PC: Escaped Nuns situates its topic in a much deeper set of contexts. You show that the anti-convent moment and broader anti-nun sentiments must be placed in the larger drive for reform in the antebellum period. "Presenting something -- anything -- as a threat to female purity, marriage, and family served to legitimize any reform measure, from antislavery to temperance to anti-Catholicism," as you write on page 56. Is a concern for the role of women and the stability of marriage at the center of antebellum reform? How does anti-Catholicism, as you've studied it in Escaped Nuns, changed the story?
CY: Researching for this book changed the way I understand antebellum reform movements, convincing me that concern for the role of women and what we might now call the nuclear family were at the center of the benevolent empire. Temperance advocates emphasized the ways in which alcohol threatened women’s safety and the home (which of course, was often true). Reformers signed a “Family Temperance Pledge,” featuring a contented husband, wife, and child, in a respectably furnished parlor. Advocates for the Common School Movement sold Americans on the idea of public schools by suggesting that the school was an extension of the home and that teaching would prepare women to be good wives and mothers. These same desires to preserve the home and keep women in domestic roles animated efforts to combat prostitution. I couldn’t help but notice similar themes in anti-nun sentiment. Convents were “bad” because they kept women from being wives and mothers. In the eyes of many Protestant reformers, nuns’ sexual purity was at risk before “licentious” priests. The convent, presented as a gloomy, lonely, unsafe place, contrasted sharply with the cheery, loving, safe home. Convent narratives served as warnings to women about the dire repercussions if they chose this life. In a quickly changing and young nation, many Americans felt considerable vulnerabilities about the future. Ensuring women’s place in the home and thus maintaining control over them, rather than surrendering that control to a priest or the allures of growing urban centers, offered some sense of security. Anti-Catholicism and in particular the anti-convent campaign cannot be understood apart from these pervasive concerns for women and the home.
