Gender and Religious Liberty in the Catholic Controversy

This paper argues that antebellum anti-Catholic writers understood Protestant young women as a cipher for a fragile system of religious liberty. During this era, anti-convent narratives (which claimed to reveal the captivity and sexual exploitation of women in convents) became fantastically popular. According to writers, the Catholic Church targeted impressionable Protestant girls for its convents to instill Papist principles as part of an insidious effort to make American government more congenial to the Church’s illiberal aims. These texts warned that Protestant young women were susceptible to this plot because of their “romantic” and overly “sensible” natures. Having sacrificed their duty to their families and nation in favor of Papist demands for obedience, these women could never truly exercise liberty of conscience nor protect American freedoms.

If young women were the greatest threat to (Protestant) religious liberty, anti-Catholics reasoned, then mothers must be its stalwart defenders. Religious liberty needed to be saved by mothers who supplied their children with a “republican” education. Politicians and Protestant activists could not do so because “Papists” deployed the language of religious freedom to discredit those who questioned convent education, thus twisting the free exercise of religion against an unsuspecting nation.

This tension between the power of women and their fragility ran throughout the controversy: mothers were portrayed as being powerful, at the same time that young women were portrayed as romantic and temptable. So too freedom of religion was proof of the greatness of American liberty, even as it shielded nefarious Popish schemes. Women were defined as the front line of defense for the separation of church and state: both its chief defense and most vulnerable point. The survival of religious liberty thus required vigilance by women on behalf of women.