BLACK ROBES / GOOD HABITS JESUITS AND EARLY WOMEN’S EDUCATION IN NORTH AMERICA

• Published in: Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies p. 116
• Main Author: Carol Mattingly
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Fordham University Press 25.03.2016
• Subjects: American minorities; American studies; Anthropology; Behavioral sciences; Christian missionaries; Christian philosophy; Christianity; Church groups; Clergy; Communities; Convents; Ecclesiology; Ethnic groups; Ethnography; Ethnology; Gender studies; History of the Americas; Human societies; Missionaries; Native Americans; North American history; Nuns; Practical theology; Priests; Religion; Religious institutions; Religious organizations; Social groups; Social sciences; Society of Jesus; Sociology; Spiritual belief systems; Spiritual leaders; Theology; United States history; Womens education
• ISBN: 0823264521; 9780823264520

Jesuit missionaries were instrumental in initiating and assuring the success of many of the earliest schools for girls and women in North America. Although histories of “American” women’s education often cite early Protestant women as “pioneers” in this cause, crediting them with the initiation of women’s education, the French created schools for girls and women in New France much earlier. Even in the early nineteenth-century United States, Protestant pioneers such as Mary Lyon and Catharine Beecher successfully raised money for their own schools because of fears surrounding the highly successful Catholic academies operated by nuns and sisters (see Mattingly, “Beyond”