French Catholic Teaching Sisters Go International: Rereading Histories of Girls’ Education Through a Political and Transnational Lens

Abstract

Scholars working on Catholic religious congregations or Protestant missionaries have long highlighted how women participated in the "civilizing process," offering religious lessons, opening schools, and teaching professional skills to "heathen" girls throughout the world. The ISCHE conferences in Lisbon (Portugal) on the colonial experience in 1993 or the conference in Maynooth (Ireland) on faiths and education in 1997 brought ample evidence that women, alongside men, were very much part of a process that led Europeans to move beyond their national borders to spread their faith. 1 This scholarship, however, had relatively little impact on histories of French education in large part thanks to a republican historiographic tradition, which tended to focus on "progressive" forces of change. 2 Within this historical narrative, women religious were