Nun Dolls: Connecting Sisters Globally Through Clothing
If you have ever visited an archdiocese or cathedral museum, you might have encountered a collection of nun dolls. Whether your initial reaction was delight or apprehension, nun dolls always inspire curiosity. Who made them and why?
The answer reveals an unexpected corridor of connectivity among women religious in the global age.
This exhibit features the nun doll collections of the St. Louis Archdiocesan archives and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet Consolidated Archives, in addition to documentary sources held by the archdiocese, the Sisters of St. Joseph, and the Sisters of the Visitation archives.
An Unexpected Gift from the Sisters of the Visitation
In 1799, Bishop Leonard Neale (1746-1817) of Baltimore set out to found a Visitation community in Georgetown with three “Pious Ladies,” Alice Lalor, an Irish immigrant (later, Mother Teresa Lalor), Maria McDermott, and Maria Sharpe. The French Visitandine communities had all been dispersed during the French Revolution, leaving Neale’s community without important foundational knowledge of Visitandine customs or ceremonies. Because the Georgetown sisters did not know what the habits of the Visitation Order looked like, they wore modest secular clothing.
By 1816, some Visitandine communities had been re-founded in France. These French sisters learned for the first time from visiting Jesuit missionaries that a new house of their Order had been established in America. They wrote to this new community in Georgetown, inviting them to tell the story of their house’s foundation, and soon developed more regular correspondence. Bishop Neale requested that the French Visitandines send a complete habit of their Order to Georgetown, and in November of 1817, the Georgetown sisters received a doll dressed in full habit.
The French sisters had created a version of themselves in miniature to model their special style of dress for their American counterparts.
From the 1650s to the 1920s, women’s religious orders actively used dolls to regulate dress. As we can see in the case of the American Visitandines, the maintenance of consistency in dress was directly related to the missionary context as new houses attempted to navigate the many obstacles to missionaries’ communication with European mother houses.
The Habit as a Blessing and a Curse
The nun’s habit has always been perceived as an outward sign of a sister’s religiosity. From the very first days of monastic orders, professed men and women distinguished themselves from the laity by cultivating a particular outward appearance. Specialized garments, hairstyles, and sameness of dress communicated their vocation in a way that transcended the boundaries of language and geographical distance.
For women religious in particular, the habit could reflect their “in-between” gendered status. To become a nun was to become a Bride of Christ (sponsa Christi) who entered into a spiritual marriage with God. This marriage was – and is still – commemorated by the adoption of a “wedding” ring as part of a nun’s habit.
But these chaste marriages produced no children, meaning that sisters did not conform to the Catholic ideal of women as mothers. Their desexualized bodies were hidden by the voluminous fabric of their habits, leaving only their disembodied faces.
On the one hand, this camouflage elevated their status above laywomen, endowing them with the independence to go places and do work that otherwise would not have been perceived as socially acceptable for women to do. Their habit protected these sexless holy figures who ran schools, hospitals, orphanages, and other social agencies, operating with remarkable authority and autonomy from men.
But for the women missionaries arriving on the American frontier from France in the early 1800s, their habits became a dangerous liability.
Missionary Nuns Incognito
From the Consolidated Archives of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, the memoires of Sister St. Protais Déboille show just how much of a liability the habit could be. Sister St. Protais was one of the original six sisters who traveled from Lyon, France, to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1836 on the Sisters of St. Joseph’s first American mission.
She writes that upon their arrival, a group of Usrulines and Sisters of Charity cautioned them against wearing their habit in public because “people would think that some nuns had escape[d] from the convent.”
Catholics in nineteenth-century America faced considerable anti-Catholic prejudice from American Protestants. Women often bore the brunt of this prejudice, as Protestants often assumed women who entered a convent were either kidnapped or coerced. The “mysterious” distinctive clothing that protected the sisters in certain circumstances now telegraphed their foreignness, their abnormality, and their dangerously independent masculinity. The Sisters of St. Joseph and most women religious had to travel incognito in secular clothing while conducting their American missionary work to avoid insults and harassment that included death threats, convent burnings, and bodily assaults.
Nun Dolls and the Habit Today
The nun dolls of the past could provide an important sense of connectivity between European mother houses and newly established houses cut off from their roots on the American frontier by illustrating the traditional identifying dress of the order. But as the technology of communication improved and nun dolls were no longer needed to regulate consistency of dress around the globe, their meanings changed and intersected with larger debates about the roles and expectations for modern women religious in the twentieth century.
- Nun dolls were sometimes kept as mementos by families whose daughters joined convents.
- They were also used to exhibit historically accurate habits and so served as a perceived window into the past for those interested in the evolution of women’s religious attire.
- They were purchased and displayed to celebrate Catholicism, and in some cases, they became holy objects themselves when blessed by a priest.
But most significantly, they evoked a sense of nostalgia for an imagined ideal Catholic past. In an interview in 1995, Linda Thompson, vice president of Vlasta Dolls, described the nun dolls as “a throwback for a lot of Catholics.”
After Vatican II, the worldwide conference of Catholic bishops from 1962 to 1965 that reconsidered the church’s role in the world and proposed “updating” (Italian: aggiornamento) the Church, the habit became central to debates about updating the roles of women religious, too. In 1979, seven thousand women religious protested the habit during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Washington D.C.
The Pope responded, “your consecration to God should be manifested in the permanent exterior sign of a simple and suitable religious garb. This is not only my personal conviction, but also the desire of the church, often expressed by so many of the faithful.”
This was not very encouraging for the sisters – standing in silent protest – who saw the habit as impractical, outdated, self-effacing, and restrictive.
By the 1980s, the meaning and the appeal of nun dolls had changed in response to these debates. The Cholewa Marketing Corporation sold ‘genuine nun dolls’ and marketed them as a way to recapture the ‘nostalgic experience’ of being taught by nuns, as one 1987 advertisement claimed.
“[The doll] implies that those who do choose to wear a habit belong on a shelf…Those of us who no longer wear the old-fashioned garb do so because we don’t want to be distinguished by our habits, but rather by our speech and our actions. Too often the habit was not a positive sign.“
Dominican Sister Jean Murray
In 1995, the Cholewa Marketing Corporation released a new doll with a more feminized “adult” face, complete with make-up. This was a drastic change from the baby-faced dolls of the 1980s that seemed to infantilize Catholic sisters.
The National Coalition of American Nuns boycotted the new dolls saying that the dolls represented women’s economic exploitation. “Here it is,” Sister Beth Rindler explained, “men making money off women again,” and she called for the profits to be donated to fund the sisters’ retirement.
Father Robert B. Sirico defended Cholewa and its dolls in an article for Forbes, condemning the boycott as the misguided action of renegade nuns who were shockingly “left-wing” and advocated for women priests.
Reporter Carol Freundlich wrote in 1990, “For the church, the “F” word was “feminism.”’
So What do We Think of Nun Dolls Now?
The seemingly endless army of nun dolls peering out from their glass cases at the St. Louis Archdiocesan archives and at the Consolidated Archives of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet have a fascinating story to tell.
Once serving as mini-messengers hazarding transatlantic voyages from the chateau-like motherhouses of France to the log cabins of the American frontier, the meanings and appeal of nun dolls have changed drastically over the centuries.
They are, without a doubt, unsettling when unexpectedly encountered.
Are they worth seeing when you visit the Archdiocese, Visitation Academy Archives, or the CSJ Motherhouse? Absolutely.