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Escaped Nuns - True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America (Hardcover)
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Escaped Nuns - True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America (Hardcover)
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Just five weeks after its publication in January 1836, Awful
Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, billed as an escaped nun's
shocking expose of convent life, had already sold more than 20,000
copies. The book detailed gothic-style horror stories of licentious
priests and abusive mothers superior, tortured nuns and novices,
and infanticide. By the time the book was revealed to be a fiction
and the author, Maria Monk, an impostor, it had already become one
of the nineteenth century's best-selling books. In antebellum
America only one book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, outsold it. The success
of Monk's book was no fluke, but rather a part of a larger
phenomenon of anti-Catholic propaganda, riots, and nativist
politics. The secrecy of convents stood as an oblique justification
for suspicion of Catholics and the campaign against them, which was
intimately connected with cultural concerns regarding reform,
religion, immigration, and, in particular, the role of women in the
Republic. At a time when the term "female virtue" pervaded popular
rhetoric, the image of the veiled nun represented a threat to the
established American ideal of womanhood. Unable to marry, she was
instead a captive of a foreign foe, a fallen woman, a white slave,
and a foolish virgin. In the first half of the nineteenth century,
ministers, vigilantes, politicians, and writers-male and
female-forged this image of the nun, locking arms against convents.
The result was a far-reaching antebellum movement that would shape
perceptions of nuns, and women more broadly, in America.
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