Review: Into Silence and Servitude – How American Girls Became Nuns, 1945-1965 by Brian Titley

DUBLIN (IRELAND)
Irish Times

January 6, 2018

By Catriona Crowe

This a well-researched, vividly written account of a cohort of women who had great influence on female life in America

Nuns are in the air. In Alice McDermott’s recently published eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, much of the plot centres on a community of nuns, the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, dedicated to caring for New York’s needy population. Netflix recently had a hit with The Keepers, which explores the unsolved murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik, who taught English and drama at Baltimore’s Archbishop Keough High School, and her former students’ belief that there was a cover-up by authorities after Cesnik suspected that a priest at the school, A Joseph Maskell, was guilty of sexual abuse. And The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book recently made into a riveting TV series, mimics the hierarchical structures of convent life with its dystopian Handmaids, Marthas and Aunts.

Brian Titley’s Into Silence and Servitude examines the mechanisms through which young American girls and women became nuns between 1945 and 1965. He chose this time period because it was during these years that the greatest number of girls attended Catholic schools, and the greatest numbers became nuns. The period also covers the timespan between the end of the second World War and the second Vatican Council.

Titley takes us through the various phases of formation for nuns: aspirancies, high schools for boarders dedicated to attracting young girls to convent life; postulancy, their first introduction to life as a nun; the novitiate, a period of intensive religious training leading to reception and profession of vows.

The Catholic church was seriously opposed to the American public school system, and set up its own network of Catholic elementary and high schools, where religion was an integral part of the curriculum. As Baby Boom children began to appear after 1945, it was clear that the church would need to increase its school network, and that it would need large numbers of new recruits to religious life to staff it. Teaching nuns were cheap: they did not get a salary, and were prepared to suffer onerous working conditions which would not have been tolerated by their secular colleagues.

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