In her ground-breaking article on Irish governesses twenty-five years ago, Deirdre Raftery pointed out that many women from middle-class backgrounds in the nineteenth century considered national school teaching beneath them and chose the more prestigious, but far more precarious, job of governessing. Thus, the small farmer’s daughter had her foot on a ladder that the doctor’s daughter was too class-bound to climb. Raftery’s latest book, equally ground-breaking, is about the geographical and social mobility of up to 20,000 adventurous Irish women who journeyed over land and sea to set up or populate convents in North America, Australia and India from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Women who volunteered for the religious life abroad usually did not have to bring dowries with them, so the social net was cast wider than it was for convents in Ireland. The only qualifications were education and, of course, good health. A Presentation convent in North Dakota recruited several girls from the industrial school run by the Sisters of Mercy in Kinsale between 1903 and 1913, to become teaching nuns. Raftery, like Suellen Hoy before her (who looked at Irish nuns going to the U.S.A. specifically), points out that even a national school education that continued until age sixteen in the form of a monitor or pupil-teachership was a good grounding for the work that lay ahead of these women. And many had more than this in the excellent superior/secondary convent schools, researched by Ciaran O’Neill, Mary Hatfield and Raftery herself.

In the early nineteenth century, small Irish convents found it difficult to make foreign foundations; the superior of Galway Presentation convent in 1833, for example, parted only reluctantly with the four sisters she sent to Newfoundland to minister to the 14,000 Irish people there. But even then, the women themselves were eager to go. When a bishop from Pittsburgh came to Carlow Mercy convent in 1843 to ask for nuns to go back with him, the whole convent volunteered. Only four went. As Irish convents grew bigger, they could spare more members. So great was the demand from abroad, but equally importantly, for the supply of willing recruits that in the 1870s and 1880s the Presentation and Mercy established ‘aspirancies’ — convent schools (in Kilcock, County Kildare and Callan, County Kilkenny respectively), for aspiring young missionaries, to let them try out convent life before making a firm commitment.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, those embarking on the religious life abroad often travelled as aspirants or postulants (the stage before formally becoming a novice) and ‘entered’ at their destinations. This gave them a certain freedom on the voyage out. One of my grand-aunts, Clarewoman Julia Ryan, who entered a Presentation convent in Melbourne around 1920, had some fun, including mild flirtations, on the ship. (She did not say whether she got a proposal of marriage, like the two Loreto postulants Raftery refers to, en route to India in 1851). Julia, later Sr Killian, had three other sisters who became nuns in Australia and India, and they already had nine aunts (all sisters from one family) nuns, many in India and Australia. This was not unusual. Familial and friendship bonds, Raftery shows, were crucial in the religious life for building strong networks across convents and continents.

This book wears its thorough research lightly — the appendices alone are a key database — and it reads like a story. I have only scratched its surface in this short review. Bishops and priests feature only marginally; the one in Perth, Australia who visited the Sisters of Mercy too often in the 1840s was swatted away like a fly. Some others failed to provide accommodation to the nuns they had invited; ‘No bishop. No welcome. No convent. No school’ noted a Kilkenny Presentation nun tersely of her little group’s arrival in Dubuque, Iowa in 1874 (p. 92). All these disadvantages were endured as stoically as the extreme heat and cold. Talking of weather, a group of young Loreto postulants travelling to India in 1895 threw all their heavy woollen habits overboard when they donned their lighter tropical clothes in the Indian Ocean. The Reverend Mother at their destination was angry (understandably!), because wool was hard to get in India, and she sent word back to Ireland that on future voyages, nothing was to be thrown into the sea, ‘except certain linen’ (p. 79). This little story shows just how young and hopeful some of these prospective nuns were, consigning their old world joyfully to the deep, and at a more mundane level, the reference to ‘certain linen’ gives a clue about how women managed menstruation on board ship. The history of nuns is the history of girls and women, and we cannot have enough of it.