This thesis examines the Roman Catholic religious order, the Oblate Sisters of Providence (OSP), and their roles as educators, religious women, and community leaders from the antebellum period through the Reconstruction era.In 1828, the Oblate's founder, Mother Mary Lange, created the religious order alongside Sulpician Priest, Father James Nicholas Joubert. The Oblate Sisters' primary mission was to educate African American girls despite the pressures to the contrary in the slaveholding state of Maryland. Also, the Oblate sisters had founded their school, Saint Frances Academy, which offered African American girls a religious, classical, and vocational education. The school endeavored to give students a skillset to survive in the local economy while allowing young girls and religious nuns to positively define notions of Black womanhood through the Catholic faith.As the first female Catholic religious order of African descent in the United States, the Oblate sisters endured opposition from both the Catholic Church and the community of Baltimore. Even though the strict consecrated life required by the church could be perceived as oppressive of women, especially Black women who lived in a society restricted by enslavement, the Oblates successfully built a sanctuary community that offered a degree of freedom for young African American girls and women.This thesis argues that the Oblate's actions offered Black girls and women possibilities to resist societal expectations of Black womanhood. However, empowering Black girls and women to specifically reject these expectations was not the order's intent. The community did not see themselves as activist or Black feminists. Instead, the Oblates embraced the Cult of True Womanhood, which restricted women significantly. However, by following these traditional gender standards, the Oblates upended racist expectations of Black womanhood. As a result,their contributions during the antebellum period through Reconstruction aided the educational advancement of African American girls and women and challenged the intersectional oppression they encountered in the Catholic Church, the city of Baltimore, Maryland, and American society at large.

Annotation Founded in Baltimore in 1828, the Oblate Sisters of Providence formed the first permanent African-American Roman Catholic sisterhood in the United States. Exploring the antebellum history of this pioneering sisterhood, Batts Morrow demonstrates the centrality of race in the Oblate experience.

Biographical essays on 500 Afro-American women that combine life histories with information on the key people, places, institutions, and events that have had an impact on these women.

In Subversive Habits, Shannen Dee Williams provides the first full history of Black Catholic nuns in the United States, hailing them as the forgotten prophets of Catholicism and democracy. Drawing on oral histories and previously sealed Church records, Williams demonstrates how master narratives of women’s religious life and Catholic commitments to racial and gender justice fundamentally change when the lives and experiences of African American nuns are taken seriously. For Black Catholic women and girls, embracing the celibate religious state constituted a radical act of resistance to white supremacy and the sexual terrorism built into chattel slavery and segregation. Williams shows how Black sisters—such as Sister Mary Antona Ebo, who was the only Black member of the inaugural delegation of Catholic sisters to travel to Selma, Alabama, and join the Black voting rights marches of 1965—were pioneering religious leaders, educators, healthcare professionals, desegregation foot soldiers, Black Power activists, and womanist theologians. In the process, Williams calls attention to Catholic women’s religious life as a stronghold of white supremacy and racial segregation—and thus an important battleground in the long African American freedom struggle.

On the rainy morning of October 1, 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized Mother Katharine Drexel. Born into a wealthy Philadelphia family, Drexel bucked society and formed the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People. Her compelling personal story has excited many biographers who have highlighted her holiness and catalogued her good deeds. During her life, newspapers called her the "Millionaire Nun," and much of the literature on Drexel and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament exalts Katharine Drexel's disbursement of her vast fortune to benefit Black and Indigenous people. The often repeated stories of a riches to rags holy woman miss the true significance of what Mother Katharine and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament attempted. Drexel was not merely the ATM of Catholic Home Missions; rather, she challenged the hierarchy to reimagine its mission in the United States. In an era when the Church controlled the actions and censored the opinions of women religious, they had to listen to Mother Katharine. Most writing on Drexel and the SBS focus on Drexel's spiritual journey, but Veiled Leadership traces the daily operations of her charitable empire and looks at how the Sisters implemented Drexel's vision in the field. The SBS were not always welcomed in the communities they served, and they experienced conflict from both white supremacists and the people they wanted to aid. Veiled Leadership examines the lives of Mother Katharine and her congregation within the context of larger constructs of gender, race, religion, reform, and national identity. It explores what happens when a non-dominant culture tries to impose its views and morals on other non-dominant cultures. In other words, as outliers themselves-they were semi-cloistered Catholic women from primarily immigrant backgrounds in a culture that regarded their lifestyles as alien and unnatural-their attempts to Americanize and assimilate Black and Indigenous people, whose families had been in the country for generations longer than the nuns' own, adds complexity to our understanding of cultural hegemony.