Karen Armstrong and Eleanor Stewart wrote two very different accounts of convent life in the 1960s. The only thing these books have in common is that both women ended up leaving the religious life after less than a decade.
Armstrong entered a religious order in England in 1962; she doesn’t tell us which one, but it was strict, even by pre-Vatican 2 standards. Kissing the ground and other nuns’ feet after the ‘Chapter of Faults’ was common practice (as it was in many communities), and dumb, blind obedience was the norm. In one ludicrous instance, Armstrong had to sit in front of a sewing-machine with no needle, having been abused by her superior for drawing attention to the lack of a needle, and then, she was abused for wasting her time and not working – despite the fact that she could not do so. This was all to conquer her pride. News from the outside world was strictly censored; at one stage the novices were asked to pray that there would not be world war, during the Cuban missile crisis, and months later Armstrong asked one of her superiors what actually happened and heard that the crisis passed; the older nuns thought it very funny that the younger ones didn’t know this. During her weeks of strict seclusion coming up to her profession, her parents, who happened to be in the area, dropped in unannounced, in the hopes of seeing her, and were not allowed to do so. (They saw her at the formal occasion of her first profession.) Armstrong could have put up with all this, though, if she hadn’t been constantly badgered and bullied about her faults. Like Baldwin and Coldstream (who I’ll be writing about again) she found the hardship and austerity and even the seclusion of the life, although challenging, manageable enough; it was the inhumanity and irrationality that repelled her.
Stewart had a far more positive experience, which is probably why she tells us the name of the order – the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Evron – which she entered in France in 1961. When she and her English companion, Susan, entered the convent first as postulants, they had to beg the sisters not to give them the ‘full English breakfast’ every morning, explaining that it was only a weekend event in England. The everyday food, although plain, was much better (naturally) than in England, the nuns drank rough cider with their meals, and even though there were Chapters of Faults and early rising and all the ordinary discomforts of an ascetic life, there was a lot more humanity. Hair was not cut off, though it had to be managed under the veil so it was kept short. (Armstrong’s was hacked off roughly at her first profession, but she didn’t mind at all.) One novice was allowed to go home for her mother’s funeral, which would have been unthinkable in Armstrong’s convent. (An aunt of mine who entered an enclosed order in Ireland in 1940 did not get home for family funerals or weddings until after Vatican 2). An interest in world affairs was not discouraged. There was a sensitivity to physical difficulty completely lacking in Armstrong’s convent; one of the novices who had a feather allergy, was excused not only from plucking turkeys, but from using the feather broom. And the novices got 2 weeks ‘holidays’ in a house in the country with lots of fresh air and picnics and a relaxed timetable. The novice mistress welcomed debate about Galileo and discussion of Bad Popes, and complaining about an irrational or unjust order was not the terrible sin it was in Armstrong’s convent. The only time Stewart got into serious trouble she deserved it, for making fun of an elderly priest whose opinions she did not like. She attributes the more relaxed atmosphere of French convents to the strong secular society there between 1871 and 1940, but maybe English people were just fonder of rules, and Irish people too. Stewart left the convent after her nurse-training in Liverpool (there are some great stories about her midwifery practice) and it isn’t exactly clear why she did so. She didn’t experience a spiritual drought, and she wasn’t physically sick all the time like Armstrong. She just felt that the convent wasn’t the place for her anymore. The sisters parted with her affectionately, if sadly, but then, so did Armstrong’s superiors, with an understanding that was too little, too late. Armstrong admits that she probably would have left in any case, and in an afterword written in 1980, is ambivalent about some of the Vatican 2 changes which altered the religious life as she experienced it, out of all recognition.
Both of these books are page-turners and neither is in any sense a ‘misery memoir’. Neither woman regrets the time she spent in the religious life; whether they learned from it, or what they learned from it, is another matter. Stewart doesn’t venture into speculation about this, but Armstrong comments in her afterword that she has, in adulthood, developed the values of detachment and self-sufficiency urged upon her in the convent, and finds that they can harden all too easily into complacency.
Entering the convent was a very normal and unremarkable thing for a Catholic woman to do in the 1960s and even the 1970s, and this comes across in both books. Families were surprised and even bereft, but resigned. The female religious life has changed significantly since the 1960s, so these are two very important historical documents.
Karen Armstrong, Through The Narrow Gate: a nun’s story (London: Macmillan 1981: Flamingo 1997).
Eleanor Stewart, Kicking The Habit: from convent to Casualty in 1960s Liverpool (Oxford: Lion Hudson 2013).
NOTE: Coming up to Christmas I will post every fortnight instead of every week.
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