ABSTRACT
In 1870, 10 Dominican Sisters left their convent in Dublin, Ireland and sailed to the ‘very antipodes’ to set up primary and secondary schools for the daughters and sons of Irish settlers in Dunedin, New Zealand. Along with thousands of Sister Teachers who travelled to the New World in the nineteenth century, Dominican Sisters played a major role in the establishment and expansion of educational systems in countries such as Australia, the United States, South Africa and New Zealand. This article builds on an increased scholarly interest in the history of Catholic Sisters and the expanding body of literature, particularly in the Western world, that is considering ways in which nuns were and are ‘central’ not only to Catholic history, but also to women’s history, the history of education and the social history of nations.1 It sets out to examine the Sisters’
1See for example, Margaret MacCurtain, ‘Late in the Field: Catholic Sisters in TwentiethCentury Ireland and the New Religious History’, Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 4 (1995): 49-63; John Fialka, Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2003); Bart Hellinckx, Frank Simon and Marc Depaepe, The Forgotten Contribution of the Teaching Sisters: A Historiographical Essay on the Educational Work of Catholic Women Religious in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009); Stephanie Burley, ‘Engagement with Empires: Irish Catholic Female Religious Teachers in Colonial South Australia, 1868-1901’, Irish Educational Studies 31, no. 2 (2012): 175-90; Jenny Collins, ‘Creating Spaces in a Male Domain: Sister Principals in Catholic Schools, 1850-1974’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 46, no. 1 (2014): 79-92.
