When English women of social privilege converted to Catholicism in late 19th and early 20th century England, they exhibited autonomy very unusual for women of the time — pushing against traditional notions of Englishness and femininity. This is New Womanhood: rejecting all passively suggested ideas of English Victorian Womanhood and setting out on one’s own path. But they joined an English Church that was itself full of new converts, and at times not quite sure what to do with them or their ideas.
As this talk will show, this ambiguity surprisingly often resulted in lay women being brought more closely into the fold of the Church and becoming an important foundation of the growing Church. But were their ideas in fact Protestant? Political? Could their membership damage the existing community? This talk will argue that lay female converts helped to remold and rethink old modes of True Catholic Womanhood, but did so in a way that shows their complete dedication to their new faith. They were ‘pious transgressors.’
Kathryn Lamontagne, PhD, FRHS, is a lecturer in Social Sciences and History at Boston University, College of General Studies. She is a social and cultural historian who works in areas of gender, sexuality, and faith in the British Atlantic world. She is the author of Reconsidering Lay Catholic Women: Pious Transgressors in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England (Routledge, 2024) and has published on the intersections of working-class life in Fall River, Massachusetts, and Radclyffe Hall & Cultural Catholicism. She holds MAs from Providence College, University of London, and Boston University, where she completed her doctoral studies in 2020. A former member of the Royal Household, she regularly appears in the US media as an expert on the British Royal Family.
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