| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836–1920. By Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xiv, 327 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2473-9. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4774-7.)

Mary Ewens's The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth-Century America (1971) broke new ground in the chronicling of women's religious orders by placing nuns at the center of a vibrant and complex narrative about the shaping of American culture as a whole. In Spirited Lives Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith follow Ewens in moving well beyond the scope of traditional "convent histories" while focusing on a single religious order—the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (CSJS). The community numbered just six on its arrival from France in 1836, and it eventually grew to become one of the largest American sisterhoods. The nuns mirrored in their own ethnic, class, and geographical diversity the diversity of the burgeoning American Catholic population. Coburn and Smith ably place the CSJS in the context of Catholic growth in the United States, showing how the church's survival and expansion would have been quite impossible apart from the institution-building labors of American nuns. Wielding extensive research with great deftness, the authors light on vivid archival examples to convey the texture of the lives under discussion and, in particular, to illustrate the shrewdness of CSJS negotiations with the Catholic male hierarchy in all aspects of their work.

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