'The Escaped Nun' and Feminist History

Edith O’Gorman, ‘The Escaped Nun’, was an Irish-American woman who had a successful career throughout US, UK, Australia and New Zealand from the 1870s-1900s presenting lurid lectures about the dangers of convent life for women.  Her lectures and autobiographical books were highly emotional denunciations of Catholicism arguing that the church was irrational yet cunning at ‘beguiling unstable hearts through the empty, theatrical and alluring ceremonies of a religion which has a peculiar charm for children and weak minds’. The responses by civil and ecclesiastical authorities to her and her lectures tried to undercut the heightened emotional register with reason and calm, reinforcing as they did the links between emotion and femininity. The difficulties for feminist readings of her work, and the genre of ‘escaped nun’ narratives in general, are the complexities of interpreting these reports of repressed sexuality and abuse within the Catholic church. How do we as feminist historians grapple with the stories presented by women like Edith O’Gorman, especially in the light of contemporary disclosures of historical institutional sexual abuse? Her theatricality, obvious biographical inconsistencies, and her engagement with ultra protestant groups throughout the English-speaking world make her a difficult subject for feminist analysis.