Habits of Compassion

Maureen Fitzgerald is an associate professor of religious studies and American studies at the College of William and Mary.

Co-winner of the 2006 First Book Prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. "An impressive cultural and political history that will undoubtedly revise the standard interpretation of the origins of welfare reform."--National Catholic Weekly"Well-written and conceived and will provide academics or general readers with a plethora of information and analysis about the activities of American Catholic sisters in nineteenth and early twentieth-century America."--American Catholic Studies "It is a pleasure to read such a well-researched discussion of the many intersections between the work of the sisters and politics. This is an important corrective history that allows these clearheaded Irishwomen to emerge from the shadows of mainstream history."--Journal of American History "The story of the collective accomplishments of women religious in America has never been told in its entirety, and indeed, given its richness and complexity, one can wonder if any telling could ever do complete justice to it. However that might be, Maureen Fitzgerald has succeeded impressively in narrating part of that story in her book. . . . Habits of Compassion is the result of thoroughgoing and meticulous research and is replete with interesting and illuminating information. It should be considered required reading for anyone who wants to be informed of a very important, but hitherto neglected, aspect of modern American history."--FCS Quarterly "With this ambitious and provocative study, Maureen Fitzgerald contributes substantively to the burgeoning field of scholarship acknowledging the seminal roles women religious have played historically in the formation of American culture and society."--Catholic Historical Review "In this excellent book, Maureen Fitzgerald uncovers the unheralded pioneer labor of working-class, Irish women religious in charitable work in New York City."--Journal of American Ethnic History “It is not only one of the most sophisticated works that we have on nuns in nineteenth-century America, but it also reminds us how central religion--whether Protestant or Catholic--was to the invention of many of the institutions of the American state.”--Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

• Contents Introduction 1. Republican Mothers and Brides of Christ 2. Good Girls, Bad Girls, and the Great Hunger, 1845-70 3. Placing-Out and Irish-Catholic Cultural Reproduction, 1848-64 4. Saving the Children from the Child-Savers, 1864-94 5. "The Family" and "the Institution": The Roads to the White House, 1890-1909 6. The Immaculate Conception of the Welfare State, 1895-1920 Notes Index