Reclaiming Religious Roots and Women's Agency

Every American city could point with pride to charitable institutions founded as a result of female benevolence, yet the women whose voluntary labor created and sustained them remain all but invisible in standard urban histories. Boylan's exhaustive research confirms that middle-class Protestant women reconciled benevolence with domestic life, thanks in large measure to the labor of household servants. Boylan is especially perceptive about the way in which Protestant benevolent women used the language of family, especially paternal imagery, in connection with their charity work and institutions. Emily Clark's remarkable study, Masterless Mistresses, could not have been written without the cooperation and support of the Ursuline community in New Orleans, who provided her with unrestricted access to 'a vault full of eighteenth-century records.' Clark's narrative moves effortlessly between Ursuline foundations in France and the new forms of female piety and activism that developed in Louisiana.