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. 9 Catholicism however, remains defined by a sex-negative status in the historical imagination, cut adrift from the processes which produced the ‘modern’ sexual subject. Grand narratives of religious decline and sexual liberation have fallen out of vogue: their propensity to flatten out the messy and textured nature of everyday life has left them open to condemnation. ‘Post-secular’ is the latest
and, as a heuristic device, is intended to focus our perceptions on female youth. 2 Historian Timothy Burke sees the gap between representation and lived experience as meaningful and argues that representations of the Modern Girl influenced the way ‘everyday life is shaped by human agents’. 3 This influence is important because, as this chapter will demonstrate, understandings of the Modern Girl influenced the actions of religious institutes. The Modern Girl, is of course, a very familiar trope. She appears in social critic Eliza Lynn Linton’s 1868 piece on the
and agency emerged. The interviewees’ testimony therefore encourages us to reframe the question we ask of their memories – what tactics did Catholic women employ to negotiate the dual demands of spirituality and sexuality? The word tactics rather than strategies is used advisedly. It borrows from Michel de Certeau’s distinction between the two. In The Practice of Everyday Life , De Certeau spoke of
once more to newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, which advertised holy statues, religious pictures, rosary beads, representations of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and holy water fonts.153 ‘Serving as much more than incidental decoration’, explains historian David Morgan, ‘these images underscore the sacred function of the family and ground the formation of Christian identity in the everyday life of the home’.154 Margaret Cusack wrote in her 1877 Good Reading for Girls that girls should help their mothers manage household Catholicism; this would keep them away from
difficult, her relationship with her family curtailed and that her everyday life would be structured and strict. She identified herself as part of a ‘we’ that had been socialised to avoid proffering criticism, pointing to an automatic acceptance of traditions, customs and even ‘funny things’. She recalled the ‘shock’ of encountering a cohort of women in the 1970s who began to question the status quo of religious life and who asked for (and received) ‘a new set of crayons’. Then in her late forties, the religious life she knew and loved had begun to change. Some changes
–1. 127 Irish Countrywomen’s Association interview cited in Longford Women’s Voices, p. 68. 128 Martin Verling, ed., Beara Woman Talking: Folklore from the Beara Peninsula (Cork: Mercier Press, 2003), p. 45. The narratives in this text were collected by Tadhg Ó Murchú in the 1950s from informant Peig Minihane, who was in her nineties at the time. 129 Verling , ed., Beara Woman Talking, p. 45. 130 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 189. 131 Meredith B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 106
, Co. Cork, NFC 132, p. 119. 32 NLI, Ms. 18869. Description of Tobernaltha Well, Sligo. Lord Walter Fitzgerald papers. 33 Carbery, The Farm by Lough Gur, p. 69. 34 Ibid., p. 4. 35 Ibid., pp. 56–7. 204 irish women 36 O’Sullivan, Praxis, vol. 1, p. 150. 37 Ibid. 38 NFC 1143, p. 208, cited in Patricia Lysaght, ‘The uses of sacramentals in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland with special reference to the brown scapular’, in Religion in Everyday Life: Papers given at a Symposium in Stockholm, 13–15 September 1993, arranged by the Royal Academy of Letters
a bride of Christ. She had probably experienced the possibilities and traumas of becoming modern proposed by philosopher Marshall Berman: To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. 2 The ‘pain of change’ was less emotively noted in the narratives of the nuns and sisters I interviewed though many experienced the tensions and the pain of everyday life
reception of postulants, and their admission to the novitiate and their profession; and procedures for the system of governance including election of convent leadership. 29 Usually, the traditions of a community were codified in manuals and guides that were written by or considered to reflect the founder’s directives. The detailed minutiae of this guidance regimented everyday life. Bridgettines were instructed in the Syon Additions (1425) on prayers and reading before, during and after meals. Three times during a meal, the nuns stopped to pray five Hail Marys. 30
trailed off here, but it was clear that she attributed the survival of her faith to the changes that occurred in her later marriage. A key manifestation of this ‘spiritual life’ was a change in her ‘prayer life’ – a phrase which mirrored the more colloquially used ‘sex life’. She described a shift from ‘box ticking’ to a ‘personalised’ form of prayer which related to her everyday life