that women in religious life were able to derivevalue and meaning from for themselves. Indeed, it was a funda-mental part of the attraction to religious life for some. Sarah stated,“As an idealistic young woman, [I] thought, I’m going to do the verybest with my life . . . and the very best that was presented to you . . .was religious life.” Equally, Annette maintained that being a sisterwas her “proudest, proudest title.”The importance Elaine attached toher habit was some measure of the investment the women made:

When we were professed, our habit was blessed for about a full hour.Right in front of the order. All the different [parts of it]. When you putit on in the morning, all the different prayers that were said over it, youknow? As you put on the cincture and you put on your cap and youput on your veil, everything was a prayer. And you felt somehowsecure in that.

Retrospectively, some of the women judged the church’s conceptionof women and womanhood during the period as chiefly negative.Margaret, for example, remarked that she had “t[aken] on the pre-vailing attitude of the inferiority of women.” At the time, however,few questioned it. Whether this was because they were trained notto question; because they derived certain benefits from it; becausethey were convinced by it or, indeed, felt venerated by it, the womenof this study accepted the pre-Vatican II regime and the ideology onwomanhood and religious womanhood it espoused.

Private or Public?

The pre-Vatican II system of religious life was apparently uncom-plicated and straightforward. Some women were called to religious


life. If they heeded that call, they entered a religious congregation.Congregational rulebooks set forth the aims and rules by whichmembers lived. The results, however, were anything but straightfor-ward. The anomaly discussed above illustrates this. Likewise, theposition the religious occupied vis-à-vis the public-private distinc-tion. As professed religious, the women of this study were instantlyrecognizable as nuns and became, as they saw it, “ambassadors,”representing, variously, their congregation, all religious, the CatholicChurch, and Ireland itself. Their public persona was qualified, how-ever, by the regulations imposed upon them. Annette said, “It wasreally strict and they wouldn’t allow us to talk to the boarders. Youjust didn’t. And then we weren’t allowed to talk to the parents. Andyou’d walk up and down the street and you never spoke to anybody.I found it very difficult. Awful difficult!”

It was also qualified by their status as subordinates–be that of thestate, the church, or the divine. It was hardly surprising that thewomen of this study associated women religious with the publicarena. Providing health, education, and other services, the religiouswere “of” the state, and there is no denying their influence in form-ing that state and its people (Inglis, ). But their position wascomplicated by rules which limited their freedom, individually andcollectively, to interact with the public, express or voice opinions,challenge state or church policy. Though there is much evidence tothe contrary (MacCurtain, ), the religious were expected to beseen but not, necessarily, heard. Theirs was a particular kind of“public,” made possible because the female religious were generallyregarded as adjuncts. Their adjunct status was not one, however,that many in religious life chose to question or challenge, at leastopenly.

For some women, Annette included, the public aspect of theiridentity was a very important part of the appeal to and reward of reli-gious life: “I used to go out and you’d see poor people and they’dsalute you and you’d think, ‘I must deserve the salute!’ you know? Imust be able to put up with things that are difficult and hard.”

Women religious were located within the public sphere but in aparticular way. In a functionalist relationship to society, the religiouswere in a sense owned by that society, a resource for it rather thanequal members within it. It was precisely in terms of ownership that


a number of the women described their relationship with the widersociety—some with pride, others with indignation.

Independent Ireland’s economic fortunes, depressed since itsinception, began to take a turn for the better in the s due topolicies introduced under the new Lemass government (Lee, ,). Record economic growth led to a significant rise in employ-ment levels, increased urbanization and consumerism, and a reduc-tion in the numbers of those leaving. By the late s, Ireland hadtransitioned from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urbancountry (Brown, :). Improvements in Ireland’s economicsituation precipitated socio-cultural changes also—not least ofwhich was greater secularization and a decline in the status of theCatholic Church. Significant numbers of Irish Catholics began toopenly question the authority of the church, especially in mattersconsidered private, and began to make decisions about personalmorality that were at odds with the teachings of the church (Whyte,, ). Though the transition was neither smooth nor sudden,a new philosophy of liberal individualism began to emerge and, withit, a move toward what Inglis describes as à la carte Catholicism(:).

By the s, women were directly and indirectly affected by amore buoyant economy and the social changes that accompanied it.Opportunities for them expanded during this time, and morewomen began to work outside the home, especially married women.Living standards and conditions improved and, influenced by move-ments and events elsewhere, some women began to question inthought and deed the society they lived in and the particular con-struction of womanhood espoused by it. As opportunities forwomen increased in Ireland, religious life began to be regarded as aless attractive life path for women to follow. Falling vocations fromthe mid-s onward were proof positive of this.

At a more fundamental level, however, what was occurring was aredefinition of Irish womanhood. Though not a radical redefinitionby contemporary standards, modernization and modern women inIreland—sometimes acting collectively, sometimes not—presented achallenge to the dominant discourse of Irish womanhood as desex-ualized and self-sacrificial if not self-effaced. It was a process thateffectively wrote nuns out of the equation. From this point on, and


despite the changes that took place within religious life itself as aresult of Vatican II, nuns tended to be excluded from the category“woman,” considered, as one of the women of this study put it, “akind of neutered gender.”

Conclusion

The contested relationship between women and their bodies, asboth a source of female power and the reason for women’s oppres-sion, has been vital to feminist research and the aims of feminism,but is equally important in the lived realities of women. Though itdid not begin with independence, certainly in the decades follow-ing it, the position of women in Ireland was fundamentally con-nected to their corporeality. As girls growing up, the women of thisstudy were aware of the gendered nature of the society they lived inand the expectations and limitations that were placed upon them asa result. In choosing to enter religious life, they committed them-selves to a regime that required them to cut themselves off fromthe secular world but also to subjugate their individuality and fem-ininity. As this essay has highlighted, gender was a crucial compo-nent of the pre-Vatican II regime—both in terms of the origins ofthat regime and its objectives. Through it, the religious were con-stantly marked out as women. By the various technologiesemployed to aid women’s transformation within religious life, how-ever, they experienced and embodied the category “woman” dif-ferently than other women. Though the restrictions that religiouslife placed on nuns as women were extensive, religious life affordedthem certain benefits—and through it, in effect, they derived avalue and meaning for themselves.

The religious tend to be ignored as women and this is no more sothe case than in studies of Irish womanhood. Despite the plethoraof research that now exists on Irish women, especially on their livespost-independence and up into the twenty-first century, and despitethe numbers of Irish women who entered religious congregationsduring the same period, in fact, we know very little about their sub-jective experiences as women. Drawing on the oral history testi-monies of Irish women religious, this essay represents an attemptnot just to include nuns in the category “Irish woman” but to inves-


tigate their position within and negotiation of womanhood. Touch-ing on the themes of citizenship, the individual, and the public-pri-vate dichotomy perhaps raises more questions than can be answeredwithin the confines of one research study, but it points the way forfurther research on the extent to which discourses of womanhoodimpact upon women in their daily lives, and the actions somewomen make in response.

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Rulebooks

Congregation of the Sisters of St. Louise ()Congregation of the Sisters of St. Nadine ()Congregation of the Sisters of St. Mildred ()Congregation of the Sisters of St. Marie ()


Documents

Embodied Ideals and Realities: Irish Nuns and Irish Womanhood, 1930s-1960s