ABSTRACT
The arrival of more than three million Catholic immigrants in the middle decades of the nineteenth century reconfigured urban spaces and magnified existing tensions among races, classes, and regions. Skilled craftspeople viewed the immigrants as fodder for industrialists, while factory owners saw them as shiftless and unprofitable. Immigrants threatened industrial and domestic laborers by accepting even the lowest-paying jobs, which until then only free black men and women had been called on to fill. In reading images of nuns and prostitutes to the ideology of the Protestant woman's sphere, it follow a strand taken up by a number of theorists of Protestant-Catholic encounters in nineteenth-century America: the pervasive cultural representation of Catholicism as feminine, and the attendant imputation, by its detractors, of licentiousness. Even where Catholicism was imagined in tyrannical opposition to women's freedoms, the visibility of nuns as capable negotiators of masculine authority within their own traditions cast them as Arminian reformers of an enslaving system.
