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Daughters Of Charity: Catholic Women And Their Communities In Antebellum America, Linda Merritt Mccubbins

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This study calls into question common assumptions about the limited public role of Catholic women during the antebellum period of American history. To understand the roles Protestant women played during this era, it is important to understand Catholic women's roles. Through primary and secondary source documents, the similarities and differences relating to church structure and theology will be documented. The study will also examine reasons why Protestant women converted to Catholicism during a profoundly anti-Catholic era.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women, both Catholic and Protestant, played an increasingly public role through organized benevolence and other activities. …