Abstract: Historians of American religion have long studied the religious callings and conversions of evangelical Protestant women, especially as catalysts for participation in antebellum benevolence and reform activities. Although the Catholic vocation to religious life and the Protestant conversion experience had significant differences, they were both affirmative responses to perceived divine calls. Each demanded a life transformation and a life-long commitment that frequently became the impulse to combat social ills. Qualitative and quantitative evidence for the vocations of Catholic sisters in the Archdiocese of Baltimore supports scholarly interpretations of a "spiritual economy" in the Early Republic, but with a Catholic difference. If middle-class Protestants galvanized by the revivals of the Second Great Awakening represented the "demand side" of the spiritual economy, then Catholics—especially newcomers from Ireland and Germany—represented its "supply side," one that cut closer to the economic bone. For Catholic women, convent life posed an appealing alternative to marriage and family, often set in impoverished urban neighborhoods, or employment in factories or domestic service. By the 1830s, the "demand side" was also increasing, as an expanding convent system offered an array of religious communities and ministries to select, whether contemplative or active, cloistered or non-cloistered, or American or European in origin. Differences among various sisterhoods may not have been well understood by Catholics, but the diversity showed considerably enlarged alternatives for Catholic women's life roles.
Joseph G. Mannard (Thu,) studied this question.