WOMEN'S STUDIES IN FOCUS "Get Thee to a Nunnery!": Uses of English Canadian Convent Archives Across Feminist Disciplines

Renée Bondy is a writer and historian, currently teaching in the W om en's Studies Program at the University of W indsor. She has published in Oral History Forum, and in Herizons and Bitch magazines.
Abstract The archives of Canadian convents house significant and plentiful resources. Until recent decades, these have been underutilized, particularly in English Canada. This paper exam ines the ways in which convent archives m ight be used by feminist researchers across the disciplines. Résumé Les archives des couvents canadiens renferment une abondance de ressources importantes, qui jusqu’à récemment ont été sous-utilisées, particulièrement au Canada anglais. Cet article étudie les façons don’t les archives des couvents peuvent être utilisées par les recherchistes féministes dans l’ensemble des disciplines.

A short tim e ago, I had coffee with my favourite archivist, a Roman Catholic sister who, with great competence and care, maintains the archives of the Ursuline Sisters of the Chatham Union, an order of teaching sisters in Southwestern Ontario. During my years as a doctoral student conducting historical research (Bondy 2007), I relied heavily on Sister Ruth Marie's expertise, her intimate knowledge of the contents of the Ursuline archives, and her thoughtful suggestions. Just as important to me as a young researcher was our shared love of history and her exam ple of tireless devotion to her work. Today, when I visit my dear friend, I am always curious to hear about her on-going projects in the archives and the latest requests she has received from both academic and amateur researchers.
Canadian convent archives are a treasure trove of inform ation about women religious (com m only referred to as "sisters" or "nuns") and their comm unities, and in many cases the contents of these archives span centuries and extend to the present day. Of course, historians of wom en religious know this, and work in this exciting subfield of wom en's history has grown significantly in recent decades. W hile scholars in French Canada have amassed a significant body of historical research on convent culture, including numerous monographs,1 English Canada has only of late entered in the sub-field in a significant way. The 2007 publication of Changing Habits: W omen's Religious Orders in Canada, edited by Elizabeth Sm yth, features m ore than a dozen articles by scholars of wom en religious, including not only historians, but also architects, sociologists, theologians and m aterial culturalists. However, only one of the authors avows and engages an explicitly

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feminist analysis (Leonard 2007), and in her discussion of further research Smyth advises that the field is open for much additional study, including areas involving "gender, power, and race dynam ics" and "the clash between conservative patriarchy and feminism that continues to be played out within both ecclesiastical and secular settings" (Sm yth 2007, 16).
On a personal note, having spent much tim e in the archives of a few religious com m unities in English Canada, I can't help but m arvel at how underutilized are their contents, not only by historians in other closely related subfields (Church History, for example), but especially, as evident in the aforem entioned publication, by fem inist scholars. There is a certain irony in the fact that wom en religious and their unique, hom osocial institutions have rarely been the subjects of inquiry by scholars who adopt a feminist analysis. As educated women in eras when few women had access to higher learning, as wom en who served and continue to serve women and children in their roles as teachers, nurses, and social service workers, and as enduring comm unities of wom en who function within a highly patriarchal Church, women religious surely merit the consideration of fem inist scholarship.
Therefore, I am writing this article with a three-fold purpose: first, I will offer a brief history of the use and accessibility of convent archives in English Canada; second, I will offer suggestions as to how fem inist scholars m ight more fully utilize the contents of convent archives; and third, I will offer a brief description of a current research project in which I am engaged which dem onstrates how convents' archival materials might extend beyond the traditional scholarly study of the history of wom en religious by engaging a feminist analysis. Convent archives, in preserving local histories, data on educational, m edical and social service institutions, detailed genealogies of mem bers and affiliates, architectural plans and real estate documents, and countless other aspects of wom en's history and culture, have potentially broad applications and could make significant contributions to feminist scholarship across the disciplines.

Access Marta Danylewycz's groundbreaking
m onograph Taking the Veil: An Alternative to Marriage, Motherhood, and Spinsterhood in Quebec, 1840-1920 has, in the more than two decades since its publication, greatly influenced the study of wom en religious, both in French and English Canada. In her book she noted that,
Religious women in Quebec are beginning to speak out. Long regarded by themselves and society as outside the purview of sociological and historical inquiry, they are breaking the silence that has surrounded their lives. They welcome political, philosophical, and personal discussion and no longer shy away from the queries of journalists and reporters about life in the cloister.
(Danylewycz 1987, 13)
Prior to this time, as Danylewycz im plies, women religious kept to themselves, and were not welcoming of outsiders. Only after the Church reforms of the mid-1960s did sisters do away with such physical barriers as the cloister, the grille, extended periods of silence, and the traditional, enveloping habit, so it is not surprising that it took som e tim e before religious communities were am enable to researchers. In earlier decades, the extensive and, in many cases, meticulously m aintained archives of women's religious com m unities had been for the use of the sisters themselves, for the purposes of preserving their own heritage and histories. As historian Elizabeth Smyth notes, this record keeping was done under the mandate of Canon Law, which required that religious com m unities maintain archives and also that they record the day-to-day lives of their organizations in annals or chronicles (Sm yth 1997, 103). Although many of the docum ents archived were originally intended as "venues for comm unity development and instruction intended for an exclusive audience of nuns and sisters" (Sm yth 1997, 109), more recently they have provided the fodder for exciting new studies within the field of wom en's history.
In the mid-1980s, Danylewycz was am ong the first to benefit from the new openness of religious com munities to researchers, conducting research in an area of

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wom en's history that had been seldom explored by scholarly historians; her successors in English Canada, numerous in recent years, owe the late Danylewycz a great debt in this regard (Bruno-Jofré 2005; MacDonald 2004; Sm yth 2007; Sullivan 2005). Certainly, as the increase in the num ber of publications indicates, convent archives have indeed opened their doors to scholars more frequently in recent decades. Even so, while the recent work of historians of wom en religious, including my own, makes a vital contribution to the work of wom en's history, m y experience conducting research in convent archives has led me to believe that this is just one way that convent archives might be utilized, and that the documentary materials therein might also be of interest to fem inist researchers from across the disciplines.
Applications As a fem inist historian who teaches
W om en's Studies and values interdisciplinarity in my own work, I am always cognizant of the ways in which my own research extends across disciplinary boundaries. As a result of the long stretches of tim e spent in a few convents' archives, notably those of the aforem entioned Ursuline Sisters and those of the Ontario Province of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, I have considered numerous ways in which feminist researchers might use the evidence therein beyond the more obvious and traditional historical applications. W hile som e of the suggestions which follow are historical in nature, the last few point to new directions for contemporary research which m ight utilize convents' diverse archival m aterials.
Among the most common requests received by convent archives are appeals from amateur historians conducting genealogical research. W ith little to go on but fam ily lore about great aunts who entered the convent decades ago, many people contact convent archivists seeking further inform ation, eager to learn the elusive details about these often romanticized relatives. Frequently, amateur genealogists are pleasantly surprised to find that convent archives often house detailed

records of the lives of individual sisters and, in the case of teaching orders, their students.
W hile professional historians have also found such inform ation beneficial, fem inist scholars from other disciplines whose work engages such topics as the family, education, m edical and social service institutions, and wom en's biography might also find such inform ation of use. After all, although separated from the world by traditional m onastic practices, cloister walls and habits, wom en religious have always been connected in various ways to the larger society. As Elizabeth Rapley notes,
They shared many of its customs and practices. They employed the same notaries, doctors, and legal advisors. They drank the same water and patronized the same butchers and grocers. They approached the problems of child rearing, nursed and medicated their sick, and attended the dying much the same way as "the world" did. In fact, the records they kept about these things, at a time when women as a whole seldom wrote much about daily life, can provide useful information on life not only in the cloister but also in the larger community that swirled around it only a stone wall away. (Rapley 2001, 4)
The annals, chapter m inutes, newsletters, yearbooks, short fiction, membership records and obituaries preserved in convent archives offer m uch otherwise unattainable detail about this unique, hom osocial culture and its intersections with the larger society.
Also of interest to certain feminist scholars might be the extensive photographic collections of some convent archives. Including formal group photographs, portraiture, and more candid photography, these collections are abundantly useful to historians of visual culture, as dem onstrated in Colleen Skidmore's work on the 19th-century photography of the Grey Nuns in Québec (Skidmore 2002). Further, feminist scholars from other disciplines whose research on wom en and visual culture intersects with topics such as fashion and the body, m ight also find these collections of value.
As Elizabeth Smyth and Heidi MacDonald, both noted historians of wom en religious in English Canada, have dem onstrated in their respective works, sisters hold a pivotal place in the history of educational, m edical, and social service institutions across the nation.

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Sm yth's num erous publications on the subject of teaching sisters in Ontario (Sm yth 1997; 1999; 2007), and MacDonald's research on the Sisters of St. Martha and the Sisters of Charity and their contributions to the social infrastructure of the Maritimes (MacDonald 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2004) are significant contributions to both women's history and the social history of Canada. Researchers from outside the field of wom en's history would be well advised to consider Smyth and MacDonald's works, and to note the integral connections between women religious and educational, health and social service institutions. Researchers engaged in fem inist analysis of such Canadian institutions would be remiss to disregard convent records pertaining to their founding, development, staffing and m anagem ent.
My own current research on Catholic girlhood indicates yet another direction for a feminist analysis engaging convents' archival material. In researching wom en's religious com m unities in English Canada in the 1950s and '60s, a period of significant reform in Roman Catholicism , I became intensely interested in sisters' self-perceptions preceding and during this period. Questions arose such as: how did individual sisters view their bodies, their gender, their public personas and their relationships to secular wom en? W hat were their deepest anxieties and their greatest joys in tim es of change? And, ultimately, how did this affect their com m unal process of reform ? After conducting extensive oral history interviews, and while in the process of probing archives for inform ation about the sisters, I came across some fascinating documents regarding the Ursuline sisters' ideas about girls and young women. Documents from meeting minutes and committee reports bearing such titles as "The Modern Girl" and "Girls Today"2 were produced throughout the 1950s and '60s, revealing wom en's religious com m unities' perceptions of young wom en in the period.
As dem onstrated by Mary Louise Adams, discourses produced by North Am erican institutions in the postwar era served as "sym bolic devices to underline the gravity of problem s wrought by changes in the modern world and the need for ameliorative actions."

Adams argues that "references to 'children' and 'youth" were regularly employed by a whole range of social critics" and that "the collective progress of adolescents could indicate the shape society would take in the future; youth operated as a metaphor for the development of the society as a whole" (Adams 1997, 40). Taken in this interpretive light, these convent-produced discourses on girls and young wom en contribute to meaningful conjecture regarding the inner lives of women religious and the anxieties and concerns of their com m unities in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, the issues which occupied sisters in the period, as reflected in their oral histories and other archival documents, are mirrored in their concerns regarding the girls in their schools and communities. A secondary outcome of this inquiry is that it also exposes and allows for the examination of a little-explored context in which girls and young wom en were constructed and discussed in postwar Canada. W hile m y work on this topic is on-going, I believe it dem onstrates the untapped potential of convent archives to move fem inist scholars beyond traditional, historical applications of their sources.
A recent find at a local construction site has spurred on my interest in the aforementioned research project. During the recent demolition of an old convent, workers discovered a cache of artifacts in the convent walls. It seems that, in the early to mid-twentieth century, the girls in the convent boarding school had stashed notes, letters, valentines and other personal items behind the baseboards of the convent classrooms and dormitories (Boughner 2008). These items, though not yet catalogued and archived, m ay provide fascinating insights into the lives of girls in earlier centuries, and may contribute to a fem inist understanding of girls' social lives, culture and comm unications.
Considerations, Caveats and Conclusions As Shelley Sweeney notes in "An Act of
Faith: Access to Religious Records in English-Speaking Canada," the archives of religious institutions often house sensitive m aterial, personal archival records which individuals and/or comm unities may not wish

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disclosed (Sweeney 1990). Although communities are more open to researchers in recent decades than they were in the past, convent archives are private archives, and, like other private corporations, each respective comm unity and its respective archivist have the right to refuse entry.
Also worthy of consideration is the fact that scholars pursuing twentieth- or twenty-first-century topics will often find themselves dealing with living subjects, or subjects who have close, emotional ties to their predecessors. The use of some archival m aterials, therefore, requires a heightened sensitivity to sisters and comm unities, and may raise particular ethical considerations.
The Canadian Religious Conference/Conférence religieuse canadienne (CRC), an umbrella organization of 230 religious com m unities, provides contact inform ation for wom en's religious com m unities across Canada, as well as maintaining archival records of its own 55-year history. W hile some communities of women are especially welcom ing of researchers, others are less so, and researchers must approach individual comm unities with their requests. The Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) m aintains a Religious Archives Special Interest Section (RASIS) comprised of various religious and archivists, which may also provide useful contacts for researchers.
The archives of women religious, in their breadth and depth of inform ation regarding Canadian social institutions and women's lives, are worthy of consideration by fem inist researchers across the disciplines. As access to these very significant resources continues to increase, fem inist scholars will produce richer and m ore nuanced analyses of Canadian wom en's history, culture and experience.
Ackn ow led g em en ts As always, I am grateful to the religious com m unities who grant m e generous access to their archives, particularly the Ursuline Sisters of the Chatham Union. Ruth Marie Curry, O.S.U., continues to offer kind assistance and generous counsel. My thanks are also extended to Heidi MacDonald and the anonym ous

Atlantis peer reviewers for their very helpful suggestions.
Endnotes 1. See, for exam ple, Marguerite Jean, Evolution des communautés religieuses de femmes au Canada de 1639 á nos jours (Montréal: Fides 1977); Marie-Paule Malouin, Ma soeur, à quelle école allez-vous? : deux écoles de filles à la fin du XIXe siècle (Montréal: Fides, 1985). Micheline Dum ont and Nadia Fahmy-Eid, eds, Les couventines : l'education des filles au Quebec dans les congregations religieuses enseignantes, 1840-1960 (Montreal: Boreal, 1986); Micheline D'Allaire, Les communautes religieuses et l'assistance social á Montreal 1659-1900 (Montreal: Editions du Meridien, 1997); Danielle Juteau and Nicole Laurin, Un métier et un vocation. Le travail des religieuses au Québec de 1901 á 1971 (Montreal: Les Presses de l'Université de Montreal, 1997); Colleen Gray, The Congregation de Notre-dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693-1796 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007). 2. Mother Kathleen's Report to the General Chapter, "Minutes of the 1957 General Chapter, Ursuline Sisters of the Chatham Union Archives, Chatham, Ontario"; Mother St. David's Opening Address to the 1969 General Chapter, "Minutes of the 1969 General Chapter, Ursuline Sisters of the Chatham Union Archives, Chatham, Ontario."
References Adam s, M. The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
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Boughner, B. "Uncovering Treasure in the W alls," Chatham Daily News (2 February, 2008).

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Bruno-Jofré, R. The Missionary Oblate Sisters: Vision and Mission. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005.
D'Allaire, M. Les communautes religieuses et l'assistance social á Montreal 1659-1900. Montreal: Editions du Meridien, 1997.
Danylewycz, M. Taking the Veil: An Alternative to Marriage, Motherhood, and Spinsterhood in Quebec, 1840-1920. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.
Dum ont, M. and N. Fahmy-Eid, eds, Les couventines : l'education des filles au Quebec dans les congregations religieuses enseignantes, 1840-1960. Montreal: Boreal, 1986.
Gray, C. The Congregation De Notre-dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693-1796. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007.
Jean, M. Evolution des communautés religieuses de femmes au Canada de 1639 á nos jours. Montréal: Fides 1977.
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Malouin, M. Ma soeur, à quelle école allez-vous? : deux écoles de filles à la fin du XIXe siècle. Montréal: Fides, 1985.
MacDonald, H. "Doing More with Less: The Sisters of St Martha (PEI) Diminish the Impact of the Great Depression," Acadiensis, XXXIII. 1 (Fall 2003a): 21-46.
_____. "Developing a Strong Roman Catholic Social Order in Late-19th Century Prince Edward Island," Canadian Catholic Historical

Association Historical Studies, Vol. 69 (Spring 2003b): 34-51.
_____. "The Im pact of Increased Health and Social W elfare Funding on the Evolution of Two Congregations of W om en Religious in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, 1945-82," Delicate Dances: Case Studies on Public Policy and the Nonprofit Sector in Canada, Kathy Brock, ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003c, pp.147-70.
_____. "The Social Origins and Congregational Identity of the Founding Sisters of St. Martha, Charlottetown, PEI, 1915-1925," Canadian Catholic Historical Association Historical Studies, Vol. 70 (Spring 2004): 29-47.
Rapley, E. A Social History of the Cloister. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2001.
Skidm ore, C. "Photography in the Convent: Grey Nuns, Québec, 1861," Social History/Histoire Sociale, 35.70 (W inter 2002): 279-310.
Sm yth, E. "'W riting Teaches Us Our Mysteries': W omen Religious Recording and W riting History," Creating Historical Memory: English Canadian W omen and the W ork of History, B. Boutilier and A. Prentice, eds. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997, pp. 101-28.
_____. "Professionalization Among the Professed: The Case of Roman Catholic W om en Religious," Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women's Professional Work, E. Smyth, S. Acker, P. Bourne, A. Prentice, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, pp. 234-54.
_____. "Introduction," Changing Habits: W omen's Religious Orders in Canada, E. Sm yth, ed. Ottawa: Novalis, 2007, pp. 1-20.
Sullivan, R. Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism, and American Postwar Popular Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

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Sweeney, S. "An Act of Faith: Access to Religious Records in English-Speaking Canada," Archivaria 30 (Summer 1990): 42-54.
Additional Information: Association of Canadian Archivists – Religious Archives Special Interest Section http://archivists.ca/special_interest/religious.a spx
Canadian Religious Conference/Conférence religieuse canadienne www.crc-can ad a.org/m ain.cfm

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