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BOOK REVIEWS 147
Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins
of New York’s Welfare System, 1830-1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2006. Pp. 298. $25.00.
Reviewed by Kathleen Sprows Cummings, University of Notre Dame
This book’s opening paragraph describes the funeral procession of Sister Mary Irene
Fitzgibbon in New York City in August 1896. An estimated crowd of twenty thousand
turned out to mourn Sister Mary Irene, an Irish-American Sister of Charity who had
established the New York Founding Asylum and supervised it for twenty-seven years.
Under a headline that proclaimed “Sister Mary Irene is Dead,” the New York Times
praised her as “the most remarkable woman of her age in her sphere of philanthropy.”
The attention lavished upon Fitzgibbon on the occasion of her death stands in
marked contrast to her invisibility in historical studies of American women and social
reform. This is true also of Catholic women religious more generally. Though there has
been a flowering of meticulous and engaging scholarship on nuns in the last two decades,
this work has rarely been considered by historians of American women. Fitzgerald
ascribes Sister Irene’s “erasure” from women’s history to the overarching Protestant
frameworks that structure the field. Like other women religious, Sister Mary Irene does
not fit those frameworks, and therefore disappears from the narrative.
There is good reason to believe that Habits of Compassion will break down this
divide. Fitzgerald situates Irish Catholic sisters squarely within a subject that has become
central to the field of women’s history—maternalist politics and the creation of the
welfare state—and shows how paying attention to nuns calls conventional interpretations
of that subject into question. Specifically, Fitzgerald challenges “a framework for
American women’s history that renders women of non-dominant cultures and poor
women as objects of reform but rarely agents able to influence women and men of the
dominant culture or the ideological or institutional premises of the dominant culture
itself” (7). While most historians of American women assume that the existence of the
modern welfare system is owed to the beneficence of elite Protestants, Fitzgerald argues
that it developed both as a result of and in response to the efforts of working-class Irish
Catholic sisters to offer succor to the urban poor.
In mid-nineteenth century New York, an increase in Irish migration and declining
conditions for the poor collided with middle-class understandings of children as innocent
and therefore redeemable. The “placing-out system” of child care, by which poor
Catholic children were removed permanently from their parents, and adopted by
Protestant families, was presented as a means to “rescue” children from lifelong poverty
and depravity. Catholic sisters, many of whom came from Irish backgrounds, consciously
created an institutional system of child care as an alternative to the placing-out system.
With the assistance of Tammany Hall politicians, with whom they shared close ethnic
and religious ties, New York’s women religious were able to channel public funds toward
relief for the Irish poor that, unlike the charity proffered by Protestant elites, allowed
them to keep family and religious bonds intact. Sister Mary Irene’s Founding Asylum