USIH Salon: Women & Power in American History: Catholic Women as a Test Case

Over the past several weeks, I have read and reread Mary Beard’s Women & Power: A Manifesto, and I am struck by Beard’s ability to produce something akin to the sort of public-oriented, longue-durée history, which speaks truth to power, that is envisioned by Jo Guldi and David Armitage in their 2014 book, The History Manifesto.[1] As Beard explains in “The Public Voice of Women,” Women & Power’s first essay, “My aim here is to take a long view, a very long view, on the culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment” (8).

From my perspective as a historian of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, I was curious about what insights into gendered language and its influence on public power I could bring to my own work. As I read it, Beard’s central argument in “The Public Voice of Women” is that

public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusively practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender. As we saw with Telemachus, to become a man (or at least an elite man) was to claim the right to speak. Public speech was a – if not the – defining attribute of maleness. Or, to quote a well-known Roman slogan, the elite male citizen could be summed up as vir bonus dicendi peritus, ‘a good man, skilled in speaking’. A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman (17).

What does this Roman vir bonus dicendi peritus have to do with the Gilded Age and Progressive Age, the main periods I research?

Quite a bit.

Beard argues that, historically, there were very few occasions when women could speak authoritatively in public. One such moment was when they acted as “victims and as martyrs, usually to preface their own death” (13). Another was when they spoke out to “defend their own sectional interests,” being careful to “not speak for men or the community as a whole” (16). These rare moments of women’s permission to speak were not confined to the ancient world but instead extended into the modern period. Beard argues that women who spoke in public were effectively un-sexed as women. They were liable to be “treated as freakish androgynes” whose right to speak was confined solely to “women’s causes,” with the result that “women’s public speech has for centuries been ‘niched’ into that area” (22, 25).

“This is not the peculiar ideology of some distant culture,” Beard explains. Rather, “this is a tradition of gendered speaking – and the theorising of gendered speaking – to which we are still, directly or more often indirectly, the heirs.” Beard makes a convincing case throughout Women & Power that “our own traditions of debate and public speaking, their conventions and rules, still lie very much in the shadow of the classical world” (20).

In an effort to explore this inheritance of gendered speaking, I decided to perform something of a historical experiment by putting Beard’s argument to the test through an examination of an important meeting at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the Chicago world’s fair celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first transatlantic voyage. This meeting, the Columbian Catholic Congress, was an affiliate gathering of the World’s Parliament of Religions, an early, watershed moment in the history of modern ecumenism. The congress was a follow-up to the American Catholic Congress, a meeting of laypeople in Baltimore in 1889, which celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the American episcopacy. Alongside the Columbian Catholic Congress met the Congress of Colored Catholics and the Congress of Catholic Women, the three of which together illustrate the growing public prominence of lay Catholics at the turn of the twentieth century.

For my current book project, I had already researched the themes of nationalism and Catholic-Protestant interactions at the Columbian Catholic Congress and the World’s Parliament of Religions. Beard’s book, though, encouraged me to revisit this earlier research to examine gendered language and its influence on public power at the congress and to see how Catholic women participated at the Chicago fair. I was less interested in focusing on the Congress of Catholic Women, at which women met separately from men, and was more concerned with reopening my investigation of the Columbian Catholic Congress, where women presented papers alongside their male coreligionists.

Historian Deirdre M. Moloney has argued that “the women’s topics presented at the Columbian Catholic Congress focused on historical subjects rather than on contemporary Catholic women’s issues.”[2] I would respectfully disagree for two reasons. First, this argument presents a false dichotomy between “historical subjects” and “contemporary Catholic women’s issues.” As Beard suggests in Women & Power, there exists a centuries-long continuum of the sorts of issues about which women have been expected to remain silent and of the other topics that have been demarcated as “feminine.” Arguing otherwise severs the past from the present and implicitly downplays the relevance of historical lessons to contemporary concerns. Second, the record of the Columbian Catholic Congress reveals that even within the talks that focused on “historical subjects,” the topics of women and femininity dominated the speakers’ arguments. This demonstrates that an artificial separation between “historical subjects” and “contemporary Catholic women’s issues” renders invisible the ways that Catholic women made their voices heard in public alongside Catholic men in the making of Catholic America and obscures the reality that they weighed in on the precise questions about power and gendered language that Beard discusses.

On the first day of the congress, Mary Josephine Onahan delivered a paper on “Isabella the Catholic,” which examined the life of Isabella I of Castille. Superficially, Onahan’s paper may appear to fall exclusively within the “historical subjects” category described by Moloney, but the text of Onahan’s address demonstrates its importance to “contemporary Catholic women’s issues.” Onahan contrasted Isabella’s femininity with that of Elizabeth I, who Beard described as “avow[ing] her own androgyny” when rallying English troops to resist the advance of the Spanish Armada (22). Isabella’s womanhood, though, was not confined to the past but was rather, Onahan argued, simply one link in a much longer historical chain extending from the beginning of human history to the present: “The 19^th century hugs to itself many delusions, none greater than the claim that it has discovered woman – woman that has come down to us from Adam all the way!”[3] It was Catholicism, Onahan maintained, that provided women with the proper feminine ideal.[4]

Onahan’s first-day address at the congress also set the tone for other Catholic women’s speeches during the week of meetings. With just one exception, the other women speakers delivered papers, to use Beard’s words, “publicly defend[in]g their own sectional interests.” This reinforced the divisions of gendered language and public power that positioned men as public speakers and women as private speakers who could venture forth to speak publicly only in areas cordoned off as “feminine” lest they be perceived as “freakish androgynes” (16, 22).

While women were not included among the diocesan delegates to the congress or on the Ways and Means and Resolutions committees, they continued to deliver papers for the duration of the conference.[5] On the third day, F.M. Edselas delivered an address on “The Catholic Sisterhoods,” in which Edselas argued that a woman fulfilled the feminine ideal through “an insatiable desire to have a finger in every benevolent pie.” This was a “master passion of her nature,” which had a divine origin.[6] F.M. Edselas was the pseudonym of Mary Catherine Chase. A biographer noted that Chase/Edselas had “written upon subjects of public interest with such force and clearness as to attract much attention, giving the general impression that a masculine mind guided the pen.”[7] This popularity led to her speech at the Columbian Catholic Congress and demonstrates Beard’s contention that, as in the classical world, “public speaking and oratory…were exclusively practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender” (17). Chase’s/Edselas’s written work, then, had become masculinized by virtue of its vigor and its public quality, while her speech at the congress dealt explicitly with the subject of women’s benevolence and Catholic sisterhoods.

The congress’s fourth day, which, as an early history of the gathering noted, “might well be called Woman’s Day, the claims and glories of the gentler sex being eloquently presented by some famous Catholic ladies,” featured the following addresses by women orators: “Woman’s Work in Art,” by Eliza Allen Starr; “Woman and Mammon,” by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop; and “Woman’s Work in Literature,” by Eleanor C. Donnelly.[8] The next day, Katherine E. Conway delivered a paper on “The Catholic Summer School and the Reading Circles.” She argued that the reading circles

aim[ed] not to raise a crop of women publicists, disputants, and debaters, but simply to increase the good influence which we can exercise on the normal womanly lines by making us more numerously able to write, at need, a plain statement of fact or opinion; increasing our resources for dull and lonely days, making us more tolerant and reasonable and therefore more companionable in our home and social life.[9]

In Conway’s view, then, women’s education should be properly directed toward improving students “on the normal womanly lines” of writing and of increasing their “companionability” in domestic and social spheres, but not toward strengthening their ability to speak publicly, an ability which Conway would likely characterize as a normal manly line.

The sole exceptions to papers delivered by women that did not deal explicitly with the subjects of womanhood and femininity were those written by Mary Theresa Elder on immigration and pauperism. The latter address was characterized as the “sensation of the congress,” as it called Catholic leaders to task for not adequately assisting poor Americans in rural areas, in contrast to Protestant churches.[10] Significantly, this was the sole paper that suffered from any public criticism. Estimates of the percentage of congress attendees who walked out during the presentation of Elder’s paper ranged from one-half to two-thirds.[11] Numerous critics actually attributed Elder’s paper to a male author. Even when commentators praised Elder for her arguments, her prose styling came under attack. Donahoe’s Magazine, a Catholic periodical in Boston, claimed that Elder’s “diction at times degenerated from the fine range of other speakers into something perilously like slang.” Furthermore, Donahoe’s argued, despite Elder’s claims being fundamentally sound – what the nameless journalist described as a “bombshell thrown into the serene arena of the Congress [that] was something more than a firework full of sound and fury” – the magazine found that her anecdotes were “hardly felicitous.”[12]

In a previous entry in the USIH salon on Beard’s book, Lilian Calles Barger argues that Women & Power “does not offer a new theory or history.” As a manifesto, its primary goal is “attempting to persuade an audience of the justice of a cause, illuminate a wrong, or move readers to action.” I agree with this classification of Beard’s book. At the same time, I would suggest that Beard’s academic audience can be moved to action by treating the manifesto as an explanatory framework for historical events and examples of gendered language that may not fall within the temporal and geographic ambit of Women & Power. As I have attempted to demonstrate with my brief analysis of the Columbian Catholic Congress, Beard’s work can serve as a useful starting point for refocusing on familiar topics in a new light and thus has the potential to transform scholarly conceptions of power and historical change in both the past and present.

[1] Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

[2] Deirdre M. Moloney, American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 25. Moloney’s book views the Catholic presence at the fair as evidence of a burgeoning movement of lay Catholic leadership in social reform movements of the Progressive Era. Other works on turn-of-the-twentieth-century American Catholic women have examined their participation at the 1893 world’s fair, but their planning and speaking roles at the Columbian Catholic Congress have been treated only briefly. More attention has been paid to Catholic women’s attendance at the fair’s World’s Congress of Representative Women or at the Congress of Catholic Women, events that did not provide space for men and women to speak together or for women to speak publicly in what was perceived as a solely masculine space. For example, see Paula M. Kane, Separatism and Subculture: Boston Catholicism, 1900-1920 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Kathleen Sprows Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

[3] Progress of the Catholic Church in America and the Great Columbian Catholic Congress of 1893, Vol. II: World’s Columbian Catholic Congresses, 6^th ed. (Chicago: J.S. Hyland and Company, 1897), 28.

[4] Ibid., 33.

[5] Progress of the Catholic Church, 41-42.

[6] Ibid., 72.

[7] Immortelles of Catholic Columbian Literature Compiled from the Works of American Catholic Women Writers by the Ursulines of New York (Chicago: D.H. McBride & Company, 1897), 180, 181.

[8] Progress of the Catholic Church, 78-87; J.W. Hanson, ed., The World’s Congress of Religions: The Addresses and Papers Delivered Before the Parliament, and an Abstract of the Congresses Held in the Art Institute, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A., August 25 to October 15, 1893, Under the Auspices of the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago: International Publishing Co., 1894), 1015-1016, 1021.

[9] Progress of the Catholic Church, 111.

[10] Hanson, ed., The World’s Congress of Religions, 1014; Progress of the Catholic Church, 179-183.

[11] “A Paper Which Made a Sensation,” Daily Charlotte (NC) Observer, September 9, 1893, 3; “The Catholic Congress,” Irish American Weekly (New York), September 16, 1893, 2.

[12] “The Columbian Catholic Congress,” Donahoe’s Magazine (October 1893), 374, 375, 376.