Separatism and Subculture: Boston Catholicism, 1900-20.

In the half-century between Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1880, Oscar Handlin's 1941 study in acculturation, and Militant and Triumphant, James O'Toole's 1992 measuring of William Cardinal O'Connell, no American cultural subgroup has been more thoroughly scrutinized than Boston's Irish Catholics. There's a library of literature on the subject. The phenomenon has partly to do, of course, with the colorful cast of characters raised up by the Irish influx, but the larger reason is that Boston is a casebook study in a remarkable phase of immigration history: the Athens of America bulwarked against the unlettered; the Unitarian Geneva wary of the un-Reformed Christian; the new arrival awed but confident. The full story will probably never be told.

Paula Kane weighs in after the Catholic beachhead has been secured. The Irish are here; their church is established; the Yankee lines have been breached. Kane's Boston Catholics are, in fact, in a transition between their insular origins and becoming major players in the community. It is a schizoid period, one in which Boston Catholics--the leaders and the led--are simultaneously cast "as victors (assimilated and empowered) and as martyrs (persecuted and marginalized)." Intramurally, the great challenge is how to keep a people on educational, social, political, and economic ascent harnessed in and for the good of the church, as interpreted by the clerical leadership.

This, of course, is familiar ground. Paula Kane's contribution is in bringing a feminist perspective to a subject that with a few notable exceptions (Donna Merwick's name leaps to mind) has been dominated by men. Kane's writing may be formal in the manner of a dissertation (which the book began as), but she's a brilliant marshaler of facts, with a keen eye for ambivalences spawned by the tensions between Catholic ideology and the thrusts of history. As an example, she notes the local church's opposition to women's suffrage on grounds it was a threat to femininity, then once the vote was gained, its portrayal as "a patriotic duty of women," to be exercised by them under "the counsels of clergy and their male kin."

These aren't great days for women in the church, yet they are a sight better than in the time of Kane's study, when motherhood and domesticity (feminine careers being barely tolerable) were components in the campaigns against birth control, divorce, "immodesty," socialism, suffrage, encroaching statism, materialism, mothers in the workplace, and almost anything else viewed as threatening to established gender roles and traditional institutional mindsets. Women were not just patronized, they were used, Kane demonstrates, to fortify a subculture and counteract separatist tendencies among the restless.

The ramifications of this were consequential, for not only were Catholic women kept in a form of isolation, but the intense parochial focus, the church's policy of a separatist integration, had the effect of shutting it off from the shaping and, for a time at least, a full sharing in the social programs of government. In Kane's apt hyphenations, the church sought to function as a "mini-city" and a "macro-family" and, as history was to prove, the effort was fated.

Kane's primary focus through all of this is on the lay experience, and this she traces through multiple aspects of the culture, including such off-beat components thereof as architecture and the dime novel. Predictably she finds the period belonging very much to the male species, though with subtle changes beginning to occur.

As wage-earners and incipient rivals to the Brahmin elite, Boston's Catholic men had always been expected to be part of the wider society. With the new century, however, came the dawning realization that women might be other than mere keepers of the hearth. That was progress, but as Kane makes clear, the enlightenment derived less from altruism than a sense that women would be useful in the fight against "paganism" and unwonted modernist tendencies generally. Hence, though still to be of the home, Catholic women were allowed to move beyond it, and so was born the organized Catholic women's movement.

The church in Boston was especially energetic in activating its women, but was Boston being progressive or was it responding to an agenda originating elsewhere? Kane notes, for instance, that the formation of Boston's League of Catholic Women occurred concurrently with that of similar groups in Italy, Holland, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Canada, and South America. To Kane the circumstance smacks of "an orchestrated score," but she stops short of arguing that Boston was part of deliberate strategy, any more than it was earlier in keeping women cooped up in the home. Boston's bishops and priests, she feels, "were more often victims of their own idealized expectations of womanhood and dutifully parroted papal warnings that the numerous |isms' generated by secularism posed threats to women's place and the family unit."

Subservience and submissiveness to priestly authority and discipline were necessary conditions for Boston's Catholic women's groups, but even under the arrangement Kane finds that they "managed to enlarge women's sphere" and at the same time perform significant social services to immigrants, working girls, prisoners, the sick, the poor and illiterate. Those contributions were to remain "largely anonymous in historical accounts," she adds, but nonetheless they dramatically heightened the visibility of Catholic women.

It goes without saying that church policy was often wrong-headed, although it did buttress a subculture as intended. For a separatism to endure, however, certain elements had to remain stable--specifically, says Kane, "clericalism, lay deference in matters of moral purity, and shared concepts of human moral development." As it turned out, each was to erode. First, there was the growth of an Americanized middle class with an educated constituency that would challenge the clergy's status as an intellectual elite. Also, with the melting pot at full boil, there was the deterioration of the central ethnic core, the Irish; the local church became more heterogeneous and it was a new game for everyone.

Beyond the walls, meanwhile, a more secular mass culture was taking shape, driven by that amazing novelty, the moving picture. Though church leaders sought to control the culture's directions by joining forces with reactionary Protestant watch-dogs (a negative ecumenism aborning), the die was cast. The church was not to be the culture's custodian.

Indeed, as Kane's book progresses, it is apparent that the church has all it can do to be custodian of its own house, though it did manage. The subculture would survive for several decades more, though never as idealized as between 1900 and 1920. As for women, little would change. They would remain in subsidiary roles until the twin stirrings of "women's lib" and the riptides of the postconciliar period. But that is not this book's story.

Obviously there's an arsenal of information in Kane's book for the tendentious historian, but tendentiousness is not her mood. That's effective methodology for the scholar. It may let a triumphalist, myopic, and male chauvinist local church off lightly, but it allows much new light on a fascinating period of national and ecclesiastical history.